Remembrance - Crier Profile Continued
REMEMBRANCE DAY falls on the 11th of this month and those who fell in the two World wars will be commemorated on Remembrance Sunday on 15th November. At the end of the BBC Radio 4 programme "Through a Glass Darkly" which was profiled in the Crier earlier this year and which documented the church windows, a number of village voices are included. They give their personal reminiscences of the people who lived at the time of the First World War, and of its effects on the village.
They weren't fools. The farm workers of those days were clever men. Absolutely country men. They knew if an animal was ill, and they would look after it. The loss of a horse was a big thing.
I've always gathered from my father's brother, his elder brother, in 1879, when he spent his childhood at Bottisham Lode, they entertained themselves by fighting, seems to have been one of the men's principal occupations - bare-knuckle fighting. He was always talking about fighting, and who could and who couldn't, and so forth.
I knew one chap who said there'd be a good war and he'd be in it. Fool, you know, boasting. Luckily he got it too. War was declared in August, he was France in September and he was taken prisoner and he had a rough time. He was young and silly, that's all. Didn't know what he was talking about. He thought a war would be just a case of fisticuffs.
Camps, says Bob Sheldrick. Andrew Camps. He's the only one of the family in Swaffham Prior now. It was his uncle, Harry Camps.
Well, I think they went along because all their mates went along, says another
voice. They went like all teenagers today wear trainers. A kind of mass
brainwashing, perhaps. But there was a lot of feeling if you didn't go. If
you didn't volunteer. People like Fisher would imply that it was your duty
to volunteer and go and fight for your - you were fighting for your country,
and there was a bit of, of young men, and there was adventure - and you were
booty away from Swaffham, weren't you? (Laughs) Mr Prince, he volunteered
and went all through the first war, and the thing he told me, when they were
under dreadful shell fire, was he thought heĠd never see Swaffham again, and he
had the dreadful experience which he related to me they lost men of course, and
one day there was a family still in Swaffham, the Camps family, and he'd
just come up the line and he'd not been before of course, replacing someone
who'd been killed, and George Prince said to me, I gave him a few tips: I
said don't you in any case ever look over that parapet or they'll have
you - cause the Germans had got snipers of course, and he said that very first
day he was foolish enough to do so and the sniper got him right through the
head. It was a young man he knew and it upset him dreadfully.
Uncle Harry as I remember, he was rather keen to get in the army because he'd
got bad legs, varicose veins or something of the sort, he tried three maybe
four times to get in the army before they took him, and when he finally went, I
think it was at a time when the army were getting desperate for men. I've
got a letter here which he wrote home from the second and fifth Bedford
regiment. "We moved on Tuesday out of tents into a fine big house as big
as Squire Allix. He was thinking about home a little bit further on, he says
"I suppose you've finished harvesting now. I had a magazine from Mr
Fisher last week. Tell him I'll write to him when I gets settled. And again
he's thinking about home, reminding them "dont eat all the apples
before I come home, which I hope won't be long. Yours, Harry." And
after the war his parents were sent a bronze plaque and it's inscribed
"He died for Freedom and Honour", and it's inscribed with his
name, Harry Christopher Camps.
Well, it was bummed up by authority.
They had the inscription, Lord kitchener wants you, pointing the finger....they had recruiting evenings, and just two of them volunteered. They were gone by the next morning.
I remember them as a happy band of men. They didn't have a lot, in the way of material things, but they were contented in their way of life. They had their beer and their tobacco, and they were happy in their work. I think agricultural work - not this mechanised way - was very satisfying.
How things were supposed to have worked out, says Bob Sheldrick, but they didn't. Cambridgeshire County Council allocated various farms for the soldiers who came home from the Great War - they gave them 55 acres each to try and get a living. Well, that worked for the first couple of years, then we had a recession. The farmers couldn't sell the corn, even at top quality. My father used to grow Proctor barley, for brewing, and he had a hell of a job to get ten shillings for a sack of corn. I'd been up to the Corn Exchange in Cambridge and he'd been round to every dealer to try to sell his corn. In the end, they terminated their tenancy of the land.
And of course, what mattered, in a different sort of way, says a lady's voice, was that all the horses went to war. A lot of them didn't come back of course, but certainly one did, and they met it at the station - they didn't have motorised horse boxes then - and brought it back and it went straight into its own box. After four years of war.
The casualty lists were dreadful. Pages and pages of them. Especially in '16. But they didn't make a song and dance about it. That wasn't English.