A Horseman of Hacconby

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AMONG THE NAMES carved upon the memorials of south Lincolnshire are men whose potentials were never realised, their lives cut short by war. Private Tom Hutchins was one such man.

Tom was a young horseman working on one of the farms in the fen-edge village of Hacconby. He answered his country’s call within months of the outbreak of the Great War. What followed was almost nine months of training, a voyage halfway around the world and a single night on the shores of Gallipoli. He then entered battle for the first time on 7 August 1915.

Before that bloody, fateful day was over, he was dead.

TOM HUTCHINS was born at Hacconby on 22 August, 1890, the eldest child of Thomas Hutchins, a bricklayer, and his wife Sophia, née Ellis. Although the Hutchins family were not directly related to my own by blood, they lived, worked and worshipped together, shared the same fields and lanes, and undoubtedly knew one another well.

Families such as ours formed the fabric of village life in the congenial communities of the area. Tom’s maternal relatives, the Ellis family (to which my own is connected), were a classic example, linking many of the village’s long-established lineages through friendship, marriage and shared experience.

Tom’s childhood was spent in modest but close-knit surroundings. The 1901 Census records the family living not in a house of their own but with Thomas Bland, Tom’s elderly great-uncle, a widowed blacksmith.

Sharing the household were Tom’s parents and his younger brother and sisters. It was a home built upon hard work and mutual support, where the trades of bricklayer and blacksmith stood side by side, each essential to the life of a rural Lincolnshire community.

Like so many boys of his generation, Tom left school early and entered agricultural service.

By the time of the 1911 Census he was twenty years old and lodging on Hacconby Fen with David Hall, himself a horseman, while another young horseman, John Clapton, shared the same household.

Tom’s occupation was recorded simply as ‘Horseman on Farm,’ yet those few words reveal much about the young man he had become.

Heavy horses were among a farmer’s most valuable possessions, entrusted only to dependable and capable men. Their care demanded patience, skill and long hours of labour in every season.

It was honest work, familiar to generations of rural county men, and one which Tom appeared destined to follow throughout his life.

History, however, had other plans.

Like thousands of young men inspired by duty, loyalty or a sense of adventure, Tom volunteered. He enlisted in the Lincolnshire Regiment on 13 November, 1914 and joined the newly raised 6th Battalion, one of Lord Kitchener’s New Army battalions.

The transformation from farm labourer to soldier was neither quick nor easy.

DURING THE MONTHS that followed, Tom trained at Belton Park near Grantham before moving with the battalion to Salisbury Plain, Luton and finally Witley Camp, where increasingly demanding brigade and divisional exercises prepared the men for active service.

Musketry, route marches and field exercises gradually forged enthusiastic volunteers into disciplined infantrymen.

For Tom, accustomed to the physical demands of farm work, the discipline of military life must have seemed a natural extension of the diligence already expected of him in civilian life.

At the end of June 1915 the battalion finally received orders for overseas service.

Embarking at Liverpool with the 11th (Northern) Division aboard Empress of Britain, Tom left England for the first and last time.

THE VOYAGE CARRIED him through the Mediterranean, calling at Gibraltar, Malta and Alexandria before the transports anchored at Mudros, the great Allied staging base for the Gallipoli campaign.

For many of the men, these distant ports were unlike anything they had ever imagined. Young rural labourers who had scarcely travelled beyond their own county boundary suddenly found themselves gazing upon ancient harbours and unfamiliar landscapes beneath a Mediterranean sun.

The sense of adventure, however, was short-lived.

On the evening of 6 August, 1915, the 6th Battalion landed at Suvla Bay as part of a bold attempt to break the deadlock that had paralysed the Gallipoli campaign for months.

The landing itself met relatively little opposition, and after disembarking, the battalion spent the night close to the beachhead amid growing confusion as units became intermingled in darkness and unfamiliar country.

Before dawn the following morning fresh orders arrived.

As the battalion moved across exposed ground, Turkish riflemen, machine-gunners and artillery opened increasingly accurate fire.

The dry scrub offered little protection. Officers became casualties, companies lost cohesion and communication steadily broke down amidst dust, smoke and confusion.

Somewhere during that advance, on 7 August 1915, Private Tom Hutchins was killed.

He was twenty-four years old.

After nine months of preparation, weeks at sea and a lifetime spent among the tranquil fields of Lincolnshire, his experience of active service had lasted less than a day.

He would never write home describing his experience. He would never return on leave to home and family. Nor would he ever again walk the lanes of his native village or tend the horses that had shaped his working life.

Like so many who fell during the confused fighting around Suvla Bay, Tom’s body was never identified.

Today his name is commemorated on the Helles Memorial, overlooking the waters where so many thousands of soldiers disappeared into history without a known grave.

THERE IS A particular poignancy in Tom Hutchins’ story.

His life followed the well-worn path of countless young fenland men: village childhood, agricultural labour, hopes of steady employment and, perhaps in time, marriage and a family of his own.

The Great War robbed him of that ordinary future and carried him from the level fields of Lincolnshire to the rugged hills of Gallipoli, where all those humble ambitions ended in a matter of hours.

Today his name stands among those of his fallen comrades upon Hacconby’s memorial, a reminder that the terrible cost of the Great War was measured not only in great battles or famous victories, but in lives such as Tom’s—ordinary, industrious and full of promise.

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