No Time to Spare? Our Boys who went to War...
By Chris Sparrow
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Chris Sparrow, who teaches Geography at Summer Fields and runs Mayfield Lodge, has spent six years travelling thousands of miles through South Africa, Turkey, France, Belgium and England while researching this book. No Time to Spare? details the actions and major contributions to the Nation’s wars by Old Summerfieldians.
Review by David Faber
August 2006
The first Old Summerfieldian to die in war was Thomas Griffith, son of the Rector of Deal. Only the twentieth boy to come to Summer Fields, he went on to Marlborough before joining the 24th Warwickshire Regiment. He died on 22 January 1879, aged twenty-two, run through by a Zulu spear during the iconic defence of Isandlwana, his body one of sixty later discovered huddled together in a grisly pose that suggested they had ‘gathered together and fought desperately to the last’. 101 years later the most recent old boy to die on active service met his equally heroic death. Captain Richard Westmacott was a third-generation Summerfieldian who, after public school (coincidentally also at Marlborough), became a third-generation Grenadier Guardsman and was later recruited to the S.A.S. Westmacott died on 2 May 1980 in a hail of machine gun fire in a terraced house on the Antrim Road at the hands of the I.R.A. He was posthumously awarded the Military Cross.
While the School must count itself fortunate that it has lost no more of its old boys in subsequent conflicts, between 1878 and 1980 no fewer than 302 Old Summerfieldians died in every conceivable theatre of war, serving on land, sea and in the air. Chris Sparrow has undertaken a truly astonishing task of research, meticulously examining each and every one of them, their school careers, their military connections, and the manner of their deaths. It is a moving story. Many were professional soldiers, some of whom reached the pinnacle of a military career. But most were young men, often plucked directly from school or university, who went to their deaths just a few years after leaving the comparative safety of North Oxford. Their stories offer a fascinating insight into their own characters, and into the times in which they lived and the battles in which they fought. Their common link was Summer Fields.
Moments of extraordinary bravery by exceptional men provide the highlights. One who was ‘speared and left for dead by the Fuzzie Wuzzies’ in the Sudan; another who took part in the famous cavalry charge at Omdurman; an officer who was struck by a hail of machine-gun bullets on the Western Front, but still managed to telegraph his parents – ‘slight wound, all well’ – shortly before he died; one of nine old boys to die during the Boer War, who carried fourteen men to safety before being killed by a single bullet through the head, an act which would undoubtedly have earned him a Victoria Cross had it then been awarded posthumously; a participant in the famous, near suicidal raid on St Nazaire in 1942; and the young airman who bicycled from Eton to Heston at the age of 16 to gain his pilot’s licence, and died in his Hurricane in 1940.
Familiar names abound. Field Marshall Sir Archie Wavell – ‘Wavell mi is doing well in North Africa’ reported the magazine in 1942 – was the son of a hero of Colenso, won his M.C. but lost his eye at Ypres, and enjoyed a distinguished career. His son, also Archie, was not so lucky. Having followed his father to Summer Fields, he too won the M.C. in Burma, but tragically became the penultimate old boy to be killed, during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1953. Billy Congreve’s father also fought at Colenso, where he won a V.C., a feat which was emulated posthumously be Billy himself on the Somme in 1916 – one of only three fathers and sons ever to have been awarded the highest medal for valour. Another old boy who was later to give his name to one of the school’s Leagues was the brilliant scientist Henry Moseley, who died at Gallipoli in 1915. The school’s two other V.C.s, ‘ Rivs’ Colyer-Fergusson and Christopher Furness are also suitably honoured.
This book, however, is far more than a simple roll of honour, a dry list of war dead. Rather it is a multiple biography which provides a varying degree of insight into the lives of these extraordinary men. Their days at Summer Fields are told through the contemporary words of the school magazine. Academic, sporting and dramatic exploits are all recalled, while public school, university and regimental records have been trawled through, and letters home tracked down. Most striking of all is the extraordinary success achieved by these teenage boys in their often short lives. The book’s pages are littered with references to scholarships and glittering academic prizes won, and almost unseemly prowess on the playing fields of the country’s major public schools and at Oxbridge.
Indeed it is the trivia of their lives and the bald facts and figures of their deaths that give this book its poignancy. Forty-four of the dead attended St Leonard’s, while 118 Old Etonians died, the largest number from a public school. Fifteen failed to reach their twentieth birthday, the youngest dying at the age of just fifteen when his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic. Of the dead, 177 were in their twenties, twenty-two being the most common age. We learn that the first ever British submarine to be lost at sea in 1914 was commanded by an Old Summerfieldian, while another’s mother provided the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s ‘ Alice’. In December 1914 the school magazine listed 227 old boys who were then serving, 43 of whom were to give their lives the following year, 1915, the worst in the school’s history. Some mothers lost two, even three sons, often in quick succession.
Not content with describing the lives and deaths of his subjects, Chris Sparrow has also identified their final resting places or the memorials on which they are commemorated. He has visited over a hundred graves himself, often in the company of current generations of Summerfieldians. From the giant memorials at Thiepval and the Menin Gate, to war cemeteries in Gallipoli, Basra and Karachi, the geographical range is incredible. The war poet Julian Grenfell, author of the celebrated Into Battle, is remembered in Mells Church in Somerset, alongside his Summer Fields and Balliol friends, Edward Horner and Ronnie Knox. Captain Harry Byatt’s grave in France is the only one to make specific mention of his prep school. And that of Major John Simonds bears the lines from a poem written by him, which is still read every year at the school’s service on Remembrance Sunday. There is no danger that the current or future generations of Summerfieldians will be allowed to forget the bravery of those who have gone before them.