A Horseman of Dunsby Fen

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Names carved upon the war memorials of south Lincolnshire are of men whose lives were cut short before they had the opportunity to discover what the future might hold. Thomas Wand was one such man.

Thomas was born in the south Lincolnshire village of Dunsby. By the time he was seventeen he had already left the family home and was working as a horseman on a farm at Pinchbeck.

As we have seen throughout my ‘Lost Fenland Generation‘ series, it was an occupation shared by countless young men of the fenland region.

For Thomas, as for so many of his contemporaries, life seemed to offer a familiar path: agricultural work, perhaps marriage and a family of his own, and a lifetime spent among the fields and villages of Lincolnshire.

This familiar path, however, would not remain his for long. We don’t know exactly when Thomas enlisted into the army in answer to his nation’s call, only that he did so. And in so doing became Private 21543 of the Lincolnshire Regiment.

We know, too, that in December 1917, at the age of twenty-three, he was killed during the Battle of Cambrai.

It is a story which takes us from the unruffled agricultural world of Dunsby and Pinchbeck to the shattered landscape around Flesquières, where he spent the final days of his short life.

Bonds of Blood

THOMAS WAND was born at Dunsby in 1894, the son of John Joseph Wand and his wife, Mary Ann, née Vickers.

The large Wand family belonged to the agricultural community which surrounded Dunsby and the neighbouring villages. Thomas’s father worked as an agricultural labourer, and the family lived within the close-knit rural society that had existed for generations in this part of Lincolnshire.

It was a world in which families were bound together not simply by blood, but by work, marriage and shared locality.

The villages and hamlets of the Fen edge were small communities. People worked the same land, attended the same churches, used the same roads and knew the families who lived around them. Thomas grew up within that world.

What makes Thomas’s story especially interesting is that he was not simply a Wand by birth; he was also the product of the previously-explored connection between the Wand and the Ellis families.

As noted in the story of John Wand [see post: ‘Before the Memorial], the two families had become connected in two directions: an Ellis had married a Wand, and a Wand had married an Ellis. That connection was strengthened further when Sarah Ann Ellis married Richard Wand, John’s cousin. Thomas was therefore the grandson of Richard and Sarah Ann.

Thus, by the time Thomas was born in 1894, the Wand and Ellis families were no longer simply two neighbouring families connected by marriage—they had become part of the same extended family, a connection that would carry through into the next generation and, ultimately, into Thomas’s own story.

An Irish Workforce

ON THE EVENING of 31 March, 1901 when the national census was taken, Thomas was living with this parents at their Dunsby home. Also with him were his siblings, George, Beatrice, Gertrude, Eliza and Lily.

This 1901 Census provides another small glimpse into the world in which Thomas was growing up, for living alongside the Wand family at Dunsby were two agricultural labourers, Michael McDermott, aged 40, and 21 year-old Michael Feely, both recorded as having been born in Ireland.

Their presence is perhaps more significant than the simple census entry might suggest.

By the nineteenth century, the movement of Irish agricultural labourers into England had become an established feature of the rural economy, and Lincolnshire was one of the counties where Irish workers could find employment on the farms.

Some came seasonally, following the demand for agricultural labour; others remained for longer periods and became part of the local rural workforce.

We cannot know from the census alone why McDermott and Feely were living with the Wands in March 1901, or how long they had been there. They may have been longer-term farm servants, or part of the continuing movement of agricultural workers between Ireland and England.

For six-year-old Thomas, however, they were simply part of the household and the world in which he was growing up.

Their presence is a small reminder that even these apparently self-contained fenland communities were connected to a much wider movement of people in search of work—and that the agricultural world into which Thomas was born was one in which mobility and the search for employment were already a familiar part of life.

And like so many boys of his generation, Thomas would leave school young and enter agricultural service.

BY THE TIME of the 1911 Census Thomas was seventeen years old and no longer living with his parents.

Instead, we find him living at Pinchbeck with the Haresign family, where his occupation was recorded simply as: ‘Horseman on Farm.’ This was an important role at that time.

Heavy horses were at the heart of agricultural life. They ploughed the fields, pulled carts and wagons and carried the burden of much of the work upon which rural communities depended. To be a horseman was therefore not merely agricultural labour.

The animals had to be fed, groomed, harnessed and handled correctly. They were valuable, powerful creatures, and their care required patience, strength and experience.

Thomas had entered that world at an early age. The countryside around him was a reassuring one of fields, farmyards, stables and lanes. Indeed, his future appeared to belong there.

But the world beyond Lincolnshire’s borders was changing rapidly.

WHEN THE 1911 Census recorded Thomas as a horseman at Pinchbeck, relationships between Europe’s nations were becoming increasingly unsettled.

Britain and Germany had been engaged for several years in a naval arms race, each building ever more powerful battleships, while the great European powers were becoming increasingly divided into competing diplomatic groupings.

The launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 had transformed naval warfare, and by 1911 the question of Britain’s ability to maintain its naval superiority over Germany was being vigorously debated in Parliament.

That same year brought the Agadir Crisis, when German intervention in Morocco brought Britain and Germany into another tense diplomatic confrontation. Elsewhere, the weakening Ottoman Empire was exposing the rival ambitions of the Balkan states, Austria-Hungary and Russia.

None of this meant that war was inevitable, and to Thomas and his family these will have been distant concerns compared with the everyday business of earning a living.

Yet beneath the familiar rhythms of farm and village, Europe was becoming increasingly armed, increasingly divided and increasingly capable of turning a local dispute into something much larger.

Thomas could have had no idea that within only three years the world of the 1911 Census would have disappeared, and that he himself would become part of the generation upon which that gathering storm would eventually break.

BRITAIN DECLARED WAR on Germany in August 1914.

‘The war, it was widely assumed, would be over by Christmas. It was a popular notion, not least among the tens of thousands of young boys who clamoured to leave boring, poorly paid jobs in order to enlist.’

Richard van Emden – ‘Britain’s Last Tommies’, 2005

Thomas was twenty years old.

We do not presently have his surviving attestation papers, so the precise circumstances and date of his enlistment cannot be established with certainty from his personal service record.

What we do know is that he enlisted at Bourne, and so became Private 21543 of the Lincolnshire Regiment. At some stage he served with the Regiment’s 7th Battalion, before being transferred to the 2/5th Battalion.

His surviving medal entitlement—the British War Medal and Victory Medal—also tells us that he did not qualify for the 1914–15 Star, suggesting that his military service began later. The surviving records therefore give us the broad outline of his military journey, but not the personal detail we might wish for.

There is no surviving diary or collection of letters from Thomas to tell us of his experiences, and no photograph has yet emerged to place a face beside his name. [For this account I have used family archive photographs from which to create a conceivable likeness.]

What we do have is fragmentary evidence. We have census records. We have Thomas’s service number. And his medal award records.

Significantly, however, the battalion’s surviving war diary provides us with a remarkable record of the unit in which Thomas would spend the final part of his life. And it is from these records that the following narrative has been constructed.

THE 2/5th BATTALION, LINCOLNSHIRE REGIMENT was a Territorial battalion, forming part of the 59th (2nd North Midland) Division.

By 1917 its men had become familiar with the peculiar routine imposed upon them by the Western Front. Life moved between front-line trenches and reserve positions, working parties and training, gruelling marches, sometimes under enemy shllfire, and periods of intense fighting.

These were followed, when circumstances allowed, by brief intervals of relative quiet.

The battalion’s surviving war diary provides a remarkable record of that existence. It was never intended as a memoir, nor did it attempt to explain the war or describe the experiences of the men who fought it.

Instead, its pages are concerned with the practical business of keeping a battalion in the field: orders are recorded, positions identified, companies moved from one place to another, trenches occupied and abandoned, and casualties carefully accounted for.

To the officers, these were the necessary documents of command and administration; to the men themselves, however, they represented something altogether more immediate.

For, behind every line on a map, every numbered position and every carefully worded order lay the prospect of danger, and the certain knowledge that, when the time came, these instructions would determine where they went, what they faced, and whether they came back.

DURING THE AUTUMN of 1917, the 2/5th Lincolnshires were engaged in fighting on the Western Front, and the battalion’s surviving diary traces their movements through the Ypres and Lens areas during those months.

It is tempting, when reconstructing Thomas’s story, to place him within each of those events noted, imagining him moving with his comrades from one position to another and sharing in the actions recorded by the battalion.

But the evidence does not permit us to do so with certainty.

We do not know precisely when Thomas joined the 2/5th Lincolnshires, and therefore, while the diary allows us to describe what his battalion was experiencing, we must resist the temptation to assume that he was necessarily present at every action or movement it records.

In telling Thomas’s story I must base it on what the evidence tells me, rather than upon what I might wish to imagine.

By November, however, the battalion was moving towards the battlefield that would soon become inseparable from Thomas’s story:

Cambrai.

‘Battalion proceeded by march route to WANQUETIN, where the Battalion was accommodated in huts at K 32 e. 9.5. 9 men fell out, but 6 of these rejoined their respective Coys., the remaining 3 being brought along by horse ambulance. Weather was fine.’

2/5 Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment War Diary: 17 November, 1917

THE BATTLE OF CAMBRAI began on 20 November 1917, marking the opening of an offensive unlike any that had gone before it.

For the first time on such a scale, hundreds of tanks were employed in an attempt to break through the German defences, and for a brief moment it seemed that the long stalemate of trench warfare might finally have been broken. The breakthrough, however, could not be sustained.

The German Army recovered, the advance faltered, and what had begun with such promise became another hard-fought struggle for possession of villages, woods and defensive positions.

As the battle developed, the 2/5th Lincolnshires were drawn into the fighting, and places such as Bourlon Wood and Flesquières became part of the landscape through which the battalion moved.

The surviving diary records their movements and operations as they entered this increasingly dangerous sector, its pages revealing the gradual transformation from preparation and movement into the intense fighting that characterised the closing stages of the battle and carried on into December.

Place: TRESCAULT
Date: 28/11/17
Hour: 1.45 p.m.

Bn. proceeded by march route to FLESQUIÈRES. The Battalion was accommodated in the HINDENBURG Support Line S.W. of FLESQUIÈRES, Bn. H.Q. being established in a dugout at K.15b.15.50.

Enemy artillery fired about 12 rounds round about Bn. H.Q. No casualties were sustained.

2/5th Battalion War Diary

For Thomas, the distance between the halesome life he had known in the fields of Lincolnshire and the battlefield of Cambrai was now measured in days.

His short journey from farm labourer to soldier was nearing its end.

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‘You were scared all the time. You couldn’t deal with the fear. It was there and always would be. I know the first time I went up the line, we were scared; we were all scared. I would get a butterfly in my stomach and my hands would shake, so for a moment or two I would have a job to coordinate my nerves to do anything. We lived hour by hour; we never knew the future. You saw the sun rise, hopefully you’d see it set. If you saw it set, you hoped you’d see it rise. Some men would, some wouldn’t.’

Private Harry Patch, 7th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry

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BY THE BEGINNING of December, the British position around Bourlon had become increasingly difficult to sustain.

The ground had already been fought over, the weather was deteriorating, and German artillery remained active. The exposed salient around Bourlon Wood had therefore become a dangerous position in which to remain.

The 2/5th Lincolnshires were among the units drawn into the fighting, occupying positions from which they would subsequently withdraw towards Flesquières.

For the men themselves, there was little of the poetic idealism that might later become attached to the name of a great battle. Their world was one of trenches and mud, cold and shellfire. It was one of orders, exhaustion and human suffering.

And with it was the knowledge that beyond the parapet an enemy was waiting to kill them.

On 4 December, the British began their carefully organised withdrawal from the Bourlon position. The battalion retired progressively, while covering parties remained behind to conceal the movement from the Germans, and the men made their way towards new positions around Flesquières.

Ahead of them lay the less dramatic but equally dangerous task of establishing a new defensive line.

The following day was spent digging and strengthening those positions under continued German shellfire, and the diary records casualties as the work proceeded. Yet the work continued.

For Thomas, there was an almost cruel familiarity in it. His life in Lincolnshire had been shaped by the physical labour on the land, first as a boy and then as a young horseman.

Now, far from the fields of home, he was once again working the earth — but this time he was not cultivating it. He was digging into it for protection, for the land around Flesquières had become his battlefield.

6 December 1917 — Flesquières

BY THE MORNING of 6 December, the new position at Flesquières was still hastily being prepared.

The battalion had been working on its new front line trench, a narrow and rudimentary defence running forward from the existing position. All the while, German artillery and machine-gun fire continued to harass the men at their work.

Even as the men dug, they were conscious that the Germans were doing the same beyond their lines, and arrangements were made to use artillery and machine-gun fire to hinder enemy sappers and prevent them approaching their own newly constructed position.

This situation changed at about three o’clock in the afternoon, when the battalion’s outpost line fell back towards the main front line as an enemy attack developed.

The main weight of the assault fell upon the men of the Leicestershire Regiment on the Lincolnshires’ right. Whilst the Germans did not reach the Lincolnshires’ own trenches, the men were nevertheless able to bring their fire to bear upon those advancing against their neighbouring battalion.

German shelling remained heavy, and perhaps significantly, the diary records that the Lincolnshires suffered around twenty casualties during the fighting. For the men of the 2/5th Battalion, the day had been one of digging, shelling, movement and fighting. And the work of strengthening the newly occupied position would continue into the night.

The battalion’s story, recorded in the diary, carried on into the days and weeks that followed. Thomas’s did not. For him, that day — 6th December, 1917 — was the end of his journey.

We cannot determine Thomas’s activities at any particular moment. Although surprisingly detailed, a war diary reflects actions of a battalion, rather than individual soldiers.

The diary, therefore, cannot tell us precisely how he met his death — but it does place his final day within a landscape of artillery fire, collapsing outposts, enemy attacks and hurriedly constructed trenches, bringing us as close as the surviving evidence allows to the circumstances surrounding his last hours.

WHEN THE MILITARY records are put aside, what remains most striking about Thomas is how ordinary his life had been.

The census does not describe a future hero or a public figure. It records a young man earning his living among horses and farmland, beginning the adult life that should have stretched ahead of him.

We cannot know what that life might have contained—whether he would have married, raised a family, remained in agriculture or followed some other path. Those possibilities disappeared within chaos and carnage on 6 December, 1917.

More than a century later, the military record may reduce him to a number within a battalion. But the evidence gathered here allows us to look beyond those bare details and recover something of the young man who stood behind them.

Thomas Wand was twenty-three years old. He had been born into the agricultural community of Dunsby and had grown up among the fields and horses of Lincolnshire.

He left that world as a young man and found himself in another landscape, where the fields around Flesquières had been transformed by war. There, on 6 December 1917, his journey ended.

Thomas’s body was recovered, and unlike so many of those who fell during the Great War, he was not lost among the missing. Instead, he lies today at the Orival Wood Cemetery at Flesquières, far from Dunsby and the farms of his childhood.

His grave gives us what so many of his generation were denied: a place where he can be found, with a name that can still be remembered.

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