The Horseman who Rode East
FOR MOST YOUNG men of the Lincolnshire fenlands in the early 1900s, life seemed destined never to carry them far from the place where they began.
For Walter Sandall, that place was the quiet fenland village of Rippingale. Here, the rhythm of life was aligned to the seasons, the weather and the work waiting in the fields. There was every reason to believe his future would be spent close to home.
After all, the land provided employment, the village provided community, and the boundaries of life rarely extended much beyond the neighbouring market towns.
However, as we have seen in my previous posts in this series, history had other ideas.
Walter was a cousin of mine. This is his story.
WALTER WAS BORN in 1893, the son of Edward and Mary Sandall. He and his brother John William, who we met in my previous ‘Lost Generation‘ post, and who was ten years Walter’s senior, both grew up in a world where horses remained as important to farming as the men who worked beside them.
Before tractors transformed the countryside, every acre depended upon horsepower. For the young men of Rippingale at that time, education and ambition were supplementary to qualities of greater value, such as strong hands, steady effort and dependability.
By the spring of 1911, eighteen-year-old Walter had already left home to seek employment. The census taken on 2nd April records him living at Mill Farm, Scredington, near Folkingham. This was the home of his employer, farm Bailiff Joe Whatton.
There, Walter worked as a horseman alongside another young farm servant, Sam Neal. It was demanding work that began before dawn. Horses had to be fed, groomed and harnessed long before work began in the fields, and after the day’s labour ended they would be cared for once again.
There was nothing extraordinary about Walter’s life. He was simply one of thousands of young agricultural labourers whose days were shaped by the demands of the land.
Only nine months after the census was taken, Walter made a decision that changed the course of his life.
ON 6 JANUARY, 1912 he travelled to Lincoln and enlisted in the Lincolnshire Regiment. He was just eighteen years and eight months old.
His attestation papers still preserve the young man who stood before the recruiting officer that winter’s day.
Five feet seven inches tall, weighing just over ten stone, with blue eyes, brown hair and a fresh complexion, he declared his occupation simply as ‘farm servant’.
The examining doctor found him fit for military service, noting only a small scar beneath his left knee—perhaps the sort of minor injury easily acquired by a young man working every day among heavy horses and farm machinery.
For Walter, soldiering may have offered adventure, regular wages or simply the opportunity to see something of the world beyond his home parish. Whatever his reasons, his first experience of Army life proved surprisingly brief.
After serving with the Lincolnshire Regiment for a little over a year, he purchased his discharge under Army regulations, repaying £18 to leave the Regular Army.
The decision was not uncommon. Many young soldiers discovered that civilian opportunities, family obligations or agricultural work drew them back home.
Having completed only a little over a year in uniform, Walter returned to Lincolnshire and resumed civilian life, perhaps believing that his days as a soldier were behind him.
A little more than a year later, however, all that changed.
IN AUGUST 1914, Europe collapsed into war. Immediately, Britain called once more for volunteers …
… and Walter answered that call.
This time he joined the 1/1st Lincolnshire Yeomanry, the county’s mounted regiment. It was a choice that seemed almost inevitable.
Long before he had learned to carry a rifle, Walter had learned to work with horses. The patience, confidence and practical skill demanded on the farm translated naturally into cavalry service. The horse beneath him may have worn military tack instead of a work harness, but in many respects the partnership remained the same.
The surviving photograph of Walter, believed to date from this period, shows a young man looking confidently towards the camera in the uniform of the Yeomanry.
There is little hint of the years that lay ahead.
Like most young soldiers, Walter quickly discovered that Army life demanded rather more than courage alone.
His conduct sheet records a handful of minor disciplinary offences during training. Once he was punished for using obscene language towards a non-commissioned officer. On another occasion he missed Last Post by a few minutes. Later he overstayed evening leave and, while serving overseas, was even charged with insubordination.
These incidents tell us something valuable.
Walter was no marble saint, untouched by human weakness.
He was a young man in his early twenties, adjusting to the discipline of military life in exactly the way countless others did. He made mistakes, accepted his punishments and carried on serving.
If anything, these small imperfections make him easier to recognise as a real human being, rather than a distant figure preserved only in official records.
IN OCTOBER, 1915, Walter sailed from Southampton with 400 men and horses of the Lincolnshire Yeomanry aboard the SS Mercian, a cargo ship requisitioned for war and reworked as a troopship.
While in the Bay of Biscay the ship encountered bad weather and both men and horses suffered from seasickness. The Mercian then stopped briefly at Gibraltar, but troops were not allowed to go ashore as there were concerns about security.
As the convoy entered the Mediterranean after leaving Gibraltar, the troopship came under attack from a German U-boat, U38 — a sobering reminder that even the journey to war carried its own dangers.
Eventually the convoy reached Egypt, where Walter found himself entering a very different conflict from the one that dominated newspaper headlines at home.
There were no endless trench systems stretching to the horizon. No shattered villages, blasted woodlands nor miles of mud.
Instead there were deserts, rocky hills and ancient cities whose names belonged as much to the pages of the Bible as they did to contemporary military maps.
The war in the Middle East demanded mobility rather than endurance in trenches. Mounted troops could cover astonishing distances in a single day, and horses remained indispensable.
Walter’s years spent handling farm horses in Lincolnshire now proved unexpectedly valuable in a theatre where mounted warfare still had a vital role to play.
As the campaign evolved, so too did the Army itself.
By 1917 Walter had transferred into the 18th Squadron, Machine Gun Corps (Cavalry), exchanging the traditions of the Yeomanry for one of the newest and most specialised units in the British Army.
Machine-gun squadrons combined the mobility of cavalry with the devastating firepower of the Vickers gun, supporting mounted formations as they swept across Palestine and into Syria.
The campaign reached its climax during the autumn of 1918.
General Allenby’s offensive shattered the Ottoman armies. Damascus fell. Allied cavalry advanced northwards at remarkable speed, achieving one of the most successful mobile campaigns of the entire war.
For the first time in years, peace seemed close enough to touch.
Walter had survived almost everything the campaign could throw at him. Enemy bullets had missed him. He had eluded shellfire and shrapnel.
The hardships of campaigning across deserts and mountains had failed to break this plucky young man of Lincolnshire.
Then came pneumonia.
Like so many soldiers of the Great War, Walter discovered to his cost that disease remained an enemy every bit as dangerous as those carrying rifles. Exhaustion, dust, extremes of heat and cold, and the physical demands of campaigning weakened even the strongest men.
On 24 October 1918, at just twenty-five years of age, Walter Sandall succumbed to his illness and died in Syria.
Six days later the Ottoman Empire surrendered. Eighteen days later the guns finally fell silent across Europe.
He had come heartbreakingly close to seeing the end; so very close to walking once more the familiar lanes of home.
WALTER WAS BURIED in Beirut War Cemetery, where today the badge of the Machine Gun Corps is carved into the white Portland stone above his name.
More than two thousand miles separate his grave from the fields where he first learned to work with horses, yet the journey between those two places is itself the story of Britain’s Great War.
For it was a conflict that reached into the smallest villages, gathered up ordinary young men of so much potential and carried them to places they could scarcely have imagined. Many failed to return.
When Walter’s affairs were settled, his Army pay and War Gratuity were returned to his family in Rippingale. The paperwork survives, recording pounds, shillings and pence with bureaucratic precision.
Yet no ledger could ever calculate the true cost of what had been lost.
Walter’s adult life began as that of an ordinary farm horseman on Lincolnshire’s fenland edge. It ended as a cavalry machine gunner on the far side of the Mediterranean.
Between those two very different lives lay only seven years.
For the Sandall family, and for villages like Rippingale, those few years changed everything.
Footnote
Once again, my thanks to Howard Sandall of Bourne, Lincolnshire, for kindly supplying the photograph of Walter in uniform. It became the definitive reference from which the canon images illustrating this post were created.
