The Fellowship of the Trenches? J.R.R. Tolkien’s Brother Officers in the 11th (Service) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, June-October 1916
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century to have served in the Great War and survived it.[1] [2] The significance of the war in Tolkien’s life and work is contentious. John Garth has written a detailed and scholarly study of the impact of the war on Tolkien’s writing and thoughts that emphasises the way the war ‘reinvented the real world in a strange extreme form’, focusing Tolkien’s fiction on a ‘conflict between good and evil’.[3] Humphrey Carpenter’s authorised biography, however, devotes only eight pages to Tolkien’s time on the Western Front.[4] The collection of Tolkien’s letters that Carpenter edited with Christopher Tolkien prints only one letter - to his friend G.B. Smith - that covers the time he spent with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers.[5]
There are numerous passages in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that can be seen at least as ‘references’ to the Great War,[6] but Tolkien himself was very clear that The Lord of the Rings was not an analogy. In a letter to his publisher Rayner Unwin on 10 December 1960 Tolkien wrote:
‘Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot [of The Lord of the Rings] or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains’.[7]
Tolkien undoubtedly suffered the personal loss of two of his closest friends as well as others in his wider circle at King Edward’s School, Birmingham,[8] but in later life he gave little indication that he had been ‘traumatised’ by the war or that it had been the defining experience of his life. If Tolkien had a ‘defining life experience’ it was almost certainly the death of his beloved mother from diabetes at the age of thirty-four, when he was twelve.
The Road to War
In August 1914 Tolkien was about to enter his final year at Exeter College, Oxford. He did not behave in the stereotypical way public school and Oxbridge men are supposed to have behaved. He did not rush to the colours in a ferment of patriotic enthusiasm. He had his heart set on an academic career and, as a young man without money or influential friends, he needed to ‘stamp his ticket’ by taking a First Class degree. He devoted himself successfully to this in his final year. Meanwhile, he joined the University OTC. Tolkien’s closest friends were similarly circumspect. Christopher Wiseman, a mathematician, also completed his final year of study at London University before joining the Royal Navy.[9] Rob Gilson was under pressure from his father, the Head Master of King Edward’s School, not to volunteer immediately. He returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October and wrestled with his conscience, finally deciding to volunteer after he reached his majority on 25 October.[10]
G.B. Smith also returned to university. He did not volunteer immediately but also joined the Oxford University OTC. He applied for a commission on 1 December 1914 and joined the 8th (Service) Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry [OBLI] before transferring to the Lancashire Fusiliers,[11] a decision that would influence Tolkien. Garth argues that Smith, having delayed volunteering, found himself ‘supernumerary’ in the OBLI. He was among a number of other ‘literary Oxford lights’ who had ‘gone in a body to officer the Lancashire Fusiliers’.[12] But Smith also had a relative, an Old Edwardian and a fellow West Bromwich man, Harold Godfrey Bache, a renowned footballer for West Bromwich Albion, already serving as an officer in the regiment.[13]
Tolkien’s outer circle of friends acted differently. T.K. (‘Teacake’) Barnsley abandoned his studies at Cambridge, where he was reading history, in order to join the 14th (Service) Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment (1st Birmingham), one of the units raised by his father, the Lord Mayor of Birmingham. The Barnsleys were leading Methodists and Teacake had thought of training for the Methodist ministry, but alone among Tolkien’s friends military uniform seemed to sit lightly on him. He was killed in action on 31 July 1917 while a Captain in the Coldstream Guards. Tolkien’s younger brother, Hilary, and his friends Ralph Payton (‘The Baby’) and Sidney Barrowclough, were also early volunteers. Hilary and Payton joined the ranks of the Birmingham Pals; Barrowclough joined the Royal Field Artillery; Payton’s brother Wilfred (‘Whiffy’) joined the Indian Civil Service and was posted to Burma.[14] G.B. Smith’s older brother, Roger, was another early volunteer. After serving in the ranks of the Army Service Corps, he was commissioned in the South Wales Borderers and killed in action in Mesopotamia on 25 January 1917.
Tolkien volunteered once he had taken his degree. We are unaware that he ever offered an explanation for why he volunteered. He did not carry any ‘anti-German’ baggage. His own surname was Germanic in origin. His love was for the literature and mythology of the ‘Old North’, which he would do much to advance.[15] In later years, at least, he was noticeably anti-French. There is no sense that Tolkien was engaged with the war at an ideological or idealistic level. He volunteered because ‘everyone else’ had done or was doing, including his own circle of friends. It was expected of him. He expected it of himself.
On his application form for a commission, completed on 29 June 1915, he requested to join the 19th (Service) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers (3rd Salford) (Pioneers), G.B. Smith’s unit. His request was destined not to be fulfilled, but he was commissioned in the same regiment on 15 July 1915.
After initial training at Bedford and Lichfield, Tolkien’s introduction to army life began in earnest in October 1915 at the huge improvised training area on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire in the 13th (Reserve) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers.[16] It was while with the 13th Battalion that Tolkien was initiated into the mysteries of army signalling. Some Tolkien enthusiasts contend that the army ‘must have’ recognised his interest in invented languages and secret codes and spotted him as a potential signaller. This may be doubted. The army was probably ignorant of Tolkien’s interests and even if they were not ignorant his interests had little relevance to contemporary signalling, which was about miles and miles of underground, overground and airline cables, telephones, power buzzers, signal lamps, flags, human messengers (runners) and even pigeons.[17]
In truth, little is known of why, or even if, Tolkien was selected to become a signaller. He may have volunteered for the role or he may have been ‘told off’ to learn it. In the short term his training course in Ripon at least got him away from the depressing surroundings of Cannock Chase. The signalling arrangements that he was preparing to join were confused, exacerbated by heavy casualties among signals personnel. The post of ‘battalion signals officer’ that he was eventually to fulfil was abolished before the war and was not formally reinstated until December 1917.[18] As the historian of the Signals Service, Raymond Priestley, somewhat drily commented, ‘The whole question of the “signals” of a battalion was shown by the Somme battles to be on a somewhat unsatisfactory footing’. In the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers the situation was addressed by the appointment of an ‘unofficial signalling officer’. It was in this role that Tolkien went to war. Well, almost.
The 11th (Service) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers
Tolkien’s ‘military family’ for the duration of his active service was to be the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Tolkien joined the battalion in the field at Rubempré, nine miles north of Amiens, on 28 June 1916, and was attached to “A” Coy.[19] The battalion war diary recorded his arrival, misspelling his name as ‘Tollkein’.[20] By this time the preliminary bombardment that would signal the start of the battles of the Somme was already underway and it was only eleven days before the battalion attacked at Ovillers.
Carpenter claims that Tolkien found little congenial company in the 11th Battalion. ‘The junior officers were all recruits like himself, some less than twenty-one years old; while the older company commanders and adjutants were in many cases professional soldiers dug out of retirement, men with narrow minds and endless stories of India and the Boer War.’ [21] This characterisation is, to put it bluntly, nonsense.
The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers was formed at Codford on Salisbury Plain in September 1914. It was a ‘K3’ battalion, raised during Lord Kitchener’s third call for a further 100,000 volunteers, and was at the end of the queue for experienced officers and NCOs. This was true even of its first Commanding Officer, James Dayrolles Crosbie. Crosbie was commissioned in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers on 3 June 1885. He was Adjutant of the 2nd Battalion from 1891 to 1893. This was usually the sign of a serious-minded professional, but Crosbie resigned his commission after the death of his father in 1897 and went to live on the family estate in Co. Kerry, where he was active in local government and society. When the European War broke out he was under no obligation to return to the colours, but he did so on 19 August 1914, his forty-ninth birthday. Crosbie was given command of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers in February 1915. He took them to France in September 1915 as part of 74 Brigade, 25th Division. He remained in command until 4 June 1916, when he was appointed GOC 12 Brigade, 4th Division.[22]
Crosbie was the only officer in the battalion who (almost) qualified as one of Carpenter’s ‘dugouts’. He was not actually ‘dug out’ of retirement because he had left the army not retired from it. One of the striking features of the 11th Battalion is the almost total lack of professional soldiers among its officers during Tolkien’s time. Crosbie’s successor, appointed only nine days before Tolkien’s arrival, was the thirty-eight-year-old Lennox Godfrey Bird, an architect and property developer, whose only military experience appears to have been with the local militia forces in Hong Kong. The 11th did not get a professional officer as CO until Bird was replaced on 6 February 1917 by Edward Cuthbert de Renzy Martin, a Regular officer of the Indian Army.[23]
Carpenter’s characterisation of the ‘older company commanders and adjutants’[sic] was hopelessly wide of the mark. The battalion 2 i/c was Jack Metcalfe, who at 20 was actually younger (by four years) than Tolkien. Tolkien’s “A” Coy was commanded by Robert Dunn (23), “B” Coy by Maurice Ward (22), “C” Coy by Roger Ganly (26) and “D” Coy by Percy Ward (24). The Adjutant was Valentine Kempson (25). Only Ganly and Kempson were older than Tolkien. And Ganly was the only professional soldier among the officers, having enlisted in the ranks of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1908 before being commissioned on 10 January 1916.The mean age of the battalion’s officers on 1 July 1916 (excluding Colonel Bird) was 25.2, with a median age of 25. They were not ‘schoolboys in uniform’.
The battalion’s officers were very different from the ‘military types’ identified by Carpenter. The only ones to have any pre-war military experience other than service with school or university OTCs, were Bird (militia forces of Hong Kong), Callaghan (Irish National Volunteers), Ganly (Regular soldier), Glendinning (Liverpool Scottish TF), Kempson (Honourable Artillery Company TF), Melling (Poona Volunteer Rifles, aged 12-14!), Newman (Volunteer Battalion Sherwood Foresters and Southern Rhodesia Volunteers), and Stubbs (Imperial Light Horse). Stubbs, who served in the South African War, was the only one with any pre-war active service. In this context, Tolkien’s brief service in King Edward’s Horse (October 1911-January 1913) and his pre-commissioning experience with the Oxford University OTC was par for the course in this most civilian of battalions. He was not a civilian ‘outlier’ among a cadre of military professionals.
Accounts of Tolkien’s early life sometimes portray him as an ‘outsider’, the poor, orphaned Roman Catholic scholarship boy with a strange interest in invented languages and obscure mythologies, who didn’t quite fit in. The death of his mother undoubtedly inflicted ‘continuing emotional distress and anxiety’ on Tolkien.[24] Despite this, Tolkien’s childhood, especially his school life at King Edward’s, was remarkably happy. He was one of the school’s leaders, intellectually, socially and sportingly. When Tolkien arrived at the 11th Battalion he found a group of men who were very similar in background to his friends from school. Wiseman was the son of a Methodist minister, Gilson’s father was a head master, Smith’s was a clerk (who died when he was thirteen), his Bache relations were solicitors, Barnsley’s family were builders and contractors, the Payton brothers’ father was a ‘merchant’ with connections to the Birmingham jewellery trade, especially silversmithing, Barrowclough’s father was the branch manager of a rubber company.
Twenty-two of Tolkien’s fellow officers (like him) went to public schools, a further fourteen attended independent schools or ancient grammar schools. Eight attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities, while others went to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and London universities. A small number had only an elementary education and were the sons of father’s who worked with their hands. A few others came from quite wealthy families, but most came from backgrounds very similar to those of Tolkien’s school friends: the sons of clergymen, schoolmasters, clerks, lawyers, businessmen, manufacturers. Tolkien was not the only Roman Catholic officer and he would have found many co-religionists among the Other Ranks of a battalion recruited from the most Catholic county in England. Nor was he the only married officer. In a pre-war Regular battalion it would have been virtually unthinkable for any junior officers to be married. In the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers six (including Tolkien) were married men.
Tolkien also had something else in common with most of his brother officers. He had been commissioned according to the same social criteria as them – public school/university education, membership of an OTC and a degree of sporting acumen. Only seven officers during Tolkien’s time had been promoted from the ranks after significant overseas service – Atkins, Ganly, Glendinning, Kinna, McDougall, Newman and Potts. (The commissioning of Alexander McDougall, the son of a blacksmith, from the ranks of the Scots Guards, was something of a social harbinger.) But it was not until the arrival of 2nd Lieutenants H.F. Heath and H.C. Stead in October that the battalion acquired officers who had been trained and commissioned via the Officer Cadet Battalion system established in February 1916. Tolkien’s brother officers were in most respects typical of those in New Army battalions, a mixture of pre-war students, clerks, civil servants, and professional men (engineers, solicitors, barristers) with a handful of more ‘exotic’ occupations - engraver, electrician, colonial police officer and millinery salesman.
If not an outsider, Tolkien was certainly a ‘newbie’. Sixteen officers remained from when the battalion landed in France on 25 September 1915: Bell; Bird; Callaghan; Edwards; Fawcett-Barry; Fowkes; Holden; Kempson; Lermit; Mackinnon; Metcalfe; Reynolds; Smale; Waite; M.A. Ward and P.D. Ward. They doubtless set the ‘tone’ of the battalion. This would have required some adjustment on Tolkien’s part, but he was not the only newcomer. Four other officers - Atkins, McDougall, Newman and Potts – arrived the day before him.
When Tolkien joined the battalion the 11th already had a signalling officer, W.H. Reynolds. There is no evidence that Tolkien was involved in signalling while Reynolds was in place. Until then, Tolkien was just another platoon officer, but one who was ‘signals ready’ when the time came. It came quickly. Reynolds was promoted to brigade signals officer 74 Brigade on 20 July 1916. From that moment, until he left France, Tolkien was involved in signalling.
It was not a gentle introduction. Tolkien and his battalion were thrown into the greatest battle in British military history within days of his arrival. It was a challenge for which, in retrospect, they seem woefully unprepared. The battalion was principally engaged twice during the Somme fighting: at Ovillers in July and against the Stuff Redoubt in October. The battalion lost 85 Other Ranks and three officers in July, including Tolkien’s Company commander, Lieutenant Robert Dunn. A further four “A” Company officers - Atkins, Melling, Glendinning and Waite – were wounded. (Atkins had only been with the battalion since the day before Tolkien arrived.) Other officer fatalities were 2nd Lieutenant C.R. Rowley (“C” Coy), Lieutenant L.N. Holden and 2nd Lieutenant J.C. Kay (“B” Coy). A further four officers – 2nd Lieutenant A. McDougall (who also joined the day before Tolkien), Captain P.D. Ward (“B” Coy), 2nd Lieutenant M.A. Callaghan DSO (“B” Coy) and 2nd Lieutenant R.H. Stubbs (“D” Coy) – were wounded. There was less offensive action in September until the end of the month, but a further three officers were killed, including the grievous loss of Captain Roger Ganly MC (OC “D” Coy), undoubtedly one of the battalion’s warriors.[32]
Heavy fighting returned in October, with the attack against Stuff Redoubt. 21 October 1916 saw the heaviest losses suffered by the battalion on the Somme, with 56 Other Ranks and two officers killed. From a strictly military point of view, it was also the battalion’s finest achievement so far, with the capture of Regina Trench, together with five officers and 731 Other Ranks, nineteen machine-guns, two automatic rifles and three field guns of the German garrison. The success was attributed to careful and thorough preparation, excellent artillery support and the willingness of the troops to get close behind the creeping barrage.
The October fighting took a heavy toll of the battalion’s officers, including two Company commanders, Captain Percy Ward (“B” Coy) and A/Captain Ronald Mackinnon MC (“D” Coy), both killed in action. Other key members of the battalion, including Captain J.C.P.E. Metcalfe, Captain H.H. Fowkes and Captain V.H. Kempson (Adjutant), were wounded, as was Tolkien’s designated successor as signals officer, 2nd Lieutenant L.R. Huxtable, perhaps the closest to a friend that Tolkien had in the battalion. These losses removed key figures from the ‘battalion command team’ and on 13 October a new second-in-command, Major W.G. Constable, was drafted in from the 16th (Service) Battalion Sherwood Foresters. By the end of October seven of the sixteen original officers of the battalion who had greeted Tolkien on his arrival had been killed or wounded and an eighth promoted out of the battalion.[33]
At the conclusion of the Somme fighting, 25th Division Staff undertook an analysis of the formation’s operations.[34] It is an impressive document that gives the lie to those who believe the BEF to be incapable of self-examination and improvement. Appendix 1 of the report dealt with ‘Communications in 25th Division from 1 July to 23 October 1916’. It is critical of signal arrangements in the July fighting: ‘Up to 18 July, when the Division came out of the line, communications were never satisfactory.’ The tendency of battalion commanders to take away Battalion Signal Officers to fill gaps among company officers was reprimanded. (This seems to have happened in the 11th Battalion.)[35] The division itself took action to remedy signals problems. On 10 August, when the division came out of the line again, a signal course was held for Battalion Signal Officers at Bus-lès-Artois, which Tolkien attended. The officers who had been taken to replace casualties amongst company officers, were ordered back by the Division for signalling duties, and ‘efforts were made to point out and rectify mistakes previously noticed’. On 7 September a Divisional Signal School was started and ‘six untrained men from each Infantry unit in the Division commenced training. Later one officer per battalion joined the School for training as Battalion Signalling Officers’. In this way, the importance of signalling was recognised and strengthened and provision made for trained officers to replace casualties without delay. The Battalion Signal Officer was an important cog in the machinery of war, to whom operational orders were sent as a matter of course, along with the company commanders, the bombing officer and the Lewis gun officer.
Tolkien’s active service ended six days after the capture of Regina Trench, when he reported sick. He was immediately sent down the line, arriving at the Duchess of Westminster Hospital in Le Touquet on 29 October. By 9 November he was back on familiar ground at the 1st Southern General Hospital on the Edgbaston Campus of Birmingham University. He was clearly very unwell, suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea. He lost two stones in weight. Other officers in the battalion and possibly the GOC 74 Brigade, Brigadier-General George Armytage, were also affected by whatever was causing the ‘trench fever’. Tolkien’s time with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had lasted 122 days, long enough to experience the full fury of the Great War on the Western Front. He had played an important role in the battalion’s operations. His Commanding Officer valued his work ‘highly’ and was anxious to see his return.[36] Ten of his brother officers had been killed, roughly a third of the battalion’s establishment. Another eight would die in the months ahead, one by his own hand. More suffered illness or wounds, some cruel and life-changing, beginning lifelong struggles with pain and depression that in one case, at least, proved to be unbearable. These life stories can be seen in Appendix 1, below.
Acknowledgements
The authors are delighted to acknowledge the help of David Harte, Lorraine Murray (Archivist, The Glasgow Academy Archive), Professor Michael Snape, Dr William Spencer and Phil Tomaselli in researching this article.
Appendix 1
Officers of the 11th (Service) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, 27 June-27 October 1916
Below are short biographies of fifty-one officers whose service in the 11th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers definitely overlapped with that of Tolkien. The names are based on the Monthly Army Lists for 1916, but we realised at an early stage that the Army Lists alone were not a reliable and definitive source. Confirmation was sought in the battalion War Diary,[37] the battalion history,[38] and the officers’ respective personal files.[39] John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which had access to the Tolkien Collection in the Bodleian Library, was also useful. The turnover of officers was such that many of those listed below overlapped with Tolkien only very briefly.
2nd Lieutenant (later Lieutenant) (Abraham) Clifford Altham MC (1893-1923):
b. 7 January 1893 at Habergham Eaves, Lancashire (aged 23 on 1 July 1916); s. of Peter Holgate Altham (1867-1934), of Reedley Hall, Burnley, tea merchant and manufacturer, and Bertha Altham (née Walton) (1869-1948); educ. Mill Hill School. Altham was employed in the family business before the war; he attested on 4 September 1914 and joined the ranks of the 20th (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (3rd Public Schools), from which he was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers on 19 May 1915; he joined the 11th Battalion on 27 May 1916, being attached to “A” Coy. His service with the 11th was short-lived. He was evacuated to England in August 1916 in order to undergo surgery on a deflected nasal septum. After a period of sick leave he was attached to the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers on 18 October 1916. It is not known when he returned to active service, but he suffered shrapnel wounds in his thighs at Épehy on 20 November 1917, while attached to the 2/5th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers TF, an action for which he was awarded the Military Cross. He was not pronounced fit for active service until two days after the Armistice and was discharged from the army on 29 January 1919. He returned to work as a tea merchant. He died on 19 October 1923 from pulmonary tuberculosis, aged only 30. He did not marry.
Honours & Awards: MC
Service File: TNA WO339/49223
Probate: £7,124 7s 9d
2nd Lieutenant (later Lieutenant) Robert Percy Foster Ashburner (1891-1961):
b. 14 May 1891 at Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire (aged 25 on 1 July 1916); s. of Thomas Ashburner (1859-1920), a solicitor, and Jane Ashburner (née Foster) (1864-1930); an articled accounts clerk before the war and later a Chartered Accountant. He was commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 9 September 1915, joining the 11th Battalion on 25 July 1916 and being attached to “C” Coy. He was wounded on 8 October 1916 and did not rejoin the battalion until 29 October. He was wounded again on the Westhoek Ridge, Belgium, on 11 August 1917. He was posted to 9th (Service) Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers on 23 August 1917. He died in Pembury Hospital, Tunbridge Wells, on 12 September 1961, aged 70.
Honours & Awards: BWM VM
Service File: Not found
Probate: £19,881 16s 0d
References
[1] For biographical details of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers officers, see Appendix One.
[2] For Tolkien’s importance, see T.A. Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century(London: HarperCollins, 2000)
[3] John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 309
[4] Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977; London: HarperCollins, 2016), Chapter VIII. Tolkien did keep a diary of his time at the front, something Carpenter says Tolkien only did at times of ‘depression’. We have not seen the dairy, which is mentioned in Garth.
[5] Humphrey Carpenter (with the help of Christopher Tolkien), eds, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien ([1981];London: Harper Collins, 1995), pp 9-10. The collection deliberately excluded Tolkien’s letters to his wife.
[6] See, for example, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937; London: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 257. We owe this particular example to Quintin Watt.
[7] Carpenter& Tolkien, eds, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p.303
[8] For Tolkien’s friends, the famous TCBS - Tolkien himself; Robert Quilter Gilson; Geoffrey Bache Smith; and Christopher Wiseman, see Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, Chapter IV. The book is dedicated ‘to the memory of the T.C.B.S.’. Two hundred and forty-five Old Edwardians who died in the Great War are listed on the school Roll of Honour, to which seventeen ‘forgotten casualties’ were added in 2019. These losses have been characterised as a ‘winnowing’. See Quintin Watt, Tolkien’s 'bitter winnowing' and the War Memorial at St. Augustine’s Church, Edgbaston
[9] Wiseman served on HMS Superb at the Battle of Jutland. He survived the war and became Headmaster of Queen’s College, Taunton. Tolkien named his youngest son after him.
[10] Gilson was commissioned in the 11th (Service) Battalion Suffolk Regiment (Cambridgeshire) on 28 November 1914. He was killed by a shell on 1 July 1916.
[11] Smith died of wounds on 3 December 1916, the unlucky consequence of a random shell burst behind the lines. The photograph of Smith in military uniform found in books about Tolkien show him wearing the cap badge of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry.
[12] Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, pp. 67, 68
[13] Bache was killed by a sniper on 16 February 1916.
[14] Hilary Tolkien and Sidney Barrowclough survived the war. Ralph Payton was later commissioned in the 14th Royal Warwicks and killed in action on 22 July 1917.
[15] See Tom Shippey, ‘Tolkien and “that noble northern spirit”,’ in Catherine McIlwaine, ed., Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018), pp. 58-69
[16] See C.J. & G.P. Whitehouse, A Town for Four Winters: Great War Camps on Cannock Chase (Privately published, 1987).
[17] See R.E. Priestley, Work of the Royal Engineers in the European War, 1914-19: The Signal Service (1921: Uckfield: The Naval & Military Press, 2006). This account is a mine of information, but it is quite the dullest and most impenetrable book ever written. For a scholarly and accessible modern study, see Brian N. Hall, Communications and British Operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[18] Priestley, Signal Service, p. 146. We owe this reference to Dr Brian Hall.
[19] Carpenter has Tolkien joining the battalion at Ētaples, which is wrong. Tolkien sailed from Folkestone on 5 June 1916 and arrived in Calais the following day. After spending some time at No. 32 and No. 25 Infantry Base Depots at Ētaples Tolkien was posted to the 11th Battalion on 27 June, arriving on 28 June.
[20] TNA WO 95/2246-2-01, 28 June 1916. This was one of only two mentions of Tolkien by name in the War Diary. The second was on 18 November 1916: ‘2nd Lt. J.R.R. Tolkien (sick) struck off the strength’.
[21] Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 114
[22] Crosbie remained in command of 12 Brigade until 17 January 1917 when he was replaced by a man fifteen years his junior, Adrian Carton de Wiart VC.
[23] Martin remained in command until he was wounded on 10 April 1918.
[24] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. T.A. Shippey revised. Published online 23 September 2004.
[25] Defining what was a public school can be a bit of a minefield. We favour the definition, proposed by Tim Halstead, that public schools were those schools which were pre-war members of the Headmasters’ Conference. These included King Edward’s, Birmingham.
[26] Tolkien married his fiancée, Edith Bratt, on 22 March 1916.
[27] The Regular Army mantra was ‘Subalterns cannot marry, Captains may marry, Majors should marry, and Colonels must marry’.
[28] The other married officers were Bowmer, Fawcett-Barry, Halfpenny, Holden and Solly.
[29] Several of the battalion’s officers had been commissioned from the ranks of the Public School battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, but without overseas service.
[30] See Charles Fair, ‘From OTC to OCB: The Professionalisation of the Selection and Training of Junior Temporary Officers During the Great War,’ in Spencer Jones, ed., The Darkest Year: The British Army on the Western Front 1917 (Warwick: Helion, 2022), pp. 78-109.
[31] The battalion had suffered six officer fatalities before Tolkien’s arrival.
[32] The other officer fatalities on 29 September were 2nd Lieutenant S.O. Hetherington (“C” Coy) and 2nd Lieutenant S. Rowson (“D” Coy). 2nd Lieutenant W. Morris (“D” Coy), who had only joined the battalion on 10 September, was also wounded.
[33] Soldiers Died in the Great War shows 213 Other Rank fatalities in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers between 1 July and 31 October 1916. We make the figure 220.
[34] TNA WO 95/2222. War Diary of 25th Division, Somme Battles.
[35] Garth,Tolkien and the Great War, p. 173
[36] Garth,Tolkien and the Great War, p. 206
[37] TNA WO 95/2446. Battalion war diaries are somewhat hit and miss, but the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers’ is one of the better ones. The scrupulous recording of OR deaths by name and number is unusual and impressive. Its reporting of officers joining, leaving and rejoining the battalion, however, is patchy.
[38] Andrew Mackay & Amy Warburton, “Made of the Right Stuff”: The History of the 11th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers 1914-18 (Burnley: self-published, 2013). The publishing information was taken from the catalogue of Bolton Central Library. The book itself has none. Nor does it have an index. It is otherwise a worthy effort that makes good use of local newspapers.
[39] Forty-two of the fifty-one officers listed have available personal files. All were consulted. A further fifteen files were also consulted, ruling out a Tolkien connection.
