Private William Ainger Howman, 1895–1916
AS WE HAVE learned in the previous post ― From the Farm to the Veldt ― Private Robert James Howman stepped off a train at Fakenham station in December, 1901 and returned home after almost seventeen years in the service of the Crown.
His military career had carried him to the edge of the British Empire and then to South Africa, where he saw action in the bitter Boer War.
He had crossed oceans, endured tropical climates and survived armed conflict before returning safely to his wife and family in their home in White Horse Street. He had his discharge papers, the promise of a Medal and memories of a life spent in uniform.
For Robert, his story ended where it had begun: at home.
For his eldest son, it would be a very different narrative.
Just fifteen years after Robert’s discharge from the army, his first-born son would don the King’s uniform and pick up a rifle. And like his father before him, the young soldier would leave the pastoral calm of Norfolk, bound for war.
Unlike Robert, however, he was destined never to return.
His name was William Ainger Howman. He was my 2nd Cousin, twice removed, and this is his story.
White Horse Street
WILLIAM WAS BORN in Great Ryburgh in August 1895, at a time when his father was serving overseas with the Norfolk Regiment.
Indeed, during William’s earliest years Robert was still stationed in distant parts of the Empire. By the time father and son truly gained the opportunity to get to know one another, Robert had already seen more of the world than most Norfolk men could ever imagine.
The family eventually settled in White Horse Street, Fakenham, where William grew up alongside his brothers and sisters.
The Edwardian years were a period of optimism and change. Railways connected towns and villages, newspapers carried stories from across the globe, and Britain’s Empire appeared secure and permanent.
For William, life will have certainly revolved around home, school, family and eventually, work.
Britain’s census records represent brief snapshots in time. The Census of 1911, conducted on the evening of 2nd April, show that William was at home with his father Robert and his mother Mary.
Also at home were Leah and May Louisa ― Mary’s two daughters from a previous relationship ― Willam’s four brothers, Frederick, George, Walter and baby James, and his young niece, Mary.
The document also records that William was sixteen years old and working as a printer’s labourer.
His occupation may have been a modest one, but it speaks of a young man beginning to establish himself in the world. Each morning he would have made his way through the streets of Fakenham to his place of employment, learning a trade and earning his living. Paying his way, just as his father had done.
In 1911, in a nation at peace, his future must have seemed full of possibilities.
Military service, however, was already part of his life.
Boy Soldier
IN APRIL 1912, a year after that census was taken, William joined the Territorial Force. He was allotted the service number 1679 and enlisted in the 5th Battalion, Norfolk Regiment. His decision to volunteer for military service was perhaps unsurprising.
At home lived a father who had spent almost two decades in uniform.
Robert’s stories of Gibraltar, India, Burma and South Africa must surely have coloured William’s imagination. The Queen’s South Africa Medal, earned during the Boer War, was a tangible reminder that military service formed part of the family’s history.
Like thousands of young men throughout Britain, William embraced the opportunities offered by the Territorials. He attended annual camps in 1912 and 1913, learning military exercises, weapons practice and fieldcraft.
At that time, few could have imagined how important such training would soon become.
Each man knew that the Territorials existed primarily as a reserve force for home defence. Most expected to simply serve part-time while continuing their civilian occupations.
After all, Britain was at peace; war belonged to the history books.
Then came August 1914.
War with Germany
WHEN BRITAIN DECLARED war on Germany on 4 August 1914, William had not yet reached his nineteenth birthday.
The following day he was eligible for military service. During the weeks that followed, recruiting offices around the county filled with eager young men keen to serve King and country; crowds gathered in towns and villages to cheer departing troops.
The news prompted a strong sense of nationalistic pride, optimism and even jingoism. Many believed the conflict would be over by Christmas. William, like countless others, could never have foreseen that Europe had entered into a struggle unlike anything in human history.
And the world would never be the same again.
Yet while many volunteers rushed to join the colours, William already wore them. He had gained valuable experience with the Territorials, and for nearly two years following the outbreak of war, he remained on home service.
The work was often routine and unglamorous. Training, guard duties and defensive preparations occupied much of the time.
Meanwhile, newspapers’ casualty lists grew longer day by day. Previously unfamiliar names became well known, heard repeatedly in conversations in shops, public houses and market squares. Names such as:
- Mons.
- Ypres.
- Loos.
- Gallipoli.
Names that would soon become synonymous with ultimate, bloody sacrifice had slipped easily into the national consciousness.
And the war showed no sign of ending.
France
IN MARCH 1916 William’s military career took a significant and consequential turn.
Under the provisions of the Military Service Act, he was transferred out of the Norfolk Regiment and into the 1/4th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment.
His new service number was 201398.
Soon afterwards he crossed the Channel to France where, at twenty years of age, he entered a landscape wholly transformed by twentieth-century industrial warfare.
Gone were the colourful uniforms and sweeping manoeuvres imagined by earlier generations. The Western Front was a nightmarish world of trenches, barbed wire and artillery. A hideous landscape of shell holes and bloated, prostrate corpses decomposing into a stinking morass of mud.
It was a battlefield where, in a single morning, entire communities could lose their young men through wholesale, indiscriminate slaughter.
And William’s arrival coincided with the British Army’s preparations for its greatest offensive yet.
The Battle of the Somme.
The Somme
BEFORE THE SOMME offensive began, British guns unleashed a week-long bombardment that fired more than 1.5 million shells at the German lines. Commanders hoped the barrage would destroy trenches, cut the wire defences and leave little resistance for the advancing infantry.
The reality proved to be very different.
Instead, many German defenders survived in deep dugouts, and when the attack opened on 1 July 1916, the battle became one of the bloodiest and most costly in British military history.
By the time William entered the fighting later that month, the Somme was already a landscape of total devastation. Their route carried them through places whose names would become engraved into military history:
Mametz. Fricourt. Bazentin. Longueval. High Wood.
Today these names are etched into regimental diaries and archives, chronicling events in the cold, toneless parlance of the military. To the soldiers who fought there they represented little more than fear, exhaustion, anguish and death.
High Wood
OF ALL THE battlegrounds of the Somme, few acquired a more sinister reputation than High Wood.
Situated on elevated ground, it dominated the surrounding countryside. German defenders could observe British movements across wide areas of the battlefield, directing artillery and machine-gun fire with devastating effect.
Repeated attacks had failed to secure it. Shellfire had splintered trees, whittling them down to jagged stumps; a shattered woodland became a charnel house of death and destruction. What was once a leaf-dappled pastoral landscape disappeared beneath craters, mud and human suffering.
It was into this landscape that William and his battalion advanced.
Did he somehow know that he may not survive the impending attack? Did he write a few lines home on the eve of battle? We shall never know.
What we do know is that on 20 July 1916, the men of the 1/4th Suffolk Regiment received orders to advance in support of the fighting around High Wood.
Leaving their positions near Bazentin-le-Petit, they moved into a battlefield scarred by relentless shellfire and strewn with the wreckage of earlier assaults. Almost immediately they encountered fierce resistance.
Machine-gun fire swept the open ground, scything through the advancing ranks and turning the attack into a desperate struggle for survival.
As the day wore on, the cost became ever more apparent. By nightfall the battalion had suffered grievous losses, with scores of men killed, wounded or missing.
Among them was Private William Ainger Howman, the young printer’s labourer from Fakenham. He was twenty years old.
No Known Grave
THE PRECISE CURCUMSTANCES of William’s death remain unknown. Like so many casualties of the Somme, his body was never identified.
Perhaps he fell in the attack itself. Perhaps he was struck while carrying ammunition forward. Perhaps shellfire obliterated all trace of where he lay.
What is certain is that his broken body was never recovered.
Today he is remembered on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.
There, among more than 72,000 names, his own sacrifice is recorded; a man whose life ended in the fields of northern France.
The soldier’s son who had followed his father into military service and who would never return home.
For his family, there would be no grave to visit. Only memories, treasured photographs and a name carved in stone.
The Measure of a Life
WILLIAM LEFT BEHIND no wife, no children and no opportunity to fulfil the future that lay before him in 1911.
The printer’s labourer recorded in the 1911 census never became the skilled tradesman he might have been. Instead, his life was interrupted by a war that demanded everything of a generation.
Everything.
His story is not unique. And it is precisely that which makes it so important. William represents thousands of young men from Norfolk’s villages and market towns who exchanged civilian ambitions for military service and paid the ultimate price.
Through him we glimpse not only one family’s loss, but the wider sacrifice of many.
Cut down on the Somme in July 1916, William would never again see the beautiful Norfolk countryside, or pass through the garden gate to his family home.
The father returned from war. The son was among the cream of a generation who did not. In that simple truth lies the enduring tragedy of the Great War.
RAVEN MOON 