The ghosts of World War 1 #somme100

Now that our streets are well lit and the attics of our houses are converted from dusty repositories of family heirlooms to bedrooms looking out onto the stars, where shall our ghosts go to get our attention?

As we spend so many hours with our screens; a phone for an idle moment in a bus queue, a tablet to scroll through as we get ready for bed, where better than the internet for a past life to reach out and tell us their story?

So it happened to me. One evening last April, as I scrolled idly through tweets, I felt a jolt of recognition at a photograph of a young private which appeared in my timeline. Not the face but the name: Private Youngs, born St Augustine’s Norwich, educated at Angel Road school, died of wounds in 1916.

Private Youngs born of St. Augustine's, Norwich, on 4th April 1897, educated at Angel Road School, Norwich. DOW. 19. pic.twitter.com/WDRKr5nehM

— Nick Stone (@typejunky) April 14, 2016

This was, I was certain, a member of my family and I tweeted the man who posted the picture, Nick, to say so. My roots being Norfolk and Suffolk, Nick Stone is one of the historians I follow to learn more about the part of the world where I grew up. He has in the past answered questions about Norwich when I was trying to do a little family history but this time he was actually sharing a picture of one of my family.

We quickly established that this was my first cousin 3x removed (in other words, my great grandmother’s cousin) as I was able to share the small amount of knowledge I have about my Norwich family. I knew, for example, that they all grew up around the Angel Road area - I remember going to Angel Road to visit my great grandmother until I was about 9 - and the name of Alfred’s uncle, my great-great grandfather Hezekiah (below).

Until now, Alfred had just been a name on a family tree but now he had a face and gradually his story emerged, thanks to the incredible war historians of Twitter who dug into archives, as we exchanged tweets, to tell the story of Alfred’s war.

Alfred Sydney Youngs was a private who had enlisted on pretty much the first day of the war in September 1914, aged 17, for a three year term in the 8th Norfolks. Was he fired by patriotism, perhaps, answering the call to do his duty or maybe just a teenager who wanted some adventure and a change from working in the boot and shoe industry as a clicker like the rest of the family?  The reasons men gave for joining up in 1914 varied, it could have been a mixture of all of these. After all, it would all be over by Christmas.

Alfred was just 5 foot 3 and weighed 119 pounds. Small, like the men on that side of our family generally are. He claimed to be 19 when he joined up but they weren’t too bothered about checking and his apparent age was enough.  Alfred, like most teenagers wasn’t above breaking the rules of army discipline. His record shows that he was admonished for overstaying his pass in July 1915 from midnight to 9.30pm, for example. There’s also a letter to the Office of records confirming his whereabouts in October 1915 sent by his father, also called Alfred, although it’s impossible to make out what the reason Alfred gave for being AWOL was.

For the first year and a half then Alfred’s war record (retrieved by Nick and shared with me) seems to show little more than getting his pay, overstaying his passes and absenting himself and taking various punishments for his misdemeanours.

Then, on the 1st July 1916, Alfred found himself at one of the biggest and bloodiest battle of the Great War, the Somme. How he died is a matter of conjecture, based on the records of the time and the work done by historians recreating those days. Another Norfolk based historian, Steve Smith, who has a blog on the Great War and the people of Norfolk joined the conversation on Twitter the day after to help me understand what Alfred’s last hours may have been.

It is possible that Alfred went over the top on that terrible first day that took so many lives. The 8/Norfolks were at Montaubon, the first of the divisions to see action at the Somme; Steve describes the battle here. Alfred could have been one of the 30,000 soldiers wounded in action that day but, unlike the many men who lay in no man’s land with no hope of rescue, Alfred was somehow brought to a casualty clearing station at Corbie. Alternatively, he could have been wounded while under shellfire from a Howitzer as he was patrolling Montauban Alley. The war diary records about 12 casualties on the 3rd. His record simply states ‘bullet wound’ on the 3rd of July and then, that Alfred died of wounds to the abdomen at the 5CSS at Corbie on the 4th July 1916.

His meagre possessions; some bullets, a lighter, some farthings were eventually sent home to his grieving parents, dispatched on the 6th April 1917. Later, his medals the 1914-15 Star and the British War medal, Victory medal were signed for by his father, Alfred Charles, in 1920 and 1922 respectively. I wonder what they thought as they held them? Were they displayed proudly or put in a drawer and forgotten?

I had learned this much because two wonderfully generous historians, Nick Stone and Steve Smith, had put so much time and taken so much interest in Alfred’s story; this working class Norfolk teenager, who died far from home, in pain from wounds in his abdomen, on a put up bed in a makeshift hospital, his death, on just another day in the war, no different from many others in its lack of glory, lack of heroism. Did he still think the fight was worth it? Who knows? No one can tell. Perhaps all he cared about by that time was where the next meal came from and whether he’d be alive to eat it.

As I grew up, no one mentioned him, nor did they mention the war records of others who had gone to the front. Great, great-uncle Reggie resisted as long as he could, but was conscripted in 1916. His records show him as a prisoner of war in Germany. Needless to say, none of this was spoken of and my grandmother would wave away questions about them with an impatient gesture, as if to say “That’s all in the past. Why do you want to dig all that up?”. A generation of men came home and said next to nothing about what they had seen and undergone. Their children knew better than to ask them.

Some, like Alfred, dying in a CSS from wounds, didn’t come back. At least, not straight away. That evening in April when Nick tweeted a picture of a young soldier from Norwich, gradually, as the evening wore on and into the next day, Alfred emerged once more from the shadows to reveal himself to his family: the great-grandchild of his little cousin Lilian who, 100 years later, likes to read Twitter in the evening.

There he is, a handsome face standing proud in a uniform, his last hours alive and the place he died on the 4th July 2016, his place of burial at Corbie all revealed after long years in obscurity.

 Maybe it wasn’t just one of those serendipitous moments that so often happen on Twitter. Perhaps, after 100 years and far from home in some foreign field, Alfred was tired of being forgotten.

Picture Credit of Alfred Sydney Youngs: Picture Norfolk.