The First VCs E-Book

Mark Ryan

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 408

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What would you do if you were struck by an enemy bullet in wartime, then realised you were still alive? For most of us, that would be the end of our fight. If we were capable of thought while we tried to cope with the pain, we'd probably hope to be rushed to hospital so that someone could save our lives. But a hundred years ago, in the opening battle of the First World War at Mons, two young men didn't react like that. Lieutenant Maurice Dease and Private Sidney Godley, born only weeks apart into sharply contrasting worlds, shared the same defiance and steely streak. Without a thought for themselves, they went back into the action for more, sustaining dreadful wounds in the process. One man died, the other lived – pieced back together painstakingly by the Germans, who had taken many casualties of their own while overrunning the British position. Together, and against the odds, Dease and Godley became the first winners of the Victoria Cross in the First World War. Here Mark Ryan uses contemporary documentation and images to tell their astounding, fascinating stories, putting the focus on two genuine and ordinary heroes of the Great War.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Privilege and Pain

2 Birdman, Ironman, Army

3 Beyond Control

4 Mollie and the Horses

5 The Road to Mons

6 Intelligence

7 Nimy Bridge

8 Maurice James Dease, VC

9 Sidney Frank Godley, VC

10 Aftermath

11 Not Knowing

12 Wounds, Death and Decorations

13 The Heavy Price of Glory

14 Survivor

15 A Hero’s Wedding

16 Gunner Godley and Old Bill

17 Remembering … and Learning Nothing

18 Bombs, Dentists and the Final Battle

Postscript: The Centenary

Bibliography

Plate Section

Copyright

Acknowledgements

First, thanks must go to John Mulholland, who was going to write this book himself until his considerable energies had to be diverted elsewhere. Imagine my relief and joy when he very generously offered to hand over all his own research and writings on the subject, giving me a free run to pick and choose as I pleased, to use whatever I wanted from his collection.

John was the man who introduced Major Maurice French (Maurice Dease’s nephew) to Colin Godley at Westminster Hall in 2003. Like Maurice Dease, John attended Stonyhurst College, and has remained as moved as I am by the story of both men. He has been a rock throughout the process. Consider that he was writing his excellent biography of Bill Speakman, VC, Beyond the Legend while fielding all kinds of questions from me, and you get a measure of the man’s patience and intellectual capacity. I continued to pick John’s brains to the very end, and fulfilled my promise to let him view the first draft of the manuscript so that he could give his own feedback. This has proved invaluable, as I knew it would, since John isn’t afraid to go straight to the point when he sees something which can be improved or needs correcting. Thank you so much, John, you deserve all your success in life.

Next, I want to thank Colin Godley, who has been a great supporter of his grandfather Sidney’s memory for a good number of decades. Colin and his charming wife Linda invited me into their home in Stepney Green with a typical East End welcome, and were always helpful with their many insights. It is a testament to their determination to preserve Sidney’s memory that they have kept many documents and photographs in superb condition, ready to pass down to the next generation, so that they too can remember their relative with pride and affection. Colin even retrieved a precious BBC recording of his grandfather from 1954, so we could actually hear the great man speak of his ordeal. I was so lucky to be able to benefit from this direct Godley family collection and will always be grateful for their hospitality.

Meanwhile, Sidney Godley’s daughter, Eileen Slade, and her son, Andy, were also a sheer delight to interview. It was an emotional experience to hear Eileen speak of her father so proudly, and recall times between the wars that she still remembered so clearly. She can be very proud of herself that she spoke so movingly of Sidney and brought his final years to life so vividly. Accounts of life before, during and immediately after the Second World War are very precious; we should cherish them and collect them while we can.

The determination of Major Maurice French to preserve everything relating to the Dease story so perfectly was also deeply impressive. It made me feel so lucky to have such extensive source material to draw upon. Major French made me feel most welcome in his house right at the very start of the process, and it was a delight to pore over photograph albums and documents which remain in such fine condition after all these years. Major French helped me up to the moment when the manuscript was handed to the publisher, and again I will always remain grateful.

Having read through the book yourself, I hope you will agree that what the Godley and Dease families preserved for us, in terms of documentary material, was quite extraordinary. To put the best of these collections together in one book was surely worthwhile, and it is something that future generations can now cherish forever when they look back at the men who won the very first VCs of the First World War.

To all the authors who have previously written about Mons, I salute your superb research and excellent accounts; I hope I have acknowledged you all as I draw on some of your material. Distinguished historians and authors have all added to the picture down the years; it would be personally satisfying to me if future authors felt my material worthy of their attention in any small way, as they add their own contribution to this subject.

Thanks to The History Press editor, Jo De Vries, for the support she showed by commissioning the book.

Last but definitely not least, I would like to thank my son Luca, 9 years old at the time of writing, who didn’t see me as often as he should have done while I tried to get this story right. I hope you never have to experience war, my son, and I hope you never feel you have to do anything to put yourself in the firing line. Appreciate the value of peace among nations and find a way to contribute to that peace.

Mark Ryan

2014

Introduction: VC – and Human Being

The tears are streaming down his face, some of them seeping into his thick moustache. It is Easter 1939 and Sidney Frank Godley is standing in Saint Symphorien Military Cemetery, 3 miles south-east of Mons. Almost a quarter of a century has passed since horror swept through here and drove men to acts of desperate and extraordinary bravery and brutality. The Belgians are putting up a plaque to commemorate those moments. The man crying is Sidney to his family and Frank when he is with the other veterans, who are collectively known as ‘The Old Contemptibles’. Sidney has a softer side and he’s afraid to go to the dentist. Frank is the Victoria Cross winner who wasn’t scared to take on the German army alone. They are the same man, of course. Today he is honouring the fallen and he can’t stop the tears. Sidney Godley’s family are standing beside him. His daughter Eileen, son Stanley and wife Nellie try to understand what he is going through. They haven’t seen him like this before. Not in public. The emotion suppressed as a soldier on active service is coming through now, in peace time. And there is no shame in it. If Sidney Frank Godley doesn’t have the right to cry, no one does.

‘I should be there,’ he says, staring at a patch of ground next to the grave of a very special man. It is the final resting place of Lieutenant Maurice James Dease, whose younger sister Maud is also on this trip. Dease and Godley are forever linked by history, for Maurice also won the Victoria Cross, the highest military accolade for valour, on that fateful day. Godley was a private in the 4th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, part of a machine gun detachment commanded by Dease. On 23 August 1914, they made a defiant stand and kept hundreds of Germans at bay for as long as they could in the opening battle of the First World War.

Standing there in tears, Godley remembers the intensity of that battle, the men’s realisation that they had been targeted. What an awful feeling that must have been, knowing that the enemy were deliberately concentrating their fire on this single point, this one bridge, and the men defending it. Maurice Dease, the most popular officer in the regiment, crying out above the fizzing sound of flying metal, urging his team to keep their machine guns going at all costs. Each man fighting for his life, yet knowing all the time that, the more they fought, the more sure they were to die. They must all have come to that conclusion, sooner or later. Those machine guns had become a magnet for the shells and bullets of a relentless enemy, who had whipped up such a deadly storm of fire that there was little hope of escape. It wasn’t a question of whether you were going to be hit, it was when. Yet no man backed down. Not when they were led by an officer they all adored: Lieutenant Dease, a man who wouldn’t give in.

Maurice Dease, trying for all he was worth to ignore the thud of the bullets as they ripped into his flesh, willing himself to blank out the searing pain so he could continue to do his job. Loveable Maurice, who refused to leave his men as they died one by one around him, after battling so heroically against overwhelming odds. Conscientious Dease, who never let his men do anything that he wasn’t prepared to do himself – even die – ignoring the pleas of his commanding officer to have his wounds treated at a field hospital towards the rear. Back to the machine guns, they must never fall silent, so back Maurice went, time and again, until silence swamped everything.

‘I should be down there,’ repeats Godley, VC, still crying.

And, if Sidney hadn’t been a cross-country runner, a footballer and cricketer, an all-round sportsman of supreme fitness and a beneficiary of the most incredible good fortune, he would have been down there. For death was sure to come calling, he knew that much when he stepped forward as the last man alive who knew how to fire a machine gun, clearing the bodies of friends out of the way as he took over. All alone against the might of the German army; the few left alive retreating, Godley the man making it possible, yet painfully, scarily alone. What a sickening feeling, knowing he couldn’t hold them for much longer, firing until the last, realising he would be overrun, firing some more. When a shell skinned his back and a bullet entered his skull, Sidney knew death had arrived, yet it hadn’t taken him. Another man who wouldn’t give in; why wasn’t he dead?

‘I should be down there with him,’ says Godley again, staring at the spot where Dease lay.

As she pictures the scene in 2013, Eileen’s eyes are glistening too. It is almost 100 years after her father lived that day for the first time, the day which forever defined him. ‘He pointed to the ground next to Dease and kept saying he should be down there with him, and then he turned to me and he was absolutely in tears,’ she said. Eileen, 91 years old, is sitting in the corner of her front room in Clacton-on-Sea. The surprise and compassion are still visible in her strong features as she sees her father’s turmoil all over again. Even if Sidney had succeeded in blanking out the worst of those memories, any number of little things could have set him off when he returned to such an emotionally charged place.

‘The local children had put small bunches of daffodils on all the graves. They called them “Easter Lilies”, and it was beautiful,’ Eileen remembered. Her face lit up when she was reminded of the moment when two children had casually gone up to the front line to give her father something to eat and drink, just before the fighting started back in 1914. They had treated it like an adventure, almost like a picnic.

‘“The innocence of a child”. That’s what dad used to say: “The innocence of a child”. He loved that innocence and he was a wonderful dad. I think it was because he had such a hard time himself when he was small. Anyway, my dad remembered those two children at Mons. And, when we went back in 1939, he found those same two children, or they found him. They had grown up by then, of course. My dad hugged them so hard he almost squeezed them to death.’

Remembering what a fine and dashing man Maurice Dease was could only have added to the poignancy of the moment. Yet Dease was just as worried about what would happen to his beloved dog Dandy and the horses he also knew by name, when he went off to war. Like Godley, Dease had a soft side; but, as he showed at Mons, he could be extraordinarily tough and brave when it mattered. In fact, his courage is almost beyond our modern-day comprehension. If ever we found ourselves fighting a war and were struck by a bullet, wouldn’t most of us hope a medic could get us out of there quickly enough to save our lives? That’s not the way Dease or Godley reacted. They didn’t think of their own safety at all.

Due to that courage, Maurice didn’t live to have children or grandchildren, but his nephew – also named Maurice – has lovingly preserved his photographs and writings to keep his memory alive. Maud Dease, the hero’s sister, learned to live with her grief sufficiently well to have a family. So the memories and the documents, the letters and photographs were passed down through the generations. The mischievous sense of humour, the bubbly character that made Lieutenant Maurice Dease, VC, so special are still there for all to see: the love for life, for people, horses and dogs are all apparent. There are even photographs of Dandy the fox terrier, who had become unofficial battalion mascot long before the build-up to war. Warm-hearted – that was Irish-born Maurice; a fine human being who forced himself to defy pain and behave almost as a super-human might on that terrible day back in 1914, until the reality of his mortality finally held sway.

Sidney Frank Godley, VC, survived and on a couple of occasions even spoke to members of the media about what had happened. But interviews were such formal affairs, even in the 1950s, and you didn’t learn much about the real man and what made him tick. Luckily, he had children and grandchildren, who offer more depth with their insights and memories. Over the years, Sidney’s living body gave up clues to those descendants about what it had been through as Private Frank Godley. His grandson Colin Godley remembers running a child-sized hand softly over the top of his head one day. ‘I was just a little boy and I remember feeling this odd bump on the top of his head, like there was something hard in his skull that wasn’t his skull. I recall the strange sensation but then I thought no more of it.’

Eileen has a more visual memory from her own childhood. In 2013 she still chuckled at the thought. ‘I still remember my dad’s back and all these darker patches of skin in many places. I was a little child when I saw it for the first time and I thought to myself: “Why is dad’s skin dark here and light there? And why isn’t my skin like that?” Later on he explained a bit about it, though he never told me exactly where the skin came from, he just smiled.’

That patchwork skin points to another remarkable part of this story, one which invites us to ask ourselves rather a dark question. If you stumbled across a badly wounded enemy soldier, who had in all probability just cut down many of your friends in the prime of their lives, wouldn’t you be tempted to put him out of his misery? How far would you go to save his life, and then ensure future quality of life? Would you go so far as giving your enemy a series of intricate skin grafts, while millions were being slaughtered on both sides of the war?

The unusual generosity of the Germans certainly left Sidney’s daughter flummoxed when she was a small child. ‘I couldn’t understand how he came to have these brown patches on his back, when I didn’t have them on mine. Where dad had skin grafts, his back finished up brown. I can’t remember how many there were, but quite a few.’

Unfortunately, the Germans weren’t finished with causing wars, and they hadn’t finished causing personal pain to Sidney Godley, either. As he led his daughter out of the St Symphorien Cemetery during that Easter of 1939 and headed home, happy that a commemorative plaque was now firmly nailed into Nimy railway bridge, he didn’t know they were just months away from another world war.

There was talk of another war, but people wouldn’t be stupid enough to start this madness all over again, surely? Sadly, the Germans would soon come pouring across Belgium and over the canal once again. They would bomb London far more than last time. And during the Second World War Sidney would have new and terrible reasons to shed fresh tears.

This is a story of violence and compassion in equal measure; humanity and inhumanity. Two men who happened to be caught up in the very worst of the First Battle of Mons, at Nimy railway bridge just outside the town. They couldn’t have imagined they were about to win the first Victoria Crosses of the Great War. Sidney Frank Godley, an Arsenal fan who didn’t like going to the dentist, and Maurice James Dease, a bird-watcher and horse-lover. They were ordinary, very likeable human beings, who did extraordinary things. Somewhere in their childhoods they developed steely streaks which helped them rise to the challenge in a crisis. Yet the childhoods of Dease and Godley could hardly have been more different.

The original plaque on Nimy bridge, dedicated to the Royal Fusiliers and the first VCs of the First World War, Dease and Godley.

1

Privilege and Pain

What makes someone want to join the army? What makes them take a deliberate, carefully considered decision to adopt a career path that could end their life prematurely or traumatise them forever? For Maurice Dease and Sidney Frank Godley, the reasons weren’t so very different from some of the motives for young people joining up today. Godley joined because he wanted to belong to something, because he had never quite belonged, not even to his own family. Maurice joined because he already had a sense of belonging, because an admired family member had joined before him.

‘I think uncle Maurice always wanted to be a soldier like his uncle Gerald. They were close.’ That simple, innocent statement from his nephew, Major Maurice French, a Korean War veteran, explains better than any other why Maurice Dease would find himself in a hail of bullets on 23 August 1914. It could be argued that his uncle Gerald had a lot to answer for, though naturally he wished his nephew no harm.

Gerald had been an adjutant in the 4th Militia Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. He had served in the regiment from 1874 to 1892 and reached the rank of major. Gerald never saw action. So there were no tales of senseless carnage and despair from the influential uncle; no first-hand accounts of almost-impossible bravery either. Neither, perhaps, were there any protective warnings about what could happen if history swept up young Maurice in a tide of international tension and dropped him in the wrong time and place. Even if there had been such warnings, however, you get the feeling that Maurice would probably still have joined up. It is what young men of a certain stock and upbringing did in those days. Some still do.

Gerald Dease was a wealthy, powerful, charismatic figure in Maurice’s native Ireland. He was county sheriff for County Westmeath in 1909, and Commissioner for National Education in Ireland. He had applied his natural authority far and wide in his day, becoming ADC to the governor of Tasmania, Lord Gormanston. Therefore, if Uncle Gerald had done something as a young man, it would have seemed to Maurice worth doing himself. After all, Maurice Dease was already linked to his uncle in a very special way.

Although Gerald had married Florence Helen Marley on 3 June 1896, he was almost 42 by then. The marriage was destined to produce no children, so Maurice was his heir. One day Gerald’s spectacular stately home at Turbotston, Co. Westmeath, with its glorious hunting grounds, would belong to Maurice, if, of course, he lived that long. There was no obvious reason to suppose he wouldn’t because, as the nineteenth century became the twentieth, there was no inevitability of a First World War. There were always tensions, of course, yet no hint that a global conflict was going to engulf almost everything and everyone. If Maurice’s time in the army was relatively brief and drew him into no desperate battles from which he couldn’t fight his way out, it could be seen as a distinguished stepping stone, a dashing interlude before he returned to the idyllic life in the Irish countryside. A soldier’s existence would give him the adventures all young men craved; he might travel far and wide like Uncle Gerald. It sounded manly, exciting, even righteous. When he’d had his fill, the glorious setting of Turbotston awaited him, with its rolling green hills and enchanting woods. You didn’t have to stay in the army forever. Show what you could do in your prime, come out before you reached middle age; then you could enjoy the rest of your life and all your lucky circumstances promised you. That seems to have been the general game plan. Put most simply, Maurice Dease had fallen under the spell of Gerald, and it would determine his destiny. They hunted together on horseback, the boy and the powerful older man. They probably talked of wars that Gerald hadn’t been in but wished he had, such as the Boer War. You can just imagine Maurice hanging on Gerald’s every word, while the boy’s father, Edmund, looked on fondly and his mother, Katherine, was left to accept that boys will be boys. Had Maurice fallen under the spell of any relative other than Gerald, things might have been very different. Maurice French explained:

I don’t think there were any soldiers before that; there might have been but there certainly weren’t any Royal Fusiliers. The soldiers were Uncle Gerald, Uncle Maurice and me. Uncle Maurice was a gentle soul, I think. But that didn’t exclude a desire to join the army. The way of thinking was completely different back then.

Maurice Dease was born in Gaulstown, Coole, Co. Westmeath, Ireland, on 28 September 1889. He was the only son of Edmund Fitzlawrence Dease, JP, and Katherine Dease, of Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. She was the eldest daughter of Maurice Murray of Beech Hill, Cork. Maurice Dease’s grandfather was James Arthur Dease, JP, DL, Vice-Lieutenant of Cavan. It was a distinguished family from the upper echelons of Irish Catholic society. Indeed, the Dease family tree could be traced all the way back to Thomas More, executed by Henry VIII and well-known even to non-historians after the film A Man for All Seasons came out in the 1960s. While none of their family homes was quite as spectacular as Gerald’s Turbotston, all were exceedingly comfortable. At such family retreats Maurice spent many happy years, the first nine of his childhood.

He adored the countryside and the pursuits that went with it. From his earliest years he went riding, and had a beautiful grey pony called Kitty. Maurice French, his nephew, still had all the photos in 2013 to illustrate what a lovely childhood Maurice had enjoyed over a century earlier. Major French had heard all the stories from his mother, Maud, Maurice Dease’s sister:

When he was a boy he was mad keen on hunting. His father was the man who ran the Westmead Hounds, so my Uncle Maurice grew up on ponies. His Uncle Gerald was very keen on hunting too. Maurice loved riding the ponies and horses above all. And he enjoyed shooting, partridges and that sort of thing, I expect. And I think, because my mother used to fish, he would have fished a bit too. Maurice was very much a country boy.

At the age of 9, he was suddenly transported into a very different world, at least during term time;, he was sent away to a preparatory school in Hampstead. There was nothing callous about it; this was simply the done thing among many in upper-class Irish society. Major French explained, ‘It was the norm for well-to-do Catholic families to send their children across to English public schools to be educated.’

Maurice’s first English school was St Basil’s, Frognal Hall – afterwards known simply as Frognal Park School. The Deases were related to the Liddells, who already had a boy called Aiden at the same prep school. Like Maurice, Aidan Liddell would go on to win a posthumous Victoria Cross as machine gun officer of his battalion. While such terrible tests of character were still a world away, the process of toughening up had already started with their separation from their parents at such a tender age. Fortunately, figures of authority at such schools were also capable of remembering just how young their charges were. Before long Frognal was taken over by a certain Miss Maloney, who later became Mrs Ware. Maurice considered her to be so warm and caring that he never forgot her kindness. And he was in particular need of such qualities in 1899 and 1900, after he contracted scarlet fever and measles, and spent weeks in the school infirmary.

He was already resilient enough to get over these setbacks, and more than ready to idolise those whose bravery on far-flung battlefields captured the imagination of many a schoolboy. From a postcard he sent to his father on 2 October 1900, it is clear that he was already attracted to matters military. The postcard is a picture of an infantryman directing a cavalry officer during the Boer Wars. Maurice, who had just turned 11, is brief and to the point:

Thank you very much for your letter and chocolates you sent me for my birthday. We played football yesterday morning and it was a very good game. I have very little news to tell you now as I told it all to mother yesterday. MD.

The year 1902 was a landmark in the childhood of Maurice Dease. He experienced his first hunt on the back of his pony, Kitty, on 13 January. The Westmeath Hounds met at Turbotston, the home of his beloved Uncle Gerald, and they rode the hunt from Pakenham Hall, the beautiful home of the Earls of Longford. The military pasts of important family and friends couldn’t be forgotten, and the way the Pakenhams led their lives might also have influenced Dease to make decisions which would cut short his life. Major French reflected:

A lot of those Irish boys at that time went into the Royal Fusiliers for one reason or other. The Pakenham family was another who chose that route. They were neighbours in Mullingar, and Pakenham Hall became known as Tullynally Castle. They weren’t Catholics at that stage; they’d been Catholics and then lapsed, but a lot of them were Royal Fusiliers.

The fact that Maurice was a page boy at the wedding of Lord Longford – who was also destined to be killed in the First World War – indicated the strong relationship between the families. And such established families weren’t going to shy away from playing their part when the fighting began. Men who could in theory have stayed out of the war on the safer side of the Irish Sea chose instead to put themselves in the firing line, and paid the ultimate price.

Maurice always seemed to follow his conscience; he was a staunch Catholic from beginning to end. He took his first Communion on 14 June 1902 at the Dominican Church, Haverstock Hill, London. But it was back in Ireland during the summer holidays that he was confirmed in the private chapel of the bishop’s palace in Mullingar. Even someone so deeply religious had no trouble reconciling army life with his Catholic faith. Sometimes you had to fight for what was right. And in the eyes of the British and the English-educated, Britain was always right.

If Maurice Dease was well on the way to becoming a Royal Fusilier even before he reached his teens, it could be argued that Sidney Frank Godley was destined to join him in the regiment because of things that had happened to him when he was even younger.

The Godly family (the spelling of the surname only changed when Sidney joined the army and the recruiting officer put the ‘e’ in it) was no stranger to extreme violence – at least George Godly of the Metropolitan Police wasn’t. George, Sidney’s first cousin once removed, worked on the most famous case in history. Indeed, Detective Sergeant George Godly’s efforts on the ‘Jack the Ripper’ investigation team enhanced his reputation considerably. They never caught the murderer, of course, the mystery man who butchered eleven women horribly in the East End of London between 1888 and 1891, mutilating them in various indescribable ways. But it was said by a colleague at the time that ‘Mr Godly’s knowledge of these crimes is perhaps as complete as that of any officer concerned.’ The Whitechapel Murders, as they were known back then, still fascinate amateur and professional sleuths today. And George might have become the most celebrated policeman in history had he actually detained the world’s most notorious murderer. There was a moment during the investigation that his boss thought George had earned just such a claim to fame. For Inspector Abberline, who led the investigation, declared at one point during the hunt that Godly had managed to arrest the Ripper and the case could be solved at last. Sadly he was mistaken and the culprit never was locked away, which must have caused sleepless nights for Godly and the rest of the team.

It is very doubtful whether Sidney Godley would have been exposed to any of the horrific details of the case as a child. The murders happened just before he was born or while he was still a toddler. Besides, Sidney’s immediate family had enough of their own problems to worry about, such as how to make ends meet. Such factors closer to home would deny Sidney the sense of stability all children crave. But it wasn’t lost on his grandson Colin that Sidney lived much of his adult life in a general area of the East End which had been notorious for its violent cases – and would be again. ‘We’ve got Jack the Ripper and the Krays all within a mile of here, we’re in the middle of it really,’ said Colin from the comparative safety of Stepney Green in the twenty-first century. But Sidney’s birth certificate shows that he didn’t start out in the rough, tough East End:

BIRTH CERTIFICATE:

Birth in the Sub-District of East Grinstead in the Counties of Sussex and Surrey.

Fourteenth August 1889, Northend, East Grinstead, Sussex, U.S.D.

Sidney Frank

Boy

Father: Frank Godly

Mother: Avis Godly formerly Newton.

Father’s profession: Painter Journeyman.

Informant Details: A. Godly. Mother. Northend. East Grinstead.

Thirteenth September 1889.

Registrar: W.H. Wood.

The voting list for 1889 gives Sid’s father as living in Imberhorne Lane, East Grinstead. He had married Avis Newton and at first life in Sussex looked promising for them, though their happiness was to be short-lived. Frank’s family had lived in the East Grinstead and Felbridge area for generations. Sidney’s grandfather was William Godly, a pit sawyer. That meant he would saw wood at the mines, to create the framework to bolster the tunnels and prevent fatal collapses of the structures. Much later in Godley’s life, he was destined to end up working in a mine too – through no choice of his own. For now William Godly provided the only link to mining, and he lived in the wonderfully named local village of Mount Noddy in 1881.

Sidney’s paternal grandmother was Harriet Pattenden, from a large family in nearby Horne, and there was no immediately obvious reason why the young boy shouldn’t have been able to benefit from the stability of wider family links and a sense of long family history in the area. Like Sidney’s grandfather William, his great-uncle John Godly also worked with wood. But John showed a finer, more artistic touch, and even carved the pews at St Swithun’s church in East Grinstead. Sidney’s family line can be traced back to a George Godly in 1770 and it is believed the family had been around East Grinstead since the 1500s. But sad circumstances were about to uproot the future hero from an area which had provided so much security and continuity for his forefathers.

The 1891 Census has Frank Godly, aged 24, living with Avis Godly, aged 29, and her mother, Harriet Newton, aged 69. Frank and Avis have two children by then – Kate ‘Kit’ Godly, aged 3, and 1-year-old Sidney Godly. Harriet would probably have acted as a nanny to the children and have done all she could to earn her keep. But it might not have been easy for Frank Godly to live with his mother-in-law, and there are suggestions that he became unsettled. He may have looked elsewhere for an outlet for his domestic frustrations; and domestic tensions didn’t make for the happiest of environments for the earliest years of Sidney’s life.

Eileen reflected, ‘I think he envied people who had a relationship with their mum and dad. His dad wasn’t all a dad should be. I’m sure part of the reason my dad was such a lovely dad was because he didn’t have an easy upbringing. He was born and brought up in Sussex for the first part of his childhood. He was the second eldest after his sister Kit, and then there was his younger brother Percy, and another sister, Ella. And that was the first family.’

Poor Sidney wasn’t able to enjoy a relationship with his mother for very long because she died in Hailsham, Sussex, in 1896, when he was just 6 years old. ‘We’re not sure but we think she may have died during childbirth,’ said Colin. Eileen said, ‘I don’t know what his mum died of, I don’t know what happened to her. But my dad always said that his father had the next wife waiting in the wings. His father married again, and I don’t really know much about that part of his life. If anyone started talking about it, my dad would quickly move onto something else. He would change the subject, you see, I think it was a bit of a sore point for him.’

When Sidney lost his mother, the consequences were far-reaching. Since Frank was a painter and decorator struggling to make a living, there was no way he could work and look after all his children at the same time. So Sidney was sent away from his own home, to live elsewhere with anyone who could be found. Records show he was fostered locally by the Wren family at one stage, though little is known about them. Sidney was then passed between relatives whenever they felt they could help to raise him. Colin explained:

When Sidney’s mum died, he lost his family, because his father couldn’t look after him and he got moved around. I don’t know why Frank Godly couldn’t make a living and find a way to look after him, but it didn’t happen that way. So when his mum died when he was only six and his father moved him to relatives and the like, it couldn’t have been easy at all. The first lot he went to, he stayed with a police inspector at Redhill for a short while, a distant relation. Then he went to Leigh in south London, and on he went from there.

‘He had a rough old time being moved around,’ Eileen observed. It must have been a confusing time too, being uprooted just when he was getting used to a new environment and starting to consider it home.

At one point Sidney found that he was right back where he had started – living with his father. To say that conditions had changed was something of an understatement. Some years earlier, it appears, Frank Godly had met an Irish woman called Lizzie, who already had children of her own. They married and moved in together in Sidcup, Kent. The 1901 Census tells an intriguing story. It has Frank Godly, then aged 34, living with his new wife, Lizzie Godly. She was aged 28 and there were more children on the scene. Sidney’s younger brother, Percy Henry Godly, was then 10 years old, having been born in East Grinstead. But also listed is William John Godly, who was 11 years old, and had been born in Sidcup. Does this suggest that Sidney’s father may have started to have children with Lizzie while still married to Sidney’s mother Avis? Linda Godley, married to Colin, put it like this: ‘Percy was his real brother and then he had half-brothers. William is a step-brother, Reginald is a step-brother.’

It was certainly a confusing situation. At least Sidney Godly is registered to the same family address in Sidcup, an indication that he may have been welcomed back into his father’s family fold by then. At 12 years old, he attended the Sidcup National School and was probably considered old enough to work odd jobs and pay his own way. He developed an affection for Kent County Cricket Club, and this quintessentially English sport would always remain a passion for him.

‘He was born in Sussex but Kent was always his team,’ Eileen insisted emphatically. ‘I think he liked living in Sidcup.’ In 1920, after his terrible ordeal in the First World War, Sidney visited his old school in Sidcup and he was presented with an inscribed black marble clock and £150 worth of war bonds. He told the pupils there it felt like coming home, so life must have been tolerable when he was 12, even if the family situation at home was still chaotic. As usual, however, any stability wasn’t to last. Pretty soon the pressure of sheer numbers and increasing tensions with his father led to young Sidney being cast out of the family fold again.

He went to live with an uncle and aunt in Willesden, north London. That was where he would eventually meet his future wife, who worked in service for an old lady in the area. For now, the source of Sidney’s stability was decent schooling, though even that was short-lived. He attended the Henry Street School in St John’s Wood, which today is a highly sought-after area, and was respectable back then too. Sidney was also sent to St John’s Sunday School and was confirmed in 1903. Given his growing love for cricket, Eileen considers it ‘quite possible’ that he was able to sneak into Lord’s cricket ground occasionally to watch the matches there. It is hard to imagine that the famous gates, so near yet so far, might have remained closed to him; that would have been almost too sad as an added frustration to an already troubled childhood. Yet he formed no lasting bond with Middlesex County Cricket Club, whose home was Lord’s, so we can’t discount such torment either. What we know is that Godley supported Kent for the rest of his days. Still, for a teenager in England at the start of the twentieth century, supporting a sports team wasn’t the priority; supporting yourself, to make sure you could eat, was what mattered. Compared to many poor souls, Sidney had fallen on his feet. The emotional deprivations which came with having no mother and a distracted father hadn’t been accompanied by starvation. In that regard he could count himself lucky, because such a fate befell many in Victorian times, and survival into one’s later teens hadn’t always been a foregone conclusion.

For Maurice Dease, childhood was so much more straightforward. He had continued to study in London, a world away from Sidney Godley, even though they inhabited the same city. And during holidays he had always returned to the paradise of family and country life in Ireland, a joyful environment offering a quality of life that Sidney would never experience. The short voyages across the Irish Sea would continue, though Maurice was given a new English base in a huge place which was both harsh and impressive.

Just before the summer holidays of 1902, Maurice had passed the Oxford Preliminary Examination, a success which underlined his academic credentials and made him suitable for the next phase of his learning. Maurice was sent to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, where he would remain from 1903 until 1907. Stonyhurst was where many wealthy Catholic families educated their children. Aidan Liddell had made the same journey north to the prep school. Another of Dease’s relatives, Charles Waterton – a noted Victorian naturalist – had studied there.

The college had been founded in 1593 by the Jesuit Fathers of the Society of Jesus, though the first 200 years of its history saw it based abroad to avoid persecution in Britain. Those old boys who returned to Britain to become missionary priests risked their lives in the seventeenth century. Twenty-two of them were publicly executed for their faith, a sacrifice never forgotten by future generations.

The chaos of the French Revolution brought the college home towards the end of the eighteenth century. Stonyhurst Hall in Lancashire was secured. By the mid-Victorian era, school life revolved around the magnificent St Peter’s church, which looked as though it had been inspired by King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Though the surroundings were spectacular, the boys were anything but pampered. The suffering and whole-hearted commitment that was such an integral part of the history of Stonyhurst became etched in the steely character of the pupils. Even at the start of the twentieth century, there was still a defiant pride at the way the college had survived and then thrived to become one of the very best of its kind in Britain. Yet the ethos of the school wasn’t overwhelmingly restrictive – quite the reverse. The reward for that difficult history was sufficient freedom to follow one’s artistic leanings, to explore one’s potential in a variety of ways. Still, lashings of rigorous discipline under-pinned the place at the same time, and therefore there was no chance of a pupil going soft or escaping from his responsibilities into the lazy idealism of his own dreamy world. Being educated at Stonyhurst was to know that you had a responsibility to your fellow man, and to be taught that, if called upon to do so, a boy had to summon the necessary character and courage to thrive in adversity.

The school motto was Quant Je Puis – as much as I can. Whatever you did at Stonyhurst, you were expected to give everything to it. Maurice Dease had no problem with that. And, although the sheer size of Stonyhurst must have seemed daunting at first to a sensitive young boy, he was also a hearty, adaptable individual and soon found his feet. Maurice French reflected:

I think the impression I’ve always had is that he was quiet, perhaps rather shy, a very gentle sort of guy and I think very religious. But I don’t think he would have found life at school in England all that difficult. It was normal to build a child’s character in this way. For example my father had nine brothers, many of whom were killed in the First World War, and they all went to school in England, mostly to Downside and Beaumont and places like that. Coming and going between Ireland and England was no problem.

And, besides, while at Stonyhurst, Maurice had a reminder of the country life he loved and all the glories of nature. For one of Dease’s great passions at Stonyhurst was the school aviary. The birds were something he doubtless looked forward to seeing again when he returned from Ireland, because it was a constantly changing, sometimes brutal feathered community. Maurice French explained, ‘Uncle Maurice was the “bird man” at Stonyhurst, he was responsible for the aviaries as a boy.’

The aviary had been created in the early 1880s by Friar Eyre SJ (Society of Jesus), who was rector of the college at the time. He had begun by buying some canaries, rumoured to have come from a local lunatic asylum. During the following twenty years the aviary had flourished so well that new, spacious premises had been built. As a boy who had always been at one with nature back home in his native Ireland, Dease was never happier than when he was involved with the aviary and its many, varied inhabitants. And he was so conscientious that he earned new responsibilities in the aviary, first keeping records as ‘Clerk of Works’, and then as ‘Head Aviary Boy’.

Such accolades mirrored his progress in the wider school, where the boys weren’t members of different houses, as at most public schools. At Stonyhurst boys were organised into year groups known as Playrooms instead, and each year could relax in its own common room.

Looking back at his time there, The Stonyhurst Magazine of October 1914 provides an engaging portrait of Dease during his years at the college:

Good-natured, amiable yet full of determination, he was Head of the Third Playroom, and later of the Second Playroom. He was Aviary Boy during his time at Stonyhurst, looking after the birds there. He discharged his duties with characteristic thoroughness. One permanent native official of the aviary used his best Lancastrian to describe Dease like this: ‘Yo’ve nobbut to tell yon lad what wants doin’, and it’s bahn to be done.’ He was so dependable that any task given to Dease was ‘bahn to be done’ – and done well.

As Aviary Boy, Dease wrote articles on local ornithology for The Stonyhurst Magazine in 1906 and 1907. In 1906, at the age of 17, Maurice showed an appreciation for words and birds in equal measure as he described some illustrations:

In the first picture we see the birds in the well known attitude which suggested the lines by Somerville

Lo! At his siege the heron

Upon the bank of some small purling brook

Observant stands to take his scaley prize.

The same bird is shown in the third picture … with his ‘scaley prize’ in his beak. Not that he won his prize without a struggle. For at least twenty minutes the honours were with the tench who ‘kept his end up sturdily til he was badly winded by repeated digs in the ribs …’

In time, Dease would also know what it was like to ‘keep his end up sturdily’ against a superior, predatory force, before being overcome by his wounds at last. And even as a child, Maurice certainly wasn’t squeamish about the brutality of nature; that much is clear in his writings:

The death rate has almost reached the vanishing point; the only regrettable incident being the death of a hen Arctic Knot, who reached us in a moribund condition from starvation and died the same night. When we add that the herons refused her plucked corpse next morning, with an air of pained surprise, her emaciated condition will be obvious.

Yet only someone with a great love for his subject would be so observant and clearly so fascinated by the nuances and pecking orders he discovered among the birds under his care: ‘The Albino blackbird, who plays second bully to the quail, has lately found an imitator of his tameness in a thrush, who waits at the gate of the aviary and vies with him in snapping worms from the fingers of the aviary keepers …’

Dease was also clever enough to understand an opportunity to speak to those who might improve the aviary and help it to survive for generations to come. He was unreservedly grateful for any generous gesture and witty with it:

While on the subject of benefactors we may conclude by thanking Fr Rector on behalf of the birds for his generous offer of new shrubs for the aviary and we may assure him in their name that when the shrubs arrive,

‘The feathered choir …

‘Perched on the evening bough shall join your worship.’

Maurice Dease

But ensuring the survival of the aviary was often an uphill struggle for Maurice. The following year, 1907, Dease sounded more frustrated by the disinterest of his fellow human beings than the cruelty of natural selection. He wrote:

The rage for presenting birds to the aviary has not yet set in. Meanwhile the praiseworthy efforts of some of the birds themselves to increase their own numbers have been frustrated by various causes. The green-finches alone have succeeded in hatching out several broods of healthy young ones. Out of a total of sixty-two eggs laid by the hen Californian Quail, only one chick has reached maturity. At present the White Java Sparrows are sitting on eggs in a small cocoanut. The corpse of their eldest born has just been ejected by the nest …

The dead had to be cast out, if those left behind were to have the chance to live. Seven years later, in the final hours of his life, Maurice would discover that under extreme circumstances, the same behaviour could be observed in humans.