STRATHBLANE WW1 Project: 8 WILLIAM KER

War Memorial

STRATHBLANE WW1 Project: 8 WILLIAM KER LIEUTENANT HAWKE BATTALION ROYAL NAVAL DIVISION, AGED 24.

William Ker
“I crossed the blood red ribbon, that once was no man’s land,
I saw a misty daybreak and a creeping minute-hand;
And here the lads went over, and there was Harmsworth shot,
And here was William lying, but the new men know them not.”
from Beaucourt Revisited by AP Herbert.

William Ker is one of the men on Strathblane War Memorial that we know most about. This is largely because he figures prominently in The Hawke Battalion, an account published in 1923 by Douglas Jerrold, a fellow officer in his Company. Jerrold quotes at some length letters from William Ker to his family at home in Mugdock during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. Secondly, Ker was a close friend of the poet and novelist AP Herbert, who was also an officer in the Hawke. William features in Herbert’s elegiac and beautiful poem Beaucourt Revisited about returning to the battlefield where Ker died on the Western Front. Also William is almost certainly the friend addressed in Herbert’s strange and poignant poem The Bathe, as William writes about the same incident in a letter home from the Dardanelles.

His haunting photograph in uniform shows a strikingly handsome young man with thick curly hair, full lips and a calm, arresting gaze.

William had been born in Lorraine Gardens, in the Dowanhill area of Glasgow in October 1892. He was the second son of chartered accountant Charles Ker of McClelland Ker & Co and Florence Higginbotham, who had married in Glasgow in 1888. In 1901 the Ker family was living in Richmond House, Cumbernauld but by the time of the 1911 Census, they had settled at Easterton of Mugdock, a property that had been in the family since 1870, according to local historian John Guthrie Smith. (Today Easterton is best known as the licensed riding and livery yard that adjoins the property.)

William was privately educated at Cargilfield School, Edinburgh and Rugby, where he excelled at football and cross-country running. But, having gone up to Balliol College Oxford in 1911, he quickly took to hockey. By 1913 he was in the University’s First XI and won high praise for his “electric sprints and his shooting” in the Varsity match of February 1914, won by Oxford against the odds. In the same year he played for Scotland against both England and Ireland. During summer vacations he enjoyed rounds at Milngavie Golf Club.

He fared less well academically, taking a third class degree in Classics. A later tribute argues that “This was no measure of his abilities”, while admitting that “he was not a quick learner of examination subjects”. He comes across as a natural sportsman, more at home in the fresh air than the library. (His distinguished uncle, another Balliol man, literary scholar William Paton Ker, held a number of academic posts, including Professor of Poetry at Oxford in the early 1920s.)

At the outbreak of the First World War William was given a commission as a temporary sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and served in the Motor Boat Reserve, transferring to the Royal Naval Division in January 1915.

The First Brigade of the RND had been formed by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Spencer Churchill in August 1914. Sometimes known as “Churchill’s Little Army”, its eight battalions were all named after famous naval commanders. William joined the Hawke Battalion (named for Admiral Edward Hawke, famous for his victory over the French at Quiberon Bay in 1759, during the Seven Years’ War). However, the Hawke was destined to spend the war on land because, as Churchill later explained, “It was perceived that on mobilisation there would be at least twenty or thirty thousand men belonging to the reserves of the Royal Navy for whom there would not be room on any ship of war which went to sea.”

He says of these would-be sailors obliged to fight on land that “their memory is established in history and their contribution will be identified and recognised a hundred years hence”.

So William Ker joined up imagining that he would see service afloat, only to find himself as one of the officers assigned to the Hawke Battalion C Company, which consisted largely of North Country miners. He must have been delighted to find his fellow sub-lieutenant in C Company was AP Herbert, another Oxford man, who after the war would become a well-known poet and writer and an MP. The two were already close friends.

As the war on the Western Front soon became bogged down in trench warfare, Churchill and others began calling for operations to start on the Eastern Front, by attacking Germany’s ally Turkey and ensuring a clear route for the Russian fleet through the Dardanelles. But the objective of clearing a route to Constantinople (Istanbul) proved easier said than done.

The British contingent in this campaign included the Royal Naval Division, alongside large numbers of Australian and New Zealand troops and a French division. The Hawke Battalion did not join the Gallipoli Campaign until the start of June, two days before the next big battle.

On the evening of May 30 Ker and Herbert went for a swim to escape from the flyblown squalor of the trenches and relax before battle. William described the scene in a letter home: “You should have seen me and AP Herbert the other evening bathing in the Dardanelles with the Turkish lines in sight on a ridge to our left, the Plain of Troy before us on the other side….I took a bathing party down to the beach yesterday. The scene was a cross between Blackpool in the season and the Ganges…The men think it is a fine picnic but we are going into the firing line tomorrow night.”

Herbert catches beautifully the conflicting emotions of men facing imminent death enjoying the simple sensuous pleasure of bathing in his poem about the same incident:

The Bathe
Come friend and swim. We may be better then, 
But here the dust blows ever in the eyes 
And wrangling round are the weary fevered men, 
Forever made with flies. 
I cannot sleep, nor even long lie still, 
And you have read your April paper twice; 
To-morrow we must stagger up the hill 
To man a trench and live among the lice. 

But yonder, where the Indians have their goats, 
There is a rock stands sheer above the blue, 
Where one may sit and count the bustling boats 
And breathe the cool air through; 
May find it still is good to be alive, 
May look across and see the Trojan shore 
Twinkling and warm, may strip, and stretch, and dive. 
And for a space forget about the war. 

Then will we sit and talk of happy things, 
Home and 'the High' and some far fighting friend, 
And gather strength for what the morrow brings, 
For that may be the end. 
It may be we shall never swim again, 
Never be clean and comely to the sight, 
May rot untombed and stink with all the slain. 
Come, then, and swim. Come and be clean to-night.

 By July 7, William reported that he had spent 16 days out of the previous 21 in the trenches, with little to do: “It is a ludicrous existence.  For three days in the supports [support trenches 200 yards behind the front line] I did absolutely nothing except take a two-hours’ watch at night, and occasionally inspect a rifle or two”. Boredom was not the worst of it. On July 19 he wrote: “There can be few things more trying than being landed in an ill-dug and unsanitary trench in the height of the Turkish summer to wrestle for two days and nights with the combined duties of scavenger, navvy, gravedigger, sanitary inspector, and – last, but not least – soldier.”

In the event both officers and the Hawke Battalion emerged unscathed from this first taste of trench warfare because they were held in reserve for most of the action. When finally the men did go up to the front line, William’s next letter home revealed his capacity for dry understatement:  “The Turks fire off a lot more ammunition than we do…This is all right when you are safely dug in but when the trench is only half made, it is disconcerting at times. There were a lot of snipers about and being shot at when you are not replying (most of our men were digging) is always trying.”

 As Douglas Jerrold puts it in his book about the Hawke Battalion: “William Ker’s letters…..have only one defect as history, that they reflect a temperament singularly equable and courageous and fortunate also in keeping in good health.” (In the heat and dust of Cape Helles, soon as many men, (including Herbert), were succumbing to disease as to Turkish bullets.)

Unsurprisingly by the following week, he was writing: “Nearly everyone is upset inside… due to nothing in particular, but to the rations and the dust and the life in general…..  We all discourse at length about our internal economies, and none of us believe that there is anything the matter with anyone else”.

In September he confided: “There must certainly be worse places to be stranded on than an outlying promontory in the Aegean…..we hardly ever fail to get some glimpse of sea, land, sky, and islands, which rivals Ben Lomond at its best.” However, he admits: “I should like to be back in your soft grey land again.”

By September the heat of summer had gone and William was glad of his Shetland sweater and sister Margaret’s “invaluable and ever-present woollen scarf”. Meanwhile the campaign was dragging on with no sign of a breakthrough, while the naval battalions at Cape Helles were being thinned by sickness and snipers. (The Hawke suffered comparatively few war casualties in Gallipoli compared with the other naval battalions there but many of the men were sick.) On October 18 William returned from a short break in Alexandria to find “an even more emaciated battalion pottering forlornly about a camp of half-made dug-outs with an inadequate supply of sandbags and waterproof sheets.”

However, always seeking the bright side, the next day he wrote: “A gorgeous Scotch morning with a northerly wind and a ruffled blue sea, white flecked over to Imbros, which reminds me more of Arran than ever, with the cloud shadows chasing across the hillsides”.

 In November William was promoted to Lieutenant. By now he had realised that the Gallipoli campaign would be fruitless. By contrast, as he wrote home in December, “the attitude of the men here is that it never occurred to them that we may be beaten by Turks or Germans, or anyone else.  The psychology of the ordinary Tyneside or Paisley man in the ranks is sufficiently impenetrable.”

In the event, the Gallipoli campaign was abandoned on January 9 1916 and the troops withdrawn. The Royal Naval Division was retained but put under the command of the Army. The Hawke Battalion became part of the 189th Brigade. Lt Ker was allowed some home leave at this time, while the division moved from the Greek Islands to the Western Front via Marseille. He rejoined C Company in May.

Initially the division was sent to trenches around Souchez near Arras, a relatively quiet part of the Western Front at this time. Then in early October the RND was sent to the Somme, where British troops had spent three months trying to break through German defensive lines.

The division was deployed in what became known as the battle of the Ancre, which is a small tributary of the Somme. Conquering the ridge of the Ancre would give General Douglas Haig a success to brandish at his forthcoming talks with the French high command.

Though the area had been turned into a sea of mud by heavy rain, an attack was launched on November 13 after a brief dry spell. The assault began at 5.45am with an apparently successful artillery barrage on the German frontline. The 189th Brigade, including the Hawke Battalion, launched the attack in thick mist. “Without a word, without half a second’s hesitation, we saw the first wave of the battalion move from their trenches and pass into the mist and out of sight,” wrote Douglas Jerrold, adding: “We saw the last of the Hawke Battalion as we had known it.”

According to Jerrold, though the artillery had done its work and the German trenches were overrun, the barrage had missed a German redoubt (enclosed defensive emplacement) directly opposite the Hawke advance. The machine guns simply mowed them down. The official casualty figure was 396 men out of 415. Every single officer who went over the top was killed or wounded. The Hawke Battalion had been wiped out. The battle may have raged for two days but for William Ker it was over in ten minutes. (Another name of the memorial, William Paterson of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, (No 18) died three days later in the same battle.)

The village of Beaucourt was taken the following day but the RND had suffered 4,000 casualties. In his book about the Hawke Battalion, Jerrold mourns the dead of Ancre and asks: “What was C Company without Ker, so gifted that his most strenuous efforts seemed effortless, yet moved to vehemence by patent folly or injustice – a personality of rare promise and still rarer charm?”

On November 16 a memorial service was held for those of the battalion who had been killed.  “A very pathetic little battalion” was the description in the diary of attendance, such had been the slaughter at Ancre.

Despite their crippling losses at Ancre the RND, with black humour, produced a Christmas card in 1916 depicting battered survivors afloat in the trenches, with the pun “Up Anchor!”.

William Ker is commemorated at the Thiepval Memorial close to Ancre in Northern France. He also features on the Milngavie Golf Club war memorial for members who died in the war, as well as the Cargilfield School Roll of Honour and the City of Glasgow Roll of Honour. And he appears in both the Balliol Boat House Roll of Honour and the Balliol College War Memorial Book 1914-1919, which records: “a fine candour, an unmistakable sincerity of purpose and a vein of humorous good sense, and all these refined by an uncommon modesty.” In the Roll of Honour in both Strathblane Parish Church and the former United Free Church, William Ker is listed along with his older brother Edwin, a Lieutenant in the HLI, and younger brother Charles, a Captain in the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, who both survived the war. (Charles followed the boys’ father into chartered accountancy and died, aged 84, in Glasgow in 1981.)

The Milngavie & Bearsden Herald reported on November 24 that William died “leading his company to the attack”. An appreciation in The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News concludes: “A magnificent young life has thus been cut off with his sporting career so full of brilliant promise.”

In his introduction to Douglas Jerrold’s book about the Royal Naval Division in 1923, Winston Churchill mentions “William Ker of the Hawke” among “the many officers of fine promise and attainment who fell in the Ancre Valley”. But the most eloquent tribute came from AP Herbert, who fought at Ancre but did not go over the top with his friend Ker and C Company. Revisiting the Ancre area the following year, with “new men”, ignorant of what had happened there, he wrote this poem:

Beaucourt Revisited
I wandered up to Beaucourt; I took the river track
And saw the lines we lived in before the Boche went back;
But Peace was now in Pottage, the front was far ahead, 
The front had journeyed Eastward, and only left the dead.
And I thought, how long we lay there, and watched across the wire,
While guns roared round the valley, and set the skies afire!
But now there are homes in Hamel and tents in the Vale of Hell,
And a camp at suicide corner, where half a regiment fell.
The new troops follow after, and tread the land we won,
To them 'tis so much hill-side re-wrested from the Hun
We only walk with reverence this sullen mile of mud
The shell-holes hold our history, and half of them our blood.
Here, at the head of Peche Street, 'twas death to show your face,
To me it seemed like magic to linger in the place;
For me how many spirits hung around the Kentish Caves,
But the new men see no spirits-they only see the graves.
I found the half-dug ditches we fashioned for the fight,
We lost a score of men there-young James was killed that night,
I saw the star shells staring, I heard the bullets hail,
But the new troops pass unheeding-they never heard the tale.
I crossed the blood red ribbon, that once was no-man's land,
I saw a misty daybreak and a creeping minute-hand;
And here the lads went over, and there was Harmsworth shot,
And here was William lying-but the new men know them not.
And I said, "There is still the river, and still the stiff, stark trees,
To treasure here our story, but there are only these";
But under the white wood crosses the dead men answered low,
“The new men know not Beaucourt, but we are here-we know.”

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