The Story of Archie Winn, a Young Man from Grimsby

---

---

SOME LIVES survive in letters and photographs, diaries and memories—whilst others have been reduced, over the passing of a century, to a mere handful of official documents.

There may be a census return. A military service number. A medal roll. A war gratuity payment recorded in an Army ledger. And, eventually, a name carved into white Portland Stone.

One such name is that of Archibald Leonard Winn.

Yet those few fragments are enough to recover something of the young man who stood behind them. Archibald Winn was my wife’s Great Uncle, and this is his story.

BORN IN GRIMSBY in the spring of 1898, Archibald grew up in a working-class family in a town whose fortunes were tied to the sea. His father, Edward Winn, was a fish buyer, part of the commercial world that surrounded the great fishing port.

Archibald’s childhood will undoubtably have been spent among the streets, docks and yards of a town whose daily rhythm was governed by the arrival and departure of fishing vessels.

The 1901 Census finds him as a small child within his family. Ten years later, the 1911 Census gives us a little more of the circumstances in which he was growing up.

By then Archibald was thirteen and a scholar, living with his father and siblings in Grimsby’s Convamore Road. The census also contains a revealing note added by Edward Winn concerning the family’s complicated history.

It appears that Edward had been married twice and Archibald’s 19 year-old sister, Besyow, was the child of his first wife. Another son, Rex Samuel Winn, aged 20, had already emigrated to Canada.

This brief chicken-scratch explanation on a census form reminds us that the Winn family, like so many of the period, was not static. Children grew up and left home. Some crossed the Atlantic in search of a brighter future. Others remained close to home.

Families had been shaped by marriage, death, work and migration long before the war added its own, far more devastating, form of separation.

ARCHIBALD WAS SIXTEEN in August 1914, when Britain entered what was to become the First World War.

For a boy of that age, the war must initially have seemed the domain of other, older people: neighbours, dockers, fishermen, and the ever increasing number of young men seen in uniform on the streets of Grimsby.

When the first rush of volunteers gathered momentum during the late summer and autumn of 1914, Archibald was not yet old enough to take part. For his father, who was no doubt aware of the growing casualty lists appearing daily in the newspapers, this must have come as a relief.

The war, however, did not end as quickly as many had expected.

By the time Archibald came of military age, the nature of the conflict had changed. The armies that had marched away in 1914 had been worn down by years of fighting. The Somme had left its terrible legacy in 1916, and the Western Front was now a vast machinery of attrition in which the dead and the maimed had to be replaced by a new generation of young men.

We have no knowledge of Archibald’s enlistment, nor his training, only that he served as Private 28416 in the 7th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment, a battalion that was part of the British army’s 17th (Northern) Division.

The 7th battalion had already acquired considerable experience of the Western Front by the time Archibald joined its ranks. Many of the men who had once marched together as Lord Kitchener’s eager young volunteers were already among the dead or wounded, and the battalion was now sustained by successive drafts of replacements.

The surviving battalion war diary provides a remarkable record of the months in which his military life reached its sad conclusion.

The diary’s purpose was a practical one: to record movements, orders, positions, operations and casualties. Yet behind its terse and stony military language lies the physical reality experienced by the men themselves.

The diary records where the battalion went. History allows us to understand something of what awaited them there.

By September 1917 the 7th Lincolnshires were moving towards the Ypres Salient. To understand the significance of this we must first understand what exactly is meant by a ‘salient’.

A SALIENT IS a part of the front line that projects into enemy-held territory, rather like a peninsula jutting out into the surrounding sea.

In military terms, it creates a position from which troops can attack in several directions, but it also leaves them exposed to enemy fire from the sides. During the First World War, the Ypres Salient was the area around the Belgian city of Ypres where Allied lines bulged into German-held territory.

The position was strategically important, but notoriously difficult to defend, and the men holding it were subjected to artillery fire from three sides. By 1917, the landscape within the salient had been devastated by years of fighting, forming the terrible setting for the Passchendaele campaign.

THE GREAT OFFENSIVE that had begun during the summer had become increasingly difficult.

The countryside around Ypres had been subjected to an extraordinary bombardment, while weeks of rain had begun to transform the battlefield. The drainage systems of the low-lying Belgian landscape had been destroyed by artillery, and the ground could no longer absorb the water.

The battlefield was becoming a swamp.

During September the battalion moved through the familiar cycle of front-line duty, support positions, billets and training. Meanwhile, preparations were being made for another attack, and men and munitions were gradually mobilised towards the ground where the next stage of the offensive would take place.

By October the landscape around them bore little resemblance to the countryside that had once existed there.

On the night of 10/11 October, 1917, the 7th Lincolnshires moved into the front line astride the Ypres–Staden railway, just south of the Poelcapelle road. Battalion Headquarters was established at Pascal Farm.

There was little in that area that could properly be called a trench. Instead, the battalion’s position consisted principally of little more than ‘improved shell holes’.

Trench systems that had once provided some degree of shelter had been battered almost beyond recognition. Men occupied shell craters in a landscape where mud and water filled the spaces between shattered remnants of the old earthworks.

Here, throughout Thursday, 11 October, the German artillery remained extremely active. And it was here, in that devasted landscape that Archibald spent his final full day alive.

We cannot say exactly where he was at that time, nor do we know the role he played. But he was here, and we can place the battalion around him and follow, too, the orders that would determine where he went during the ensuing hours.

DURING THE NIGHT of 11/12 October, the two companies of the Lincolnshires that were north of the railway were relieved by the 8th South Staffordshire Regiment. The Lincolnshires assembled for the coming attack along a line running from south of the railway towards the road junction below Tranquille House.

The attack had been carefully planned.

C Company, commanded by 2nd Lieutenant Wotherspoon, would form the right of the assault. B Company, under 2nd Lieutenant Tilbury, would be on the left. The remaining companies would follow in support.

Their first objective lay around Taube Farm. The second was Turenne Crossing. During the eve of the attack, Major Peddie and Captain J. King marked out the jumping-off lines. The men waited.

At 5.25 on the morning of Friday, 12 October, the allied artillery barrage began.

The ensuing attack was part of the operation that became known as the First Battle of Passchendaele. The 7th Lincolnshires advanced alongside the 10th Sherwood Foresters and the 8th South Staffordshires, moving along the southern embankment of the Ypres–Staden railway towards Turenne Crossing.

For Archibald and his comrades, the attack began shortly after first light.

There would have been no clear, open ground across which to advance. Instead, the men had to pick their way through a landscape broken beyond recognition, where shell holes filled with water lay between ridges of churned mud and shattered earth.

Duckboards and fragments of timber offered only uncertain footing, while the barrage moved ahead of them and the men struggled to keep their formation across ground that seemed to resist every step.

Progress was slow, exhausting and dangerous; a misstep could mean slipping into a crater, losing contact with the men around you, or exposing yourself to enemy fire.

Yet, despite this, the first part of the operation went well.

At approximately 6.50 a.m., the first objective was reported captured. The battalion had reached the ground around Taube Farm. Then came an unexpected discovery.

Major Peddie moved Battalion Headquarters forward towards the farm, only to find that it had not been completely cleared. A party of German soldiers was still sheltering there—around one hundred men and nine officers.

Peddie, Captain King and two orderlies accepted their surrender. A German machine gun and trench mortar were also captured, and a further group of prisoners taken from another position.

The Lincolnshires continued towards their second objective.

By around 8.00 a.m., the second objective at Turenne Crossing was reported captured.

The immediate operation had therefore succeeded. That is worth remembering, because the larger, mainly disparaging story of Passchendaele has sometimes obscured the successful actions of individual battalions.

The offensive as a whole would become synonymous with mud, suffering and disappointment, but on this particular morning the 7th Lincolnshires had advanced, captured their objectives and held the ground they had been ordered to take.

And somewhere within that advance was Archibald Leonard Winn.

We cannot say exactly when he was killed. The date recorded against his name is 12th October 1917, and the battalion’s casualty figures show the scale of what happened that day. Twenty-eight other ranks were killed, one officer died of wounds, and approximately 170 other ranks were wounded. Forty-three more were reported missing.

Archibald’s death therefore belongs not to some indistinct period during the long Passchendaele campaign, but to a specific military operation on a particular Friday morning.

He was with the 7th Lincolnshires as they assembled before dawn. He went forward with them when the barrage began, crossing treacherous, open ground toward their objectives. And it was at some point during those operations that he fell.

His body was never recovered for burial in a known grave. This is hardly surprising.

The battlefield on which he died was not a place where the dead could easily be found. Shellfire continued to tear apart the ground. Men disappeared into shell holes and flooded craters. Bodies could be buried, uncovered, buried again or simply lost beneath the mud.

When the battlefield was eventually searched after the war, many men could not be identified. Archibald was one of them.

The fighting did not end with his death, of course. For him, the operation was over. For his family, the torment of grief was just beginning.

The ensuing official machinery of death was slow and dispassionate.

There were records to complete, effects to settle, medals to issue and, eventually, the formal confirmation of his death. His surviving documents reduce the final accounting of his life to numbers and entries in ledgers.

For Archibald’s family, there was no small patch of Belgian earth beneath which they could imagine him resting. There was only his name, surrounded by thousands of others whose bodies had also disappeared during the fighting in the Ypres Salient.

He is remembered at the Tyne Cot memorial, which stands among the fields of Passchendaele, commemorating almost 35,000 servicemen who have no known grave. Their names are etched in stone.

It cannot tell us where Archibald lies, only that he was there.

And now, more than a century later, when we look beyond the name on the memorial and trace his life through the surviving records, the anonymous soldier begins to become a young man again.

His future may have been lost in a foreign field.

His name was not.

---