Air Mechanic 1st Class James ‘Jimmie’ Howcroft
Royal Flying Corps-9206
Died of injuries received in service-1936 aged 42
Silver War Badge British War & Victory Medals
&
Lance Corporal Fred Howcroft
“A” Company, 9th Battalion, The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment-16015,
Died of wounds aged 22
1914-1915 Star British War & Victory Medals
James ‘Jimmie’ Howcroft and his brother Fred were the only sons of a sometime Sunday school teacher, who once taught the infants class at Fern Street Wesleyan Sunday School in Bolton, Lancashire. Both brothers were named in the chapter of Hannah Cottrell’s Gate Pike that covers the Great War because of their mother’s long-standing connection with the church. The Howcroft brothers were Wesleyans but did not attend Fern Street because the family had moved further afield when they were both growing up. Jimmie Howcroft’s story is an unusual one, he was the only World War 1 serviceman with any connection to Fern Street that the author has discovered who served in the Royal Flying Corps and he was also an internationally published poet. His brother Fred was in the infantry, but his full service record survives, which is both unusual and also adds the detail to the lives and deaths of Fern Streets’ Wesleyan soldiers, many of who would have experienced similar events.
The father of the Howcroft brothers, another James Howcroft, was born in Daubhill, Bolton and his two sons were brought up in the surrounding area of Rumworth. James senior married Margaret Clegg, the sometime infants’ teacher at Fern Street Sunday school, in 1890 and they had their two children before 1894. Sometime before the turn of the century, James Howcroft senior died. By 1901 his widow Margaret had remarried Richard Taylor, a labourer at a glass works, ten years her junior. In 1911, Richard and Margaret Taylor and her two sons Fred, a coal miner (b. 1893), James, an electrician (b. 1894) were living at 10, Haynes Street, Morris Green and had a lodger, the 69 year old Joseph Howcroft, who was probably a relative, lodging with them. A daughter of Margaret’s second marriage, named after her mother and born in 1900, had by then died.
By the time the Great War broke out in August 1914, Margaret and Richard Taylor were living apart and, as Fred Howcroft’s service record clearly states, Richard Taylor’s address was then unknown to the Howcrofts. Fred Howcroft attested before a Magistrate in Bolton on 8th September 1914 and spent that night in Fulwood Barracks, Preston. His mother, by then living at 29, Longfellow Rd, Daubhill, received a separation allowance against his name, which shows that he (and his brother) had been financially supporting the family. His battalion the 9th Loyals was a’ K3’ formation, the ‘third hundred thousand’ of Kitchener volunteers, formed in Preston in September 1914, before moving to Salisbury plain for training.
Under canvas until the harsh winter of 1914, the 9th Loyals moved into billets in Christchurch, Hampshire, by then part of 74th Brigade, 25th Division. Fred Howcroft had been appointed Lance Corporal on 26th September 1915, just over two weeks after joining the army. It was during his first Christmas in the 9th battalion that Howcroft fell from grace, on the night of 27th/28th December when he failed to return to his billet at midnight and finally surrendered himself to his company orderly Sargeant on the morning of 28th September. His whereabouts on the night in question was not documented on his crime sheet. Howcroft was admonished by the 9th Loyal’s C.O and reverted to Private that very day.
The battalion moved to Southborne in January 1915, then to nearby Romsey in May before undergoing final training at Aldershot in June. After twelve months in the making and a final inspection by Lord Kitchener, the 9th Loyals embarked for France from Folkestone on 25th September 1915. Four days later, back in Bolton, James Howcroft enlisted in the army and was posted to the Royal Flying Corps. An electrician by trade, his skills would have been required in the newly formed Flying Corps, then still part of the army and not a service in its own right. Although James Howcroft was, of course unaware of his destiny, he was entering his last year of normal life.
As James Howcroft was undertaking his basic training in the R.F.C, his brother Fred was on active service in France. After disembarking at Boulogne, the 25th Division concentrated in the area of Nieppe. Fred Howcroft made it back to Lance Corporal (unpaid) in May 1916 and that was confirmed as a permanent paid appointment on 2nd May 1916. The 25th Division’s baptism of fire occurred during the German assault on Vimy Ridge on 21st May 1916, but Fred Howcroft didn’t participate in the engagement. He was in hospital in Chelsea when the action was fought, suffering from an attack of smallpox.
Howcroft was admitted to the London General Hospital on the King’s Road, next door to Chelsea underground station on 18th May. He had been en route to Bolton on leave, but never made it back home; luck was very definitely against him and his family that spring. The originally prognosis at the hospital was that he would be fit to return to duty quite quickly, but his condition proved to be more serious and Howcroft ended up remaining in hospital until 10th June 1916. He may not have been the only soldier from the 9th Loyals returning home for leave who were so stricken from such a contagious disease. A telegram survives in Howcroft’s service record. Dated 14th June 1916, it documents that Private Howcroft and a Private Hodgson had disembarked at Boulogne en route back to the 9th battalion. Just over a month later Fred Howcroft would be fighting for his life in a different kind of hospital.
James Howcroft by then had finished his basic training and could well have also been in France (his exact date of arrival in the country in 1916 is unknown). Although he was a 1st Class Air Mechanic, James served as an observer in two -seater observation or bombing airplanes, in which he would also have acted as the gunner operating drum fed .303” Lewis Machine Guns. It was a high-risk job for both pilots and observers as the machines they flew in were easy targets for German fighter planes.
An observer firing a top mounted Lewis Gun: to do so he had to stand upright, unsecured, in the open cockpit.
His brother Frank’s division was in reserve on the first day of the Somme in 1916 and was not committed until the night of 3rd/4th July when they relieved the 32nd Division in the front line. Three days later, on 7th July 1916, in the course of one of the number of small scale engagements the 9th Loyals fought in that day, Frank Howcroft was wounded twice, both rated as “severe”. He was evacuated to the 44th Casualty Clearing Station (C.C.S), a Field Hospital Unit then located at Puchevillers on the Somme.
British Infantry at the battle of the Somme
A Chaplain attached to the 44th CCS later remembered what it was like when successive waves of badly wounded soldiers arrived at the Field Hospital, as they repeatedly did in the battles on the Somme.
“I spent most of my time giving anesthetics. I had no right to be doing this, of course, but we were simply so rushed. We couldn’t get the wounded into the hospital quickly enough, and the journey from the battlefields was terrible for these poor lads. It was a question of operating as quickly as possible. If they had had to wait their turn in the normal way… it would have been too late for many of them. As it was, many died…………I did a lot of stretcher carrying and helped to strip the men of their filthy uniforms. We had to cut them off with scissors, and there were some nights that we cut until our fingers were raw. We had over a thousand beds and that simply wasn’t enough. We had to keep the worst cases and send anyone who could possibly travel down to the base.“
Images of 44th Casualty Clearing Station recovered from a skip: location where taken unknown
One of the ‘worst cases’ was Lance Corporal Frank Howcroft who finally died of his wounds on 16th September 1916 and was buried in the 44th Casualty Clearing Station’s cemetery, now Puchevillers British War Cemetery, north east of Amiens. Most sources give his date of death as 8th July 1916, but that was actually the day he was admitted to the Casualty Clearing Station. His service file documents both his admission to it on the 8th July and his death from wounds over two months later. His mother, Margaret Taylor, then living at 202 Willows Lane in Deane, would have been informed of his death quite quickly. Frank’s effects were eventually sent to his mother and consisted of “one bag, one belt and one identity disc”. The very same month, exact date unknown, her airman son James was badly injured on landing, somewhere in France.
Puchevillers British Cemetery: near Amiens, France
James Howcroft fractured his spine in the accident and was left all but paralyzed. Margaret Taylor had already lost her first husband, her infant daughter and had been deserted by her second husband before the news of the dreadful events of September 1916 would have reached her. All she had left by the time the month ended was the by then totally disabled youngest boy. James Howcroft was a patient in a London hospital for the next five years, unable to move hand or foot and in constant pain. Whilst most men would have given up the fight under the burden of such enormous suffering, Jimmie Howcroft ‘s faith steered him through and from his bed of pain he dictated poetry to his nurses. His verse became the life he had by then lost, but not in a mournful or resentful way, as he wrote:
I flew!
Upward climbing to the engine’s roar-
The clay is dead, but still the soul can soar,
Imprisoned here, as if by some earthly chain,
In higher life my soul shall soar again.
Hodder and Stoughton published his first volume of poetry Looking On in 1920 and it sold for 2s 6d per copy. The volume was well received throughout the English-speaking world and from the proceeds of the first edition Jimmie Howcroft was able to buy Little Forest Gate Cottage, Liphook in the New Forrest, near where his brother Fred had been stationed in December 1915 and January 1916. He lived there, cared for by his mother and a nurse and produced a second collection of poetry, Songs of a Broken Airman, in 1922, written with the avowed intention of making enough money to set up a poultry farm. Jimmie Howcroft lived on until September 1936, when he finally succumbed to the injuries he’d received twenty years to the month earlier.
As the historian of Gate Pike wrote, Jimmie Howcroft had a ‘great soul’ and simply refused to mourn for ‘what might have been’. Instead he observed the beauty of nature from the confines of his sickbed, delighted in what he saw as its ‘music’ and chronicled the rapture he experienced in his poetry or ‘songs’ as he described them. Thoughts of light and air, the elements he had once soared through in flight, particularly enthralled the ‘plucky poet’. To him they were eternal forces, entities that heralded a truth and one underscored by a rhythm as ancient as time, like ‘ sunbeams’ that keep on dancing to the music in the breeze’.
Hannah Cottrell remembered Jimmie and Fred Howcroft in Gate Pike and Jimmie’s volumes of poetry are still sold by collectors across the world. Reviews of his poetry can be read in archived editions of newspapers as diverse as the New York Times and the Australian Northern Advocate. Fred Howcroft’s service record can be read on line or at the National Archives. All of the houses the family lived at in Bolton and later in the New Forrest still stand. The Reverend Leonard Thomas Pearson, attached to the 44th Casualty Clearing Station, left a photograph and scrap album of his time with the unit when he died, which was later recovered from a skip and deposited with the Bodleian Library. Lyn Macdonald also interviewed the Reverend for her book The Roses of No Man’s Land,which also contains several of his recollections. Jimmie Howcroft’s tombstone bears the following legend:
In Honoured and Ever Loving Memory of Jimmy Howcroft RFC of Bolton and Little Forest Cottage Liphook.
Then what am I-
A stricken pawn in a mighty plan-
Yet striving still to be a man
Though hopeless seems the race to be.
Yet breast it bravely, thou shalt see
Like mist before the sun
Thy troubles fade and die away
And joy be at the close of day-
if thou hast nobly run.
Jimmie Howcroft’s grave: St. Mary the Virgin, Bramshott, Hants.
Above (left) R.F.C- Other Ranks cap badge and (right) Loyal North Lancashire Regiment- Other Ranks cap badge-1914-1918
world war one: the untold stories 