Facebook post #041 (Nov 2020)
A strange, sad story of coincidence for Remembrance week. As usual, I’m thinking of my schoolmaster gt-grandad Arthur Wheaver, who seems never to have been quite the same after returning from the guns of the Somme in WWI. And I’m thinking of my grandad John Squire, who served out East in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and wasn’t demobbed until well after the WWII had ended – and well after Mum was born. They emerged physically unscathed – but scarcely imaginable are their experiences.
This may be partly why, even when briskly exploring, I pause on passing a war memorial. Others I don’t walk past show up in the photos later, like the one at Knowle Church, Warwickshire. This is the church where my parents married, with John Squire present; Arthur Wheaver having apologised for not being able to make it on grounds of insufficient lifespan. Dad’s family was still close to Sutton Coldfield (post 24) but Mum was an incomer – the third generation of Yorkshire farming stock born in Surrey.
What we didn’t know until my recent round of research was that John Squire’s grandfather, John Traviss Squire, was not the only sibling to leave Yorkshire. By 1891, his sister Sarah was married to Alfred Harris, farming in Packwood nr Solihull, Warwickshire. In 1901, their son, John Bertram Harris (Mum’s grandad’s first cousin) was 17, a joiner’s apprentice staying with his John’s Sr’s widowed mother in Barnsley.
JBH tried to enlist for service in WWI three times but was refused. He eventually enlisted in the 16th Warwickshire Regiment, then volunteered to transfer to a ‘Special Company’ of the Royal Engineers.
It turns out that this was a euphemism for an illegal poison gas unit, formed in response to the German use of gas at the Somme. His fate too was obscured but it emerged that he had an accident while handling gas shells or cylinders. He was taken to the hospital in the port of Étaples, described by Wilfred Owen as:
“A vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles … Chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all the faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England; nor can it be seen in any battle, but only in Étaples. It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.”
John Bertram Harris didn’t make it. Perhaps you guessed that our farmer’s lad – who would do anything for the war effort – is commemorated on the war memorial outside Knowle church; also in the Soldiers’ Chapel inside.
