The Yorkshirepost

By Sheena Hastings

The First World War saw the biggest loss of fathers in modern British history. Now in their 90s, their children are still mourning. Sheena Hastings reports.


WHEN we mark Remembrance Sunday this weekend, one of the nation’s most important rituals will acknowledge those who sacrificed their lives for their king, their country and for freedom.

The lost include 750,000 men who never returned from the First World War. Many of those who died were young fathers, whose children have spent 90 years mourning the dads they’d hardly got to know.

When Lord Kitchener began recruiting a voluntary army after war was declared in August 1914, 2.5 million men stepped forward in a wave of patriotic fervour. Fathers enlisted alongside single men.

From generals down to privates, all were confident of a quick victory, and there was even talk of being home for Christmas. They had no inkling that they were about to become trapped in a deadly stalemate.

As the conflict wore on, the Government introduced conscription and raised the upper age limit for recruits from 38 to 41.

For four years all the children saw of daddy would be during the occasional couple of days’ leave. Some children did not even have the memory of these home visits; they were left with nothing if their their father made the ultimate sacrifice early in the war.

Charles Chilton’s dad, also called Charles, was 17 when he and a friend ran off and lied about their age in order to join the Sherwood Foresters. This caused consternation at home, not least because Charlie’s girlfriend was pregnant.

A hasty wedding was arranged, then Charlie went off to France. His letters spoke of his desperate desire to come home and meet the baby son born a few months later, but he never returned to meet his namesake.

Censorship played its part, but many soldiers found it difficult anyway to describe the true suffering and carnage at the Front. Even those who did return to civilian life would rarely speak of the horrors they had endured.

It was often left to those who served alongside men who died to tell the families about their last moments.

They would later write to, or visit, a bereaved family, who had no body to bury. It was during one such visit that four-year-old Charles Chilton found out more about the death of his father.

“A man came to our house who knew my father and served with him in the same regiment,” says Charles. “He said he saw my father just a few yards away, standing up. This shell came over and exploded, and he saw him no more. Nothing of him was found.”

So the two Charles Chiltons never met, and young Charles found it difficult to muster any emotion towards a father he hadn’t known. “I didn’t have any feeling for him, all he was was a photograph hanging on the wall. I’d never seen him, never touched him, even my mother never told me much about him.”

Charles found more of an emotional connection with his father later in life. He was a BBC radio presenter and married with children when, in the 1950s, he went looking for his father’s grave in Arras, Normandy.

It was that visit and the sight on a memorial of the 35,000 names of soldiers lost in the Battle of Arras that brought the reality and scale of those war deaths home to Charles as well as the very personal loss of his own father.

The emotional journey led Charles to research the host of ironic songs sung by troops in the quagmires of the Western Front, and write a groundbreaking 1960s’ radio show with actress Joan Littlewood. The programme became the basis for the film Oh! What A Lovely War.

George Musgrave’s father Alfred was carried off the battlefield with both legs badly injured in 1917. Gangrene was setting in and Alfred seemed to accept that he would never come home, yet was his “ordinary cheerful self” when he wrote his last letter to the family. George recently visited his father’s grave in Normandy for the first time.

“This is a moment I’ve waited 90 years for, now I’m happy to be with you again,” he said at the graveside.

Donald Overall remembers as a very small child that his mother would receive letters from her husband Harry from the trenches. Accounts of derring-do would be allowed through the net of censorship.

Donald remembers: “It was a sunken road, and all the riflemen were firing at the Germans, and apparently the Germans complained that the British had too many machine guns. They said they couldn’t advance against them. In fact, the British had no machine guns at all. (what they were hearing was) rapid rifle fire.

“The Lee Enfield was a bolt action rifle, and my mother said that father told her that the bolt got so hot that they couldn’t handle it, so they had to urinate on the bolt to cool it down so that they could keep it firing.”

From 1916 onwards, the numbers killed on the Western Front increased dramatically, with the loss of thousands of British soldiers in every battle.

Those that were recovered from the battlefield were given a makeshift burial close to where they’d fallen. One such heroic soldier was Harry Overall.

The news of his death arrived by telegram.

“I remember this distinctly,” says Donald. “Mother opened it, she read the telegram and collapsed on the floor… I was holding on to her skirt. I tried to wake her, I couldn’t make out what was wrong.

“She said: ‘Your father’s dead.’ She said: ‘Your father won’t come back’. She said: ‘You’ll have to be the man of the house’. I thought ‘Me, mum? I’m five years old’. I had to stand up and be counted, and I did. I did stand up straight, because I wanted to be like my father.”

Some families found telling the children their father was dead too traumatic. Mabel Howatt knew nothing about her father Ernest’s death until she heard his name called out among a list of others being prayed for at school assembly.

“I couldn’t take it in completely, except that I think everything went blank. Whether I realised I had no dad then or not, I just blanked out and sank to the floor. And that was the only intimation that anyone ever said to me that my father was not coming back…”

The death of the man of the family usually meant not only grief but also great financial hardship. The toll of emotional loss and increased hardship was compounded by shame for Gertrude Harris, whose father, Harry Farr, was shot for cowardice in October 1916.

In all, 306 British soldiers were court martialled and shot for cowardice during the Great War.

Harry had been in hospital suffering from shell shock, and was sent back to the Front
too soon. The sound of gunfire and shelling brought back the shell shock. He reported sick, but was ordered back to the trenches.

He refused, and was then dragged back to his position. The family later found out that, in response to Harry’s continued fear and trauma, his sergeant threatened to shoot his head off.

“Six months after mother heard that my father had died, her pension was stopped,” says Gertrude. “And when the landlady knew my mother had no money coming in, she said, ‘Well, I’m awfully sorry to ask you to leave your room’…We were homeless and penniless.”

Gertrude’s mother took her daughter with her when she later found a live-in job as a maid in a house in London.

In 2006, Harry Farr was granted a pardon, after a campaign by his family to clear his name.

Gertrude and her own daughter Janet led the campaign. “It was such a wonderful thing,” says Gertrude. “I was so happy for it to be proven that my father was not a coward and he was a brave soldier, as my mother said.

“Every year, when she watched the Armistice, she used to see the veterans walking along and said: ‘My Harry should have been amongst them’. She said: ‘He was a brave soldier, he was no coward’.”

The letter from the Ministry of Defence acknowledged that “execution was not a fate he deserved”.

Children who barely knew their fathers still have the capacity to miss them terribly, even nine decades on. “I miss him. I missed him as a boy, and I miss him as an old man,” says Donald Overall, tearfully.

“The first time he carried me upstairs I was on his shoulder, only a boy, a baby. Well, four years old was the last time I saw him… I could smell his tobacco and his army uniform. I’ve never forgotten it, I never will, I never ever will.”

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