Tentacles ... and a Mystery

It's time I wasn't surprised when I find that something innocuous that I'm doing today has tentacles stretching back years, decades or even further.  Last night I watched the last few of a set of DVDs that I collected over a period of some weeks back in 2004.  They were produced by the Daily Mail - a newspaper that I would normally avoid, and almost certainly haven't bought since then - to mark the 90th anniversary of the start of the First World War.  The DVDs reproduced a series of programmes broadcast by the BBC over twenty-six weeks to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary in 1964.

They were screened immediately after something I watched regularly and were introduced by an horrific original photograph of a soldier in a tin hat sitting in a trench across from some dead comrades.  As the titles rolled week after week for half a year, to the accompaniment of dramatic theme music specially composed by Wilfred Josephs and played by the BBC Northern Orchestra, as an eager teenager I would long to broaden my education by watching this presentation.  And week after week, my mother - if she wasn't already in the room, my mother would hear the music and immediately appear - denounced it firmly as "that old war programme" with the inevitable follow-up as the TV was switched off, "we've had enough of war!"

When it came to discipline in the home, mother's word was law.  Sometimes I could wheedle, or offer a logical persuasion for something I wanted to do but when that programme came on, however much I might hope to the contrary, there was something about her tone of voice that said there would be no discussion and I knew not to argue.  At last, decades later, I would be able to watch them.  But the busy life of a courier - how I managed to get to the newsagent's every day for a month or so to buy the paper, I just don't know - and later of a busy retiree, had meant that only recently had I picked up the habit of watching the occasional episode from where my initial enthusiasm had left off. 

Hearing those haunting strains again brought back mum's voice from the past and I am far more able now to understand why, scarcely twenty years after the death of her beloved brother on the other side of the world during the successor to that 'war to end all wars' which wasn't, she was unwilling to be reminded yet again of that loss.

One of the episodes I watched last night presented a brief summary of the war in the Middle East, with the need to protect the route to India and to secure the oilfields that could make or break the functioning of a navy that was ever less dependent on coal for its fuel.  It told of the action of the Indian Expeditionary Force from Basra towards Baghdad in 1915.  By September 1915, the British and Indian force had reached Kut al-Amara, about 100 miles south of Baghdad and, after a defeat further north, retreated there to await further support.  This never came, however and, after a siege of 147 days, they surrendered to the Ottomans on 29th April 1916.  At the time, it was the worst defeat of a British army but, unlike other great surrenders at Yorktown (1781) and Singapore (1942), the consequences were not so strategically significant.  A stronger and better-resourced Mesopotamian campaign was initiated at the end of 1916; Kut al-Amara was retaken in February 1917 and Baghdad the following month.

My father's two eldest brothers served in the First World War, but when they were demobbed, neither of them returned to live in the family home, so I'm not sure what he knew of their experiences.  As I watched that episode of The Great War last night I recalled the only instance I can remember when he ever spoke of the service of either brother in the war.  What prompted the comment is now lost to me, but the fact that I remember them so clearly speaks of their very rarity.  Referring to the younger of the two brothers, who was some eight years his senior, dad told me, "Will was at Kut."

I said that my mother's was the voice of authority in the home; this was so much the way of my childhood that it hadn't occurred to me until this very weekend to wonder what dad made of that.  I recall his willingness to administer discipline when my behaviour required it but I don't think I ever heard a cross word from him to mum.  Rarely did he express any personal emotion ... at least not in my presence.  But now I'm wondering whether he would have shared his son's desire to follow that series on TV.  He made no comment, however, and the TV was always switched off.

I've puzzled from time to time over those words.  A few years ago I attended a talk on the war in Mesopotamia at the National Archives and chatted afterwards to the speaker but to no avail.  Given that my uncle was born in July 1898, it seems most unlikely that he could have been one of those captured after the siege in 1916.  If he had lied about his age, it is just possible that he could have been in the force that re-took the town the next year, but without knowing what regiment he served with, nor any other details, it's impossible to say.