Lt. Geoffrey Stephen Allfree, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Drowned at Sea, 29th September 1918.

One of the eight children of the Reverend Francis Allfree, Vicar of St. Nicholas- at- Wade with Sarre, Geoffrey Allfree was born in the parish in January 1889. He was privately educated at Alexander House College, a boarding school on the High Street in Broadstairs. After leaving school Allfree served an apprenticeship as a deck officer in the merchant navy and made the return journey to Australia and back at least once, as the record of his arrival at Sidney, New South Wales in July 1908 on the cargo ship the Waipara shows. In 1910, aged 21, Allfree was awarded his Master’s Mate Certificate by the Board of Trade, which qualified him to act as a mate on foreign going steamships.

Although a trained mariner Allfree’s career had changed direction by the following year and he described himself as a painter (artist), living on his own means on the census of 1911, whilst staying at Church Cottages, Stopham in Sussex. When war broke out, he volunteered in October 1914 and was commissioned a Sub-Lieutenant in the R.N.V.R. He served initially in the Royal Naval Division, despite its name an infantry division formed of surplus to requirement reservists and volunteers from the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. Before joining the Naval Division Allfree married Alice Maud Mary Godwin, in Pimlico, on 17th October 1914.

Shipped to Egypt en route for the Gallipoli landings in 1915 and by then promoted to Lieutenant; one of Allfree’s brother officers in the Royal Naval Division was the famous poet Rupert Brooke, who died before reaching Gallipoli in April 1915 of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite on the Greek island of Skyros. By 1916 and the Gallipoli campaign over, Allfree had been transferred to sea-service and was commanding His Majesty’s Motor Launch 286 the following summer. By then he was a father, his eldest daughter Stephanie having being born in 1917. His Majesty’s Motor Launch 286 was a U.S. built; petrol engined motorboat, 86’ long, armed with a 3-pounder gun and depth charges and had a ship’s compliment of eight.

The following year, in September 1918, Allfree lost his life whilst in command of HMML 247; an identical, New Jersey built craft. A four-boat flotilla of Motor Launches had entered St Ives Bay for shelter during a strong southerly gale, which rapidly escalated to hurricane force winds. In the eye of the storm, the Motor Launches started engines and tried desperately to work their way into deeper water. Allfree’s launch developed engine trouble, one mile off Clodgy Point, and started to drift helplessly towards Oar Rock. The St. Ives’ lifeboat raced to reach the stricken ship, but arrived minutes too late by which time the launch had blown up on impact with the rock, presumably as its depth charges detonated. All the crew, bar one survivor, were killed in the explosion or subsequently drowned.

At the time of Geoffrey Allfree’s death his wife, who was pregnant with their second child, was the sole beneficiary in his will. His estate was comprised of effects to the value of £253-14-3d. Allfree’s body was never recovered and he is commemorated on both the Portsmouth Naval Memorial and the Birchington and Acol War Memorial in Kent. Alice Allfree, never remarried, lost her youngest child Rosemary in 1929, aged ten, and finally passed away in Paddington in 1969. Allfree’s eldest daughter inherited her father’s artistic flair and became a well-known artist, illustrator and writer in her own right, both in England and the USA. Best remembered as Stephanie Godwin, she died in Woodstock, New York in 2006, having lived in America since 1948.

Geoffrey Allfree left an artistic legacy of his own behind him; the aspirant artist went to war with a sketchbook always to hand and later turned many of his sketches into what are now extremely collectable paintings. Most of his works were of events he had participated in and have a suitably naval content. His talent was officially recognised by the Royal Navy, who in January 1918 announced that he was to be their official painter; not a permanent position but an occasional commission to produce paintings as requested. His ‘The Evacuation of Sulva Bay’, an evocative depiction of the last warship sailing away from Gallipoli, hangs in the National Library of New Zealand and other examples of his work can be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London. Perhaps one of his more unwittingly prophetic paintings, ‘Motor Launches’, depicts two of the class of motorboats he would loose his life in struggling against monstrous waves, under a grey, foreboding sky.

The lives of both Geoffrey Allfree, and his father, the Reverend Francis Allfree who died in 1904, are remembered on separate memorial plaques in St. Nicholas Church, St. Nicholas- at- Wade in Kent.

“Like mist before the sun”

Air Mechanic 1^st 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, 9^th 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 8^th 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 9^th 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 9^th Loyals moved into billets in Christchurch, Hampshire, by then part of 74^th Brigade, 25^th Division. Fred Howcroft had been appointed Lance Corporal on 26^th September 1915, just over two weeks after joining the army. It was during his first Christmas in the 9^th battalion that Howcroft fell from grace, on the night of 27^th/28^th December when he failed to return to his billet at midnight and finally surrendered himself to his company orderly Sargeant on the morning of 28^th September. His whereabouts on the night in question was not documented on his crime sheet. Howcroft was admonished by the 9^th 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 9^th Loyals embarked for France from Folkestone on 25^th 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 25^th 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 2^nd May 1916. The 25^th Division’s baptism of fire occurred during the German assault on Vimy Ridge on 21^st 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 18^th 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 10^th June 1916. He may not have been the only soldier from the 9^th Loyals returning home for leave who were so stricken from such a contagious disease. A telegram survives in Howcroft’s service record. Dated 14^th June 1916, it documents that Private Howcroft and a Private Hodgson had disembarked at Boulogne en route back to the 9^th 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 1^st 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 3^rd/4^th July when they relieved the 32nd Division in the front line. Three days later, on 7^th July 1916, in the course of one of the number of small scale engagements the 9^th Loyals fought in that day, Frank Howcroft was wounded twice, both rated as “severe”. He was evacuated to the 44^th 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 44^th 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 44^th 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 16^th September 1916 and was buried in the 44^th Casualty Clearing Station’s cemetery, now Puchevillers British War Cemetery, north east of Amiens. Most sources give his date of death as 8^th 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 8^th 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 44^th 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                

A Murder in Rapldorf

Pte. Levi Ripley, 1^st/5^th Battalion The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment-241788 (formerly 3992) attached 8^th Battalion.

Died a prisoner of war 1/2/1917 (murdered by a German civilian), aged 25

British War and Victory Medals

Levi Ripley married in his hometown of Bolton, Lancashire on the inauspicious date of 1^st July 1916, the opening day of the battle of the Somme. His wife would have seen little of her new husband, who embarked from Folkestone sailing for Boulogne fourteen days later. He was sent first to the ‘Bull Ring’, the 25^th Infantry Brigade Base Depot at Etaples and from there to 8^th Loyals who he joined on 4^th August1916. Twenty-six days later he was reported missing in action.

St Peter’s Church Halliwell where Levi Ripley was married in 1916

Elizabeth Ripley (nee Thomasson) had to wait over three months before news was received through official channels that he had been taken prisoner, whilst suffering from shrapnel wounds to the nape of his neck and left hand. He remained a prisoner of war for the rest of his life and in the winter of 1917, on 1^st December was working on Auger’s farm at Rapldorf in the district of Straubing in Bavaria. It was there that, as an official of the German government later explained, Levi Ripley ‘was killed in a fight’ with ‘Farmer Auger’.

When subsequently asked for details after the war, more information was forthcoming. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, non-officer POWs could be compelled to perform labour by their captors. In Levi Ripley’s case, that had led to him working on the farm in Rapldorf, where he was murdered. The German government explained that criminal proceedings had been instigated against Auger, but he had been acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defence as ‘Ripley had forced himself in upon him with an axe’.

No other information on the events of 1^st December 1917 is contained in Ripley’s service record. The facts that is was the middle of winter when he was working on the farm and that he had access to an axe may indicate he was engaged in forestry work. What led him to snap and go for Auger with an axe, if that is what happened, is unknown. Ripley had been assigned to the farm where he died from the POW camp at Nuremberg, Bavaria, which was run by the Royal Bavarian Army Corps and some 35 miles or so distant from Rapldorf. Ripley had been living at, and working on, Auger’s farm before he was murdered.

News of his death first reached the UK through an unusual source. The POW camp at Nuremberg was for Other Ranks and not for officers. The senior Other Rank there was Regimental Sargeant Major Tate of the Scots Guards, who although a Warrant Officer Class 1 was still an ‘other rank’. Tate wrote to the Loyal North Lancashire POW Help Committee at their Preston base informing them that Ripley had died at the end of November 1917. The letter was received on 25^th January 1917 and forwarded to the authorities.

No action was taken at that point, nor was his death officially recorded, as at least two positive reports of a prisoner’s death were required before ‘evidence of death’ was accepted. Corroboration finally arrived in a communication from neutral Denmark on February 18^th 1918 and it was only then that his wife was officially informed of her husband’s death. She was awarded a war widow’s pension of 13s 9d with effect from 14^th March 1918 at which point her separation allowance was stopped.

The British government did not forget about Ripley’s death and further investigations were undertaken after the Armistice had been signed. A death certificate was obtained from a Protestant Pastor, one Huber, who certified that the body had been given a Protestant funeral and buried on 4^th December 1917 in the cemetery at Perkam, Bavaria, adding that the grave was easy to identify as Ripley’s fellow POWs had provided a ‘simple wooden cross’ for the grave and also a ‘more beautiful crucifix’ inscribed ‘In loving memory of Pte Levi Ripley, 5^th N.L. Regt.’. The government paid for photographs of the grave to be taken and sent to Ripley’s widow in March 1919. In response to her request for a copy of his ‘soldiers’ will, the document was finally found and sent to her in November 1920, two years after the Armistice had been signed.

Elizabeth Ripley was 26 when she received her husband’s will in November 1920, three years after his death. She remarried the following December, to Andrew Ingram a coal miner, at St. Thomas’ Halliwell, the same church she had married Levi Ripley in four years earlier. Her first husband Levi had been a weaver before the war broke out and all of his family had also worked in the textile mills. He was one of the sons of James and Amelia Ripley, who lived in Deane on Gilnow Lane. The couple had nine children, seven of who lived to adulthood, the youngest of who was Levi, born in 1892.

Levi Ripley attested on 5^th March 1915 and, according to his service record, was stationed in Bolton until 15^th July 1916. He cannot have served in the 1^st/5^th battalion because that formation was in action in France before he even attested, although it was formed in Bolton in August 1914. Ripley may then have first served in 4/5^th Battalion, which was formed in Bolton in 1915 and was still there in September 1915, as the Manchester Evening News reported on 8^th September 1915,

An interesting in incident marked the morning parade of the 4/5th L.N.L Regiment at Fletcher Street Barracks, Bolton this morning. The Officer Commanding, Lieutenant-Colonel Lang Simms, called out one of the men, Private F. H. Hurst, and congratulated him on saving the life from drowning of a young girl of about twelve years of age in the Barrow Bridge Lake.

The 4^th/5^th Loyals had moved from Bolton to Ashford, Kent at some point before July 1916 when they moved to Aldershot. Ripley, if his service record is correct, did not travel south with them. He could have been retained at Fletcher Street, he may have ended up an officer’s soldier servant, for example, and his officer may have remained at Fletcher Street Barracks on official duties.

Fletcher Street Barracks, Bolton

An examination of Ripley’s service record does show that the officer who signed Ripley’s Certificate of Primary Military Examination considered him ‘fit for service in the 1^st/ 5^th Battalion and that officer described himself as ‘Capt. Commanding Depot 1^st/5^th Loyal North Lancashire’. 1^st/5^th Battalion also appears on Ripley’s attestation for 4 years service in the Territorial Force. Ripley is also referred to as being a soldier of the 5^th Battalion in other official documents (a formation which had ceased to exist in 1914). The possibility exists therefor that Ripley was a soldier of the 1^st/5^th (who never served in the battalion) who trained as a soldier with the 4^th/5^th in Bolton and who remained at Fletcher Street Barracks after that battalion left for Kent in late 1915 or early 1916. The war was at first kind to Private Ripley, but the kindness vanished fourteen days after his marriage when he sailed for France.

A troopship departs from Fokestone heading to Bolougne

He arrived at the 8^th Loyals on 4^th August 1916, a month after they had been first committed at the battle of the Somme as part of 25^th Division. When Ripley joined his battalion they were holding a stretch of the front line north of the River Ancre, before being relieved and concentrating in Bus les Artois for rest and training by 14^th August. It was a short respite as by the 19^th August they were back in the trenches opposite the German held Leipzig Redoubt during the phase of the Somme known as the battle of Pozieres. Elements of the Division gained a foothold in the German defensive position on 21^st August and two companies of 8^th Loyals were employed to garrison the section of German trenches taken.

The location of the Wunderwerk in 1916

The Thiepval Memorial to the missing: the Wunderwerk was a quarter of a mile south of the memorial

On 26^th August the 8^th Loyals took part in an attack on a portion of the Leipzig Redoubt still in German hands known as the Wunderwerk. The assault was made by “D” Company at 6pm in the evening and was initially successful and reserves, a second and third wave of the battalion, joined their comrades in the Wunderwerk to exploit “D” Company’s success. The Germans, however, counterattacked in force over the following 48 hours, whilst their artillery fire pulverized the area held by 8^th Loyals, who were finally driven out of the Wunderwerk on the 27^th and moved out of the line to regroup. The 8^th Loyals losses in the engagement included four officers and eighty-five other ranks killed, one of who, Private Levi Ripley, was finally recorded as missing on 30^th August 1916.

            The Commonwealth War Graves records show that the remains of Levi Ripley were re-interred in Niederzwehren Cemetery at Hessen, Germany at some point after 1919.

Niederzwehren: Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery

Loyal North Lancashire Regiment: Other Ranks cap badge 1914-1918