A Time to Remember: WW1 and a Local ‘Conchie’
CHRIS SANDERSON recounts coming across ‘The Reluctant Tommy’ by Ronald Skirth (edited by Duncan Barrett), an autobiography of a local man who volunteered for WW1 and survived as a pacifist
Some years ago, I read a review of this autobiography and was intrigued by the idea of an active soldier who not only survived World War One but survived it as a pacifist. I agreed with Ian Hislop’s front page comment: “Surprising, uncomfortable and very memorable”. But over and above what most people love about this book, there was another aspect that took me by surprise and ensured that it became compulsive reading: Ronald Skirth, the reluctant Tommy himself, was local to our area!
Ronald Skirth won a rare scholarship to a grammar school. He recounts: “My new school was at Rye and to get there required a rail journey on two different companies’ lines, seventeen miles in each direction. To a train-mad youngster like me, the unlimited free rail travel my season tickets entitled me to was a magnificent bonus”. Going home from his last day at school (early summer 1916), he stopped off at Hastings to enrol for the army because Bexhill had already turned him down twice: “This time I was going to enrol in the army even if it meant a false declaration of age. The Hastings Enrolment Officer wasn’t quite as thorough as his Bexhill counterpart with the result that, fifteen minutes after, I walked out as a soldier.” His call-up would come when he had completed his apprentice teaching training.
In those days before television and radio, people made their own music and performed together. On one musical evening in July 1916 he was introduced to fifteen year old Ella. Both were talented pianists who enjoyed singing and they met as often as they could. They sang duets together and he accompanied her as pianist when she sang solo, often in performances. The book also recalls how they went together to concerts and explains: “A crescent shaped concert hall had been constructed by hollowing out the low cliff which overhung our promenade.”
Neither of them could have suspected that this was the start of what Skirth calls a fairy-tale love story, continuing through censored letters and giving him the strength to survive unthinkable horror. Their courtship lasted only a few weeks because his call-up came for 2 October. He had requested to be sent to Cooden for his 24 weeks of training but was sent 300 miles away to Catterick. There, tests showed him to be an extremely good mathematician, so he was given the rank of corporal and trained to be a Battery Commander’s Assistant. This involved using information from various sources and working out the necessary coordinates, a skilful and responsible role. It even involved deciphering code because meteorological details were sent daily in code. At the end of his training he spent barely a week at home in Bexhill before he was sent to Flanders on active service.
Though relying on his papers (chiefly the diary, now lost) which might have been scribbled hastily, he wrote skilfully, for example re-constructing dialogue. When describing scenes of war, he combines vivid description with the reactions of a 19-year-old soldier about how he escaped death at Passchendaele after witnessing friends killed horrifically
“I was desperately afraid. I am not ashamed to admit it. As the daylight waned and the mists grew thicker my imagination ran riot. It was my loneliness as much as my fear that made me see those ghastly swollen parts of bodies somehow assembling themselves into horrific evil beings. Evil things about to take revenge on me for what had happened to them..It seemed impossible that I could be the only living human being when, within five miles, there were thousands of concealed men of both armies, all as silent as the dead.”
He wrote with humour and wit at times, particularly when recalling the ineptitude and pomposity of senior officers. I particularly enjoyed a section he called ‘How to lose a stripe’ which recreates the dialogue between himself, responsible for working out the coordinates for firing the cannon, and a visiting senior officer who needed to advance his career by being able to say he had served in a battle zone and acted as a competent gunnery officer. No doubt the officer was embarrassed by his obvious lack of experience. His officious manner provoked young Roland, who was having difficulties obeying orders from an officer who didn’t really know what orders to give but had merely scribbled a mark on a map for him to use to set up the gun. As politely as he could, the teenager pointed out that he could not work with the map that he had been given because it was in metric, and they worked in yards.
Then what do you propose to do about it?’
‘Nothing Sir. I am under your orders.’
‘There was a sudden silence then, very meekly, I said that I could make conversions but it would take time. ‘Shall I go ahead Sir?’
‘For God’s sake get on with it!’
Having dutifully made all the calculations, Skirth finished by checking the target through binoculars. He was shocked to find the target so randomly chosen by the officer was a church. Again politely, he tried to point out that it was against orders to shoot a consecrated building.
‘Are you a bloody conchie?…….Listen Corporal, I am your superior officer. What you think has nothing to do with it…. I shall report your insolence to your Commanding Officer. If you add insubordination to insolence, you’ll bloody well wish you’d never been born. Hand me those figures. That is an order.’
The following day he found he had been demoted and, worse, his leave delayed. He had some consolation though, in knowing that no explosives had landed anywhere near the church. ‘My calculations must have been very inaccurate!’ he comments wryly.
Ronald Skirth was willing to defy authority if he considered it to be acting in an immoral way, and was able to defend his principles. But his decision to become an affirmed pacifist (conscientious objector, hence “conchie”) came later when he encountered the body of a German about his own age, clutching a photo of a girl who bore a strong resemblance to his own sweetheart, Ella.
Not long after, he was badly injured and had a lengthy period of convalescence and memory loss, but did not return to England until after his next placement in Northern Italy. What shocked me was a dramatic and fatal ‘mistake’ that was reported as a victory and earned honours for officers who were really the culprits.
The Reluctant Tommy was published in 2010, over 90 years after the events it describes, and being written by an ordinary soldier, gives a rare insight into a war that is more widely documented by high-ranking officers. Skirth organised and transcribed his old diaries and letters and notes as an old man in his seventies. His intention was to write about his love story; the true story of how a teenage love affair lasted and withstood separation. However, once he started to gather his papers together, the monumental story of war intruded because it was their love, kept alive by censored letters, that gave him the will to survive the horrors he endured. That hugely traumatic experience could not be ignored.
He didn’t plan for his writings to be published but, after his death, his daughter realised their historical worth and passed them onto the Imperial War Museum. Eventually Duncan Barrett heard about them and set himself the huge task of editing the masses of information. What he has put together is an amazing biography, well worthy of the praise heaped on it by people such as Ian Hislop and Jon Snow.
The Reluctant Tommy is truly a remarkable story, an important witness account of The Great War through the experiences of an ordinary but extremely intelligent man. I recommend it most highly.
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