STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 12 WILFRID BLAKE MOYES, SERGEANT 8th ROYAL WEST SURREY REGIMENT, AGED 30.
“I fled through the rushing space, The stars beat on my head: I paused not in the race, I knew not I was dead.” Extract from a poem by Wilfrid Moyes written in 1912.
Wilfrid Blake Moyes was born in the old Manse at Strathblane. His father the Reverend William Begbie Moyes had been appointed minister at Strathblane Parish Church in 1886 as a young man of 25. He was to stay for the next forty seven years, bringing up a family in the Manse with Clara his wife, and ministering to his parish through all the changes those years would bring to the village.
In 1888 their first child Wilfrid was born, and the manse family continued to grow over the next three years with the addition of two more children, Eustace Fletcher in 1889 and Edith Noeline in 1890. One might imagine that childhood in a Victorian manse would have been rather tedious. Not in this case. In a tribute to Clara after her death in 1928, a close friend Vera Farnell, one time Dean of Somerville College Oxford, writes: “Her sense of the beauty and the value of little things and her ready humorous fancy imparted to everyday life in her family an unusual grace and flavour. Where she was, nothing was ever dull or flat. With her husband and children she was on terms of rare and tender intimacy and her deepest joys were bound up with their lives.”
By 1901 Wilfrid had left his close-knit family and was a pupil at a prep school in Hastings, prior to becoming a pupil at Uppingham, an English public School in Rutland, where he stayed until he went up to New College, Oxford in 1907, aged 19. His time at Oxford cannot have been happy: records show that he was frequently absent from lectures due to ill health, was unable to sit any of his exams and consequently came down from Oxford in 1909 without a degree. Back home in Strathblane his health seems to have improved sufficiently for him to take up his studies again, this time at Glasgow University where he graduated M.A. in 1913. He went on to study for a law degree (LLB), but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914. A portrait taken at this time shows a boyish-looking youth with strong features and full curving lips, sporting evening dress and a lace jabot.
Vera Farnell, in her tribute to Clara, records the close relationship existing between mother and son: “In a special sense she was close to her eldest son Wilfrid, whose death in France from wounds, in 1918 seemed to take something irreplaceable from her own life.”
One of their shared joys was a love of literature and the census of 1911 records that they were both staying at a hotel in Glasgow for what sounds from the guest list to have been a literary gathering.
Clara wrote a number of poems and stories, some of which were collected and privately published in her memory by her friend Vera. (Poems and Legends by Clara Fletcher Moyes, Basil Blackwell, 1929.) She was English, born to a well-heeled milliner and brought up in the flat countryside and soft climate of Lincoln, but her poem Ode to Winter – Song of the Northern Manse is an expression of pleasure and exhilaration in the cold “Northern lands” where she had come to live. Included in the anthology are two poems written by Wilfrid in 1912, both deeply poignant in view of what lay ahead for him. In the first he explores the contrasting sides of human nature, its mountain top aspirations for all that is good and noble, co-existing with a potential for depravity and evil, and holds to a belief that the best in human nature is never totally extinguished by the worst:
“O Soul of Man, thy mountain peaks So nigh to heaven’s gate shall rise, That e’en thy lowest depths shall catch The light that on their summit lies.”
It was a belief that would be tested to its very limit a few years later in the trenches of the Western Front. In his second poem he experiences his own death in a vivid dream and, if he writes from personal experience, it suggests a tragic love affair in his life. In his dream he embraces death eagerly and without fear, counting it as nothing for the joy of being reunited with his lost love.
“I fled through the rushing space, The stars beat on my head: I paused not in the race, I knew not I was dead: I felt no scorching rays, Beheld no burning sun, I sped through the trackless ways On which the comets run; I left time standing still Upon my breathless flight, I knew not good or ill, Cared not for dark or light; Heeding nor space nor time I pressed toward my goal, Borne on by love sublime To the mistress of my soul. I found her where space ends, Where time has ceased to be, And now my spirit blends With hers eternally.” W.B.M. 1912
When war was declared in August 1914 Wilfrid was quick to volunteer, enlisting on September 29. He seems to have joined the Highland Light Infantry initially as a second lieutenant but then transferred to Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment) without a commission. The circumstances are unclear.
Within a few months he was on active service in France as a sergeant in the 8th Battalion. Three times during the war he returned to the front after being wounded: at Loos and at Ypres in 1915, then at Pilckem Ridge in 1917. His battalion’s official war diary for July 31 that year records: “During the advance the enemy’s barrage was very accurate and the Battalion sustained many casualties…The remainder of the day was spent consolidating and collecting wounded. Shellfire was consistent and accurate. Towards evening heavy rain commenced to fall making work and movement difficult owing to the slippery and muddy state of the ground.” The battalion recorded 200 casualties between July 30 and August 1, plus 105 missing.
In late 1917 Wilfrid was awarded the Military Medal for bravery on the field during the Battle of Cambrai. On November 20 in the battalion’s official diary, his commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Tringham had included Wilfrid among men “who did exceptional good work” that day in a raid east of the village of Villeret (south of Cambrai): “I & J squads under the command of Sergt Moyes dealt with several small parties of the enemy which were moving over the open and traversed Bank Trench effectively keeping down fire from that trench…Shortly after the withdrawal had been ordered, Sergt Moyes sent the Lewis guns sections back but he himself remained at W in observation of the enemy until Zero+2 hours. During that time he observed considerable forward movement of the enemy, which received attention from our artillery and M guns.”
In a short paragraph inserted between a blow by blow account of a football match and an advert for Kay’s Linseed Compound, the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald of December 14 1917 reports without comment the award of Wilfrid’s Military Medal “for work done in the field during the [recent] advance”. It was a sign perhaps of how much the war had become part of the fabric of everyday life and acts of courage almost commonplace. Wilfrid was granted leave at that time and his family had the joy of welcoming him home for what would be his last Christmas.
Three months later during the Somme Crossing in March 1918 and only six months before the end of the war, Wilfrid was killed. On the day he was fatally wounded, his battalion was fighting near Omiecourt. The battalion diary records: “The people on the flanks especially on the right were severely tried. The fighting took place in the open and a very stubborn resistance was put up until the order came to withdraw. Very heavy losses were inflicted on the Germans approaching from Pertain but the Battalion suffered many casualties.” Over a ten-day period the 8th Queen’s Royals had suffered 380 dead and wounded, including 30-year old Wilfrid, who died on March 26 from a gunshot wound to the neck.
Wilfrid is buried at St Pierre Cemetery in Amiens, France. As well as appearing on Strathblane War Memorial, he features on the Roll of Honour in Glasgow University Chapel, on the Milngavie Golf Club Memorial, on the Evening Times Roll of Honour and on the Roll of Honour at Uppingham School. In addition to his Military Medal he was awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. (By coincidence they are colloquially known as “Pip. Squeak and Wilfred” after a British newspaper cartoon strip.)
Other members of the Moyes family also served in the war: Wilfrid’s brother Eustace was a Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, while Rev Moyes served with the Y.M.C.A. in France from June 1917. Did father and son ever meet on the Western Front, one wonders?
After the war William and Clara placed a brass plaque in the church at Strathblane in memory of their “beloved elder son”. It concludes with two Bible quotations, both from the Book of Revelations: “He that overcometh shall inherit all things… and I will give him the morning star.”