Journey’s End closes with the Company under attack by the Germans. This video tells the story of what happened to the real Journey’s End Battalion – RC Sherriff’s own 9th East Surreys – when the Kaiser’s Battle began on 21 March 1918.
Here’s a short video about the real characters behind RC Sherriff’s classic play:
Captain Archibald Henry Douglass – known to his fellow officers in the 9th East Surreys as ‘Father’ – died of wounds on 8 April 1918.
He was born in Brentford towards the end of 1887, to the Reverend Henry Douglass and his wife Clara. He had four older sisters and a brother, Percy, some thirteen years older, who also fought in the war, in the RAMC in India, attaining the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
Census records show Douglass in Preston in 1911, living in a boarding house, working in an electrical manufacturers, and training as an ‘electrical engineering pupil’. He enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment in December 1914, and was commissioned into the East Surrey Regiment in July 1915, arriving in France on 5 June 1916 – just in time for the 9th East Surreys to take part in the Battle of the Somme, where it suffered heavy losses.
Officers of the 9th East Surreys, March 1917. Including 2nd Lt Sherriff (middle row, standing, centre) and 2nd Lt Douglass (third row, standing, extreme left). By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: ESR/25/Clark/7)
Douglass came through the Somme unscathed, and so was on hand in September of that year to impress a young 2nd Lieutenant fresh out from England – R C Sherriff – who later recalled the first time he met ‘Father’:
‘…sadly sitting in our shed drying a sock over the candle…Father was one of the most lovable men I have ever known: to use an exceedingly ungrammatical expression he was the best type of typical Englishman: he hated any form of affectation and he hated vulgarity. A man of few words he would sit for an hour or more at a mess table without saying a word, smoking cigarettes that dangled from his upper lip – leaning forward and fiddling with his fingers under the table. He was also the coolest man I ever saw in the trenches where nothing ever seemed to make the slightest impression on him.” (From: Memories of Active Service, Vol 1, p69. Copyright Surrey History Centre, Ref: 2332/3/9/3/2)
That first meeting would later be immortalised in the opening scene of Journey’s End, where Captain Hardy is initially glimpsed drying his sock over a guttering candle flame.
The officers of ‘C’ Company, 9th East Surreys. Front row, left: 2nd Lt Douglass. Back row, second left, 2nd Lt Sherriff. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: SHC 2332/6/4/2/3)
His nickname lends support to the view that Sherriff had ‘Father’ in mind as a possible model for the character of ‘Uncle’ in Journey’s End, but there are other plausible models, including Percy High (a schoolteacher some ten years older than Douglass), and David Hatten (the ‘wise old Hatten’ as he was sometimes called). But besides the image of Hardy hunched over his candle, there is another moment in Journey’s End which is undoubtedly attributable to ‘Father’. Sherriff’s account, in Memories of Active Service, of his first proper week in the front line includes the following exchange of dialogue:
‘”It was a perfectly bloody time”, Douglass replied to Hilton [the Company Commander] – “The Minnie’s came down two at a time – you couldn’t watch both; and when the Minnies didn’t come – aerial darts and rifle grenades did – ugh! it was rotten” – He glanced around the table and said – now in the voice of a really annoyed man – “Pat, you’re Mess president – why the Hell isn’t there any pepper! Must have pepper.”‘ (Vol 1, p212)
Anyone familiar with Journey’s End will recognise the dialogue in an instant:
When Sherriff first came to know him, Douglass was a 2nd Lieutenant, but over the following eighteen months he was promoted to Captain, and by March 1918 was the Battalion Adjutant. He had successfully come through the Battalion’s engagements in Messines in June 1917, and Ypres in August of that year (when Sherriff was wounded home). But on 16 March 1918 – just five days before the Battalion would begin its rearguard action against the attacking Germans in the Kaiser’s Battle – Douglass was wounded by a bomb fragment, being hit in the cheek, leg and thigh. Whether this was accidental, or the result of enemy activity (the East Surreys were in the front line on that date) is unclear. According to Michael Lucas, he is reported at Rouen Hospital on 22 March, and was shortly thereafter returned to England. There are almost no details in his War Office file at The National Archives, and the telegram reporting his final demise, on 8 April, notes that he died, at the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in Berkeley Square, of meningitis following a gunshot wound to the head.
‘Father’ is buried in Hanwell Cemetery in London, and his grave is listed in the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But his most fitting memorial will always be found in the pages of Journey’s End.
Having been wounded on 2 August, Sheriff was now in hospital in France. He had dictated one letter to his mother and now wrote briefly home to Pips, noting that he was writing with his left-hand, which is why the writing was shaky. At the point of writing he still did not know whether the wound would be sufficient to see him shipped back to England, but, after a night at the 14 General Hospital at Wimereux near Boulogne, he sailed for Dover on 4 August aboard the Hospital Ship St Denis.
From there it was on to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley in Hampshire, where he stayed for two weeks, writing to his mother and father while he was there, but also – very happily from his point of view – being visited by them as well. He fully realised how lucky he had been to have got home (‘considering the comparative slightness of my wounds’ – according to a letter to Pips on 5 August). Ten days later, he noted that only his finger remained damaged, and ‘that will soon be better’ (letter to PIps, 15 August.)
However, by then there there was a new problem: his neuralgia had flared up again. The reoccurrence of the neuralgia may well have been psychosomatic. He knew his wounds were relatively superficial, and expected to be out of hospital relatively soon. On 18 August he wrote to Pips that:
‘As my wounds are now practically better there is nothing for me to stop here for except my neuralgia which will probably be cured by the application of some syringe to my ears. However, I shall not of course hesitate to report any trouble I have with my head, for I think 10 1/2 months is quite a sufficient spell out there and that I am due at least a couple of months off in England – and the kind of neuralgia I had several times in France was enough to knock me up – I have not had it as bad as I did in April this year but it is always hanging about.’
Even as he was clutching at that straw, however, a Medical Board had decided that he was fit for service again. He was granted 3 weeks leave, after which he was to report to the East Surrey’s Grand Shaft barracks at Dover,and, after three weeks Home Service there, he would go back out to France again.
A week into his leave, however, he again reported sick. This time he had boils – which had broken out on his neck when he left hospital, and then formed more widely in places where he had splinter wounds – and he was checked in to St Thomas’s Hospital in London. The treatment took long enough that he had to write to the battalion notifying them that he would not be returning as planned, and requesting an extension of his sick leave. The cause of the boils is unknown, but, while infection may have played a part, so might the stress of knowing that he was just a few weeks away from returning to the din of the trenches.
On 9 November he joined the 3rd East Surreys in Dover. Throughout the course of 1918 a succession of Medical Boards ruled him unfit for overseas service, and he never did go back to France – at least, not until May 1921 when he took his Battlefield Cycling Tour with his father.
According to Pips’ account of their journey, they visited all of the places where Sherriff had spent time in the front lines: Ersatz Crater and the front line at Vimy Ridge; the craters of Hulluch, where he worked with the tunnelling corps; Cité Calonne, with its basement dugouts, where they had enjoyed some merry evenings; Bully Grenay, where he had his photo taken with his fellow officers; Hooge, where they had spent hot days marching in the sun; and, finally, to the battlefields around Ypres, where Sherriff’s father recorded his son’s wounding in unemotional fashion:
‘It was in this battle – about the 1st or 2nd day – that my eldest son, Captain R C Sherriff of the 3rd East Surreys was wounded and sent home to England where he remained until the end of the war.’
In 1930, Sherriff began writing a sequel to Journey’s End, which took up where the play had left off. The first scene shows the men of the Company under heavy pressure from the Germans. Stanhope mounts a suicidal attack, which leaves the Company destroyed and Stanhope and Trotter in than hands of the Germans. ‘Well,’ says Trotter, ‘this is where we say goodbye to the Very lights. Goodbye to the war.’ Sheriff may have felt a similar emotion as he climbed the gangplank of the St Denis on 5 August 1917.
On 1 August the battalion had finally moved forward from its tent encampment at Dickebusch to the Old French Trench, 2 miles south west of Ypres, preparatory to moving up to relieve one of the units which had been engaged in the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, which had begun with an intense artillery barrage prior to an assault on 31 July.
Many years later (1968), writing in a volume of essays (Promise of Greatness: The 1914-18 War), Sherriff described the barrage:
‘We were surrounded by batteries of artillery, and for three nights it was bedlam…There was something grand and awe-inspiring in the tremendous cannonade of guns. If you stood out there at night, you would see the whole surrounding country lit with thousands of red stabs of flame as salvo after salvo went screaming overhead.’
While the guns may have raised the spirits, the weather and the conditions in camp did quite the opposite, for by the time Sherriff’s battalion was called upon, it had been raining incessantly for three days and nights, and the conditions in which the men were living were unspeakable:
‘The cookhouse was flooded, and most of the food was uneatable. There was nothing but sodden biscuits and cold stew. The cooks tried to supply bacon for breakfast, but the men complained that it “smelled like dead men”. The latrines consisted of buckets with wet planks for the men to sit on but there weren’t enough of them. Something had given the men diarrhoea. They would grope out of their shelters, flounder helplessly in the mud and relieve themselves anywhere. Some of the older men, worn out by the long marching and wretched food, were sick. They would come groping out of their shelters, lean their heads against the corrugated iron walls, and stand there retching and vomiting and groaning. Then they would go back to their huts…These were the men who were to break through the German lines, advance into Belgium and win the war.’
The battalion moved forward from Old French Trench at 5:00pm on 2 August, to take over the brigade battle front from the North Staffs (who held the northern half) and the Queens Royal West Surreys (who held the southern half). ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies took over the front line, with ‘A’ Company in support and ‘B’ Company in reserve. The battalion diary recorded the difficulties the relieving troops faced:
‘Heavy rain had been falling for three days, no communication trench could be used, for they were more than waist deep in water and liquid mud. Consequently all movement had to take place overland and the dark night and obstacles in the way made progress slow. In addition, on arrival at the support line, and, further, on the way to the front line, ‘C’ Company got caught in a heavy rain of shelling from the enemy, suffering something like 20 casualties in killed and wounded.’
Sherriff was one of the wounded.
In his 1968 article Sherriff wrote of the circumstances surrounding his wounding, suggesting that the battalion had been involved in an ‘over-the-top’ style of attack which had begun at dawn, and that he had been wounded in the afternoon, when attempting to make contact with a neighbouring company. But his account is quite at odds with the battalion diary, which must be seen as much the more reliable source. Being written more than fifty years after the event, it is not surprising that some of the details would be incorrect, but there is no question of the veracity of his general account of the miserable conditions in the days leading up to his wounding nor of the fearsome barrage which proceeded his move towards the front lines, both of which are corroborated by the diary and other sources. Similarly, his account of the shell that caused his wounding seems authentic, as does his description of what happened immediately afterwards:
‘It was a soldier’s legend that you never heard the shell coming that was going to hit you, but I know from first-hand experience that you did. We heard the report of it being fired, and we heard the thin whistle of its approach, rising to a shriek. It landed on top of a concrete pillbox that we were passing, barely five yards away. A few yards farther and it would have been the end of us. The crash was deafening. My runner let out a yell of pain. I didn’t yell so far as I know because I was half-stunned. I remember putting my hand to the right side of my face and feeling nothing; to my horror I thought that the whole side of my face had been blown away. Afterward, with time to think about it in hospital, I pieced the thing together. The light shell, hitting the solid concrete top of the pillbox had sent its splinters upward, mercifully above our heads; but it had sent a ferocious spattering of pulverised concrete in all directions, and that was what we got.’
Sherriff and his runner ‘began the long trek back, floundering through the mud, through the stench and black smoke of the ‘coalboxes’ [shells from 5.9 inch howitzers] that were still coming over’. They made their way back to a dressing station, and then, after a brief examination by a doctor, they carried on to a field hospital. Sherriff reckoned they had walked for 6 hours, over 5 miles, to arrive at the hospital, where, ‘with the aid of probes and tweezers, a doctor took fifty-two pieces of concrete out of me, all about the size of beans or peas. …He wrapped them in a piece of lint and gave them to me as a souvenir.’
The same night (or, most likely, the next day, despite the dating of the letter) he wrote home to his mother (or, more precisely, had an orderly write the letter to his dictation – the handwriting is clearly not Sherriff’s), to let her know that:
‘I was wounded this morning in the right hand and the right side of the face. Nothing at all serious, dear, don’t worry. I walked down all right…rest content that I am quite well and there is a chance of getting home.’
He promised he would write her another letter, unless his wound happened to be a ‘Blighty’.
[Next letter: 3 August]
Sheriff wrote home to Pips:
‘As we are waiting for orders to move which may be through any moment, I am just writing you a short line in case we find a difficulty in writing during the next few days’.
He had just received a long letter from his father which discussed the progress he had made with Laws’ History [the book Sheriff had previously requested]. He had reached the Volume on Charles II, and Sherriff reckoned ‘it must be a very interesting book.’ His father had also written of the quiet country cycle rides he had been enjoying, and Sherriff trusted that it would not be long before he was able to go home and join him:
‘Things are going fast and furious here now, and we can never tell what is going to happen next – all I can hope is that I shall be one of the fortunate ones to come through safely and one can do nothing more than that – and to fall back on philosophy to save ones mind’.
He hoped that he would be able to write ‘occasional lines’ to Pips in the coming days, but knew that his father would be patient, ‘for you know what difficulties there are in writing’.
[Next letter: 2 August]
Sheriff began a brief letter to his mother:
‘As we shall probably be going up into the line today I am taking the opportunity of writing a short line in case I do not have an opportunity for a day or so. We have had several days here now so had to expect to move and although we have no definite orders they will come through soon, I expect – I cannot tell at all what we are in for and simply trust and pray that I shall be lucky and come through safely – for as you say – some have got to come through safely and I hope I shall one among them.’
He went on to tell her that he had received the ring she had sent – it was ‘very nice indeed’, and he told her that he looked upon it as a gift from her, even although she was not paying for it. He did not feel he could wear two rings, so he would continue to wear the old one in the line, ‘because it has been through everything with me up till now’.
He had to keep the letters short, because he had to pack his gear, but he promised that he would write to her from the line whenever possible, but told her not to be surprised if she did not hear form hi for a while.
[Next letter: 31 July]
The rain had started…
‘I am sitting in our tent with the rain coming down in torrents outside – during breakfast (all meals are held out of doors in fine weather) it started to come down and we quickly moved inside to finish – it reminds me of camping to hear the rain pattering down on the canvas and natural thunder is mingling with gun thunder just at present’.
They were still in the camp at Dickebusch, from where, the previous evening, he had again strolled into town with a friend, to do some shopping and have dinner (‘a pleasant relaxation from camp life’). They were ready to move if necessary, and he promised Pips, as he had many times in the past, that he would endeavour to send a letter home whenever he could. But he knew there might be tough times ahead:
‘it is quite a matter of luck even how a regiment fares as a whole – we may be lucky and in a few days be out resting with very little further trouble – or it may be the reverse, it is of little use worrying and hoping, it is of little use worrying and hoping’.
As ever, he was resolved to leave everything to fate, and not try to ‘frustrate’ it by doing anything which he had been told not to, nor by doing anything which was very obviously not the right thing to do. ‘The best thing,’ he had decided, ‘is to continue as one is advised, either by superior officers or by instinct’. He apologised that he could tell his father nothing of ‘Military Interest’, except to note that everyone was ‘as usuall “fed up” but at the same time cheerful to a certain extent – the speculation is “How long?” “Another Winter?”‘
He asked Pips to try to get hold of a pocket edition of ‘Laws History’ [most likely Edward Laws’ History of Little England Beyond Wales, published in 1888], for he was determined, ‘if I once again find myself safe at home’, to return to his favourite pursuits, and principal among those would be ‘the study of History and Antiquities’. His overall objective was to buy a small farm, and, supplemented by writing and teaching, to free himself from ‘the dependency of the office’ (although he was quite clear that he would return to the office after the war, for as long as it took him to be financially secure).
He thanked Pips for the long letter he had received from him, in which he had noted that he had been gardening on an evening recently which had been just like the one when Sherriff had returned home from leave. ‘How much would not I give for that 10 days over again,’ he sighed in reply, ‘I have dwelled on it so much since – lived it again and again…and come to the conclusion that it could not be improved’.
[Next letter: 30 July]
Sherriff, still in the tent encampment at Dickebusch, began his letter to his father by apologising for not having written much recently. He had been out of the line for three days now, but had spent much of the time trying to catch up on sleep:
‘One gets a certain amount of sleep in the line but it is disturbed and one of the greatest joys on coming out is to lie down and have an undisturbed sleep for several hours which is quite delightful’.
Their previous spell in the line had been ‘short but not sweet’, and they had been glad to get out for a few days rest. He knew they would be in again soon, but he was resolved to ‘bear it as patiently as possible’, and trust that he would be one of the lucky ones to come through it unharmed. Surely, he felt, the war could not last many more months – and ‘if only the Russians would pull themselves together I am sure things would end early’.
Pips had obviously just written a letter informing him of the air-raids that had been taking place [with daylight raids now mounted by Gotha bombers], but Sherriff was unimpressed at the suffering of his fellow Londoners:
‘You say in your letter you are now having to bear the hardships of war on account of the aeroplane raids – if only I could have those in exchange for these! What would the Londoners think if there was a fleet of aeroplanes dropping bombs day in and day out – all night too – not a moment when something does not drop somewhere. What would I not give for an occasional day with no firing at all as you get in London – if only some of the Londoners could have a day over here and then be put back into London I am sure they would not worry over an occasional bombing – specially when they have cellars to run into anywhere (which we don’t always have, and even if we have must not always use if on duty) – I am afraid you do not appreciate your happy lot sufficiently.’
Having got that off his chest he reported that he had been experiencing a ‘touch of biliousness’ of late, which he put down to the effects of recently inhaling some gas (‘very slightly though’). And it clearly hadn’t stopped him going into town the previous day, where he had enjoyed a walk around, as well as lunch and dinner (‘it is such a change to get away like that’).
Just as he was closing up his letter to Pips the Corporal was coming round to pick up the mail, so his mother had to settle for a very brief letter that was little more than an assurance that he was well, and a promise of a longer letter in the near future.
[Next letter: 29 July]
Sherriff and his Battalion were now back in reserve, in a tent encampment near Dickebusch, a mile or so behind the lines. They had moved back there the day before after spending a couple of days in the support trenches following their departure from the front line. He was enjoying the rest, as he told his mother:
‘We are still out of the line but of course may go in at any time now. Meanwhile we are having a fairly good rest out here – it is pleasant, after all, to be anywhere so long as it is a fair way from the front line.’
If he received permission, he intended to take a trip into a nearby town that afternoon, to get away from the camp, and to do some shopping.
Scottish Wood, where C & D companies had been in support trenches two days earlier. From Herbert Sherriff’s account of their Battlefield Tour in 1921. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 2332/9/7)
‘Things go on just as they did before I came home, ‘ he noted, rather wearily – but at least he had the happy memory of his 10-day break at home. He hoped that, if the war carried on into the winter, he might be scheduled for his next leave around Christmas time (‘that is, if the leave keeps on’).He often thought of the time he spent at home on leave, and had come to the conclusion that he could not have spent it any better: ‘I think there was nothing that could have improved our holiday and I am so thankful nothing occurred to mar it, such as a lot of wet weather or anything like that.’
And with that he told her that he had to go. He apologised for choosing to spend his time going out on walks, rather than writing her long letters – ‘but you cannot realise the pleasure of going for a quiet walk into a town with [Percy] High or another friend and having a quiet dinner and an hour’s rest’. But he promised to write later if they were still staying in the camp.
[Next letters: 27 July]