Disillusionment of a Harringay Boy During the Great War

A few days ago I stumbled across the Great War memoirs of a Harringay boy. Originally published in 1978, it has just been republished this year, 100 years after John Tucker went to war.

Seventeen-and-a-half years old, full of idealism and patriotism, John enlisted as an Infantryman in the London Kensington Regiment and reached France, after training, in August 1915.

Against all odds he survived three years of bitter trench warfare, was seriously wounded, and returned to Blighty a few months before Armistice Day. During those years he took part in the Battle of the Somme, the battles of Arras and Cambrai, and the Third Battle of Ypres. Yet though his patriotism remained unflinching, his idealism gave way to the grim realities of day to day survival in the trenches and, as he began to understand what constitutes courage, he grew from boyhood to manhood. The author contrasts the beauties of the French countryside with the ugliness of widespread death and destruction, and paints a picture of French country life hardly less squalid than the soldiers' own lot. But above all, he makes the reader realise what it was like to fight in the war to end all wars. These are the memoirs of one Infantryman, but through his eyes a vivid canvas of the whole war gradually unfolds.

          Waterstones Book description.

Here's reader review of the first edition I found on Amazon:

John Tucker was a regular soldier in the London Kensington Regiment during World War One; enlisting when he was only seventeen in 1914. He later moved to the pioneer section of the battalion, which by his own admission probably increased his chances of survival. He does not write of extensive depictions of combat in this memoir, but rather relates the unending struggle of the WW1 soldier to deal with the privations of the war. He wrote this memoir in his seventies so some of his narrative is disjointed, as he states that he can no longer remember the exact sequence of events. He goes into graphic detail of some of the horrors of war that he witnessed, such as the sight of dead and wounded soldiers as they were still fresh in his memory after all those years. On the Somme he recounts an instance where a trench was full of German dead, and the only way to proceed was to walk over them. He served on the Somme, Arras and at Passchendaele, surviving each of those violent conflicts though being under constant shelling by the Germans. He was wounded seriously in 1918 in the Beaurains-Tilloy sector; being hit by a piece of shrapnel which penetrated his lung, and was left for dead by his comrades, until finally being evacuated to blighty. His memoir is one in the disillusionment school of WW1 writings; he saw the war and the sacrifice as being unnecessary and a result of the failure of those in power.

You can preview the book on Google here and  buy it online at Waterstones here.

In the book we learn that John was living in Chesterfield Gardens when the war began.

I know that Harringay local Bethany Burrows Atherton has been doing some research on Harringay men who fought during WWI, particularly those associated with St Paul's Church.  So I dropped her a note about the book yesterday and was pleased to get an excited email back this morning expalining that John was one of the St Paul's Church men she's been researching. So we can expect to hear more about John soon, I'm sure.