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To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May
David Crane
Gerry Harrison
‘I do not want to die. The thought that we may be cut off from each other is so terrible and that our babe may grow up without my knowing her and without her knowing me. It is difficult to face. Know through all your life that I loved you and baby with all my heart and soul, that you two sweet things were just all the world to me’Captain Charlie May was killed, aged 27, in the early morning of 1st July 1916, leading the men of ‘B Company’, 22nd Manchester Service Battalion (the Manchester Pals) into action on the first day of the Somme.This tolerant and immensely likeable man had been born in New Zealand and – against King’s regulations – he kept a diary in seven small, wallet-sized pocket books. A journalist before the war and a born storyteller, May’s diaries give a vivid picture of battalion life in and behind the trenches during the build-up to the greatest battle fought by a British army and are filled with the friendships and tensions, the home-sickness, frustrations, delays and endless postponements, the fog of ignorance, the combination of boredom and terror to which every man that has ever fought could testify.His diaries reflect on the progress of the war, tell jokes – good and bad, give details of horse-rides along the Somme valley, afternoons with a fishing rod, lunch in Amiens, a gastronomic celebration of Christmas 1915 and concerts in ‘Whiz Bang Hall’. He describes battles not just with the enemy, but with rats, crows and on the makeshift football pitch – all recorded with a freshness that brings these stories home as if for the first time.The diaries are also written as an extended and deeply-moving love letter to his wife Maude and baby daughter Pauline. ‘I do not want to die’, he wrote – ‘Not that I mind for myself. If it be that I am to go, I am ready. But the thought that I may never see you or our darling baby again turns my bowels to water.’Fresh, eloquent and warm, these diaries were kept secret from the censor and were delivered to his wife after his death by a fellow soldier in Charlie’s company. Edited by his great-nephew and published for the first time, these diaries give an unforgettable account of the war that took Charlie May’s life, and millions of others like him.
Copyright (#ulink_f1f659ee-5778-5a93-8bbf-8b29e6d20a02)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This William Collins paperback edition published 2015
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014
Copyright © Gerry Harrison 2014
Foreword copyright © David Crane 2014
Gerry Harrison asserts the moral right to be identified as the editor of this work.
Maps © John Gilkes
Cover image © IWM
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007558551
Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007558544
Version: 2015-10-13
Praise for To Fight Alongside Friends: (#ulink_7be40ca9-3bf5-5d87-afeb-4edca5594874)
‘What shines through like sunshine is Charlie May’s default belief in service to country, his quiet commitment to others over self, and his sheer decency. You could bet your life on Charlie. And, in a way, we did’
The Times
‘[We] want to hear the voices of those who were there, unencumbered by 21st-century prejudices … To Fight Alongside Friends [is] the disarmingly jaunty, previously unpublished diary of Captain Charlie May … beautifully edited and minutely annotated’
Sunday Times
‘By 1 July 1916, when the last diary entry was entered at 5.45 a.m., the reader feels that they know Charlie May, and what follows comes as a shock, as if a cinema reel had broken in mid-reel’
Financial Times
‘Every so often one comes across a diary where it is the sense of personality behind it that lifts it out of the ordinary: such a diary is that of Captain Charlie May’
David Crane
Captain Charlie May, in the summer of 1915, before his departure for France.
Contents
Cover (#ufa7b6dc3-addd-5165-912b-fb4b9067e48d)
Title Page (#u21aaef87-f356-5c5d-a56c-055cc85ab2b1)
Copyright (#uc233fd20-e33f-55c5-a409-71fb972e083c)
Praise (#u6c4afdf4-2743-5495-bbce-d8927b63333a)
List of Illustrations (#uc9f61214-4405-5a38-aec8-36f8b90ee748)
Maps (#u17aa0dc0-8da0-5805-8ba9-8bfc6c5ce507)
Foreword by David Crane (#u99c6aaf6-dd09-5b3c-9782-23a203682e19)
Prologue: ‘A pippy, miserable blighter’ (#u13fef291-c0f9-5c5b-94d3-b5f74bbcf2ce)
Chapter 1: ‘And all because it is war!’ (#ua26d59cf-881f-59f5-912c-517665c0d1c9)
Chapter 2: ‘Mud caked to his eyebrows’ (#u395dd2cd-2b48-56d9-8487-f3638a6e64c4)
Chapter 3: ‘Our past glorious Xmastides together’ (#u165b2e5d-829a-5484-bcc7-c61492d836ff)
Chapter 4: ‘It is the wire that is the trouble’ (#u425977dd-47d8-55a8-b8e9-23bfda4234b0)
Chapter 5: ‘Full of brimming excitement about my leave’ (#udd44ac5f-cfb2-5400-8e5a-c62ce6e924ca)
Chapter 6: ‘What a game it is!’ (#uf1942be4-3e0b-5862-af52-b99b7941c58e)
Chapter 7: ‘Dry trenches mean happy men’ (#u18e3b289-7556-57ee-adbb-28b4e37be033)
Chapter 8: ‘Pushes and rumours of pushes fill the air’ (#u1fdad283-4f42-53b6-b73e-0e13f0880b5c)
Chapter 9: ‘God bless the fool who made that shell’ (#u7103f2e3-cd46-5e9a-9e62-134dba9af1a3)
Chapter 10: ‘The flickering, angry light of a burning village’ (#u81b708a7-cdb0-544a-a57c-1e1486156b83)
Chapter 11: ‘The greatest battle in the world is on the eve of breaking’ (#u1a60fa0a-ca3d-5df9-aa68-38182976d763)
Chapter 12: ‘We are all agog with expectancy’ (#ud71f2244-85dc-5e5f-a2d2-17f7832d7ef2)
Epilogue: ‘My dear one could not have died more honourably or gloriously …’ (#u9076a7d3-5983-5a6f-b5ee-6bb00eec6897)
Other Writings (#ufada7baa-d351-5832-9eb9-c6e91646466d)
Picture Section (#ufd068f46-bb28-5f47-b563-be128bf5a1fb)
Footnotes (#ue24057cd-cfce-57b2-8f47-0f8e1400fa55)
Notes (#u53d83ef3-b3bc-5b3e-8e07-bced88fd49fc)
Index of Names (#u6e1567bf-3897-545e-868f-cf58ff02e9fa)
Index (#uf55b2068-a01e-5397-b8a2-8d6cffd472ca)
Acknowledgements (#u7027d1a2-5fe1-55b1-bdb6-820716fd0dec)
About the Author (#u067d01c3-86af-58f2-b4e7-b7263efc8b67)
About the Publisher (#u79220671-aa34-5b96-a429-ca8db1a3ffa8)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_39fc8dee-5927-5061-a990-d9943b4c43ea)
Frontispiece
1 (#ulink_771c9b49-e973-5b35-8853-f33b809d943c). Portrait of Captain Charlie May (Photo courtesy of family)
Plates
2. Charles Edward May (Photo courtesy of Jason Bauchop)
3. The steamship Westmeath (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
4. Port Chalmers, Dunedin, 1880 (Photo courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Ref: O.24194)
5. Princes Street, Dunedin, 1885 (Photo courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Ref: C.011756)
6. The May-Oatway Fire Alarm (Photo courtesy of Dunedin Fire Brigade Restoration Society Inc.)
7. The May Family in London, about 1905 (Photo courtesy of Susan and Charles Worledge)
8. Lily May’s wedding, 1909 (Photo courtesy Susan and Charles Worledge)
9. Trooper May at camp, King Edward’s Horse (Photo courtesy of family)
10. Charlie outside tent, Salisbury Plain (Photo courtesy of family)
11. Private Richard Tawney (Photo courtesy of LSE, Ref: LSE/Tawney/27/11)
12. Captain Alfred Bland (Photograph courtesy of Daniel Mace)
13. Lieut. William Gomersall (Photograph courtesy of Victor Gomersall)
14. Private Arthur Bunting (Photograph courtesy Adrian Bunting)
15. Maude with Pauline in her christening robe, 1914 (Photo courtesy of family)
16. Maude and Pauline in leather-bound case(Photo courtesy of Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)
17. Maude, Pauline and Charlie, perhaps on leave, Feb. 1915 (Photo courtesy of family)
18. Maude (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)
19. Pauline, aged about four with Teddy bear, c.1918 (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)
20. Charlie’s personal diaries (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Refs: MR4/17/295/1/1-7)
21. Pencil sketch by Charlie, ‘Our Camp in the Bois’ (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/5/1)
22. Charles Edward May, seated, at Imperial School of Instruction camp, Zeitoun, Egypt, 1915 (Photo courtesy of Susan and Charles Worledge)
23. Dantzig Alley British Cemetery (Photograph courtesy of Derek Taylor)
24. Charlie’s headstone, Dantzig Alley (Photograph courtesy of Derek Taylor)
25. Frank Earles, early1920s (Photograph courtesy of Rosie Gutteridge)
26. Pauline, a friend and Maude in Fontainebleau, France, 1922 (Photo courtesy of family)
27. Pauline’s wedding to Harry Karet, 1950(Photo courtesy of family)
Foreword (#ulink_1626d15e-0138-5aea-9f55-503948a963b3)
What is it that makes one diary live and another simply die on the page? Nine times out of ten it is down to the intrinsic interest of the material or the quality of the writing; but every so often one comes across a diary where it is the sense of personality behind it that lifts it out of the ordinary: such a diary is that of Captain Charlie May, killed in the early morning of 1 July 1916, leading his men of B Company of the 22nd Manchester Service Battalion into action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
There is nothing very remarkable about Charles May, and that is the point about him: from the first page of his diary to the last haunting entries he feels so utterly familiar and recognisable. That is partly because his war was the war that a million men like him knew and endured and has become part of our historic consciousness; but more than that it is because Charlie May is ‘England’ as England has always liked to imagine itself, the England that stood in square at Waterloo and would stand waist-deep in water at Dunkirk, the England of a hundred 1940s and ’50s films, down to his English wife and his English baby daughter and the English batman and the Alexandra rose that he sports into battle – the unassuming, modest, enduring, reliable, immensely likeable kind of Englishman, with his kindness, his tolerance, his loyalty, his certainties, his prejudices, his pipe, his fishing rod, his horse, his good jokes and his bad jokes and his un-showy patriotism, that if you had to spend your war up to your knees in clinging mud you would be very grateful to find next to you: and he is absolutely genuine.
I do not know if it is odd that someone so quintessentially English should come from New Zealand, or if that is part of the explanation, but Charlie May was born in that most stonily un-English of towns, Dunedin, on 27 July 1888, the son of an electrical engineer who had emigrated five years earlier. His father made his name and the foundation of a successful business with a patent for a new kind of fire alarm device, and on their return to England, Charlie had entered the family firm of May-Oatway, acting as company secretary before moving with his new wife, Maude, from the Mays’ family home overlooking Epping Forest to Manchester where, just two weeks before the outbreak of war in 1914, a daughter, Pauline, was born. It is clear that the Mays did not lose sight of their New Zealand lives – their Essex home was named ‘Kia Ora’ (‘be well’ in Maori) and Charlie would call his new home ‘Purakaunui’, after a pretty coastal settlement, near Dunedin – but in 1914 there would have felt nothing odd about such a double identity. It was famously said that sometime between the landing at Anzac Cove and the end of the Battle of the Somme the New Zealand nation was born, but in the late summer of 1914, before Gallipoli was ever dreamed of, many of the thousands of New Zealanders who volunteered to fight in a war half a world away would have seen themselves as part of a single imperial family, one corner of the great Dominion ‘quadrilateral’ of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, on which the British Empire rested.
While still in the south May had been a member of King Edward’s Horse, a Territorial unit of the London Mounted Brigade with strong Dominion links, and, daughter or not, it was only a matter of time before war put an end to his short married idyll. On the outbreak of hostilities five divisions of a small but highly trained British Expeditionary Force had immediately been embarked for France to stem the German advance, but Kitchener for one never had any illusions that this was going to be a short war over by Christmas and within the month the first 300,000 of a New Army had responded to his call for volunteers.
By the end of September another 450,000 had volunteered, in October a further 137,000, and in the following month Charlie May enlisted into the 22nd Manchester Pals battalion – the ‘7th City Pals’ – and added his name to the five million men who would wear uniform of one sort or another before the war was over. The idea of the ‘Pals battalions’ had first been put to the test in Liverpool by Lord Derby and the city of Manchester enthusiastically followed suit, embracing the patriotic and civic ideal of a battalion made up of friends from the same street, pub, factory, profession, warehouse or football club, joining up and fighting together – ‘clerks and others engaged in commercial business,’ as Derby put it, ‘who wish to serve their country and would be willing to enlist in a Battalion of Lord Kitchener’s new army if they felt assured that they would be able to serve with their friends and not to be put in a Battalion with unknown men as their companions’.
It was a sympathetic initiative, if a double-edged one as time would bitterly show, but in the late summer of 1914, as towns across Britain competed with each other in displays of civic pride, the slaughter that would engulf whole tightly knit communities in grief still belonged to an unimaginable future. Within hours of the Lord Mayor of Manchester launching his appeal in the Manchester Guardian on 31 August, volunteers were besieging the artillery barracks on Hyde Road and by the end of the next day 800 men had been sworn in and the establishment of the first of the Manchester Pals battalions, the 1st ‘City’, or 16th Service, was complete. Over the next four days another two battalions were added, and after a late summer lull in recruiting caused by the frustrating long queues, a further three battalions in November, the 20th, 21st and Charlie May’s 22nd under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Cecil de C. Etheridge.
It would be exactly a year before Charlie May and his battalion embarked for France, and in that time an enthusiastic but improbable bunch of men drawn largely from the cotton industry and City Corporation – ‘mostly town bred’, wrote May, with a rare whiff of the King Edward’s Horse and the Empire – had to be turned into soldiers. In these early stages before their khaki uniforms arrived, they wore the ‘doleful convict-style’ ‘Kitchener Blue’ and ‘ridiculous little forage cap’ so deeply resented among the New Army, but over the next twelve months, and in the face of the universal shortages of uniforms, weapons and ammunition and every provocation and indignity an army could dream up to frustrate, bore or disillusion a civilian volunteer, the job was at least begun.
