The headmaster’s son from Newton Poppleford: Sergeant Bernard Verriour, 24 May 1916

Thanks to the late John Hagger of Newton Poppleford, there is a reasonably full account of Bernard Verriour’s part in the Great War, and of his family background.   Click  here to read more.

The graphic image of the Battle of Delville Wood, seen above and referred to in John Hagger's account, is reproduced from an official military artist’s drawing published in The Great War (1917) edited by H.W. Wilson.

Above: The Arras Memorial, on which Bernard Verriour’s name appears, is in the Faubourg-d'Amiens Cemetery  in the western part of the town of Arras, Northern France 

A death from dysentery in Mesopotamia: Lance Corporal John Gordon Griffin, 16 May 1916

A Royal Army Service Corps cap badge

John Gordon Griffin’s name appears on Budleigh Salterton’s War Memorial and on the brass plaque in the town’s St Peter’s Church. He was born in 1889, in Feniton, near Honiton, later moving with his parents, John and Mary Jane Griffin (nee Capron), to Model Cottage in the nearby village of Talaton.

His connection with Budleigh is that by 1911 he was living in Fore Street with the Sellek family, for whom he worked as an apprentice butcher.  Variously spelt as Sellek, Selleck or Sellick, the family had numerous members in the business: the antiquary Peter Orlando Hutchinson records in his Journal for 6 October 1887 that ‘Mr Walter Sellek, the Butcher’ had built some cottages in Sidmouth.

John Griffin married Ada Slater in 1913 in St Peter’s Church. His wife was from Stoke –on-Trent; Fairlynch Museum records give her family address as The Island, Tean.    Their son John W. G. Griffin was baptised in St Peter’s in 1914, according to Fairlynch researcher Sheila Jelley, who notes that the family lived in Frewins and that John as a young father  was a keen sportsman.

It seems that the Griffin family may have been some of the first residents of Frewins,  a cul-de-sac of Arts and Crafts-style houses in Bedlands Lane, Budleigh Salterton. Local history researcher Nicola Daniel noted in the Otter Valley Association newsletter of October 2015 that the houses were built on land bought in December 1911 by Miss Ethel Frewin Mathieson of Otterbourne on Coastguard Road. Secretary of the Budleigh Salterton National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society, Miss Mathieson seems to have been a forceful character who intended that the houses should be for local people with a rent of no more than two and sixpence.

On the outbreak of war John Griffin joined the Royal Army Service Corps; his previous experience in the butchery trade would have qualified him well for this branch of the Army, where he was attached to Supply Details in the 13th Division, according to a record at Fairlynch. The prefix S4 to his service number indicates that he enlisted as a volunteer in Kitchener’s all-volunteer army.

At the time of his death from dysentery on 16 May 1916 he was serving in Mesopotamia – in modern-day Iraq. Amara, the town in Iraq on the left bank of the Tigris,  was occupied by the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force on 3 June 1915 and it immediately became a hospital centre. 

John Griffin was buried in Amara War Cemetery, represented on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website by the above image.  He was 27 years old. Sheila Jelley notes that his wife Ada and their son John returned to her home area of Staffordshire; Ada died there in 1925 when the child was 11 years old.

‘The Great War at Fairlynch’ 2015 exhibition at Budleigh Salterton’s very special museum!  Reviews included: 'Wonderful display on WW1, informative, bright and relevant. Well done!!' 

‘Armchair patriots’?

As the need for volunteers became more acute, the Government launched a campaign using posters such as this one.  Commissioned by the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC), and designed by Savile Lumley, it was published in 1915.  

 

Equally effective as a piece of recruitment propaganda was this 1915 PRC-commissioned poster by the artist E.V. Kealey.  While encouraging men to enlist to protect their defenceless womenfolk, it subtly appealed to women to persuade their men that it was their moral duty to serve King and Country. 

 

The East Budleigh and Budleigh Salterton Territorial Army on parade in Rolle Square, Budleigh Salterton, in 1914. Pictured are: (front row) Reginald Ford, George Annis, Andrew Leaman, Frank Steward, G. Sanders, B. West and E. Annis; (back row) Frank Henry Cowd, H. Clarke

Image credit: Fairlynch Museum

A recent University of Exeter PhD thesis has examined the way in which a crucial role in the recruitment campaign was played by the county’s elites. For the author, Richard Batten, they were “armchair patriots”  who became “the self-appointed intermediaries of the war experience on a local level and who took an explicitly exhortative role, attempting to educate Devonians in the codes of ideal conduct in wartime.”

 

 A photo of March 1915 showing the forming of a Volunteer Training Corps at Budleigh Salterton, led by Colonel Milne. The Corps was open to all men who were able to prove that they were ineligible for Lord Kitchener's Army

Image credit: Fairlynch Museum 

In places like Budleigh, retired army officers - and there were plenty of them -  were ready to recruit local men, as Budleigh’s William Cowd recalled:  “Soon came a call for volunteers for military duties, a ‘National Reserve’ was formed, men of all age groups fell in on the South Parade by Raleigh's Wall, known locally as the Quay Wall, and were addressed by a local, Col Baker, who spoke of the need of such an important force.”

In other parts of Devon the picture was rather different.  Results in the remoter north-west parts of the county have shown, according to recent research, that the recruitment campaign failed to convey the true gravity of the country’s position and that residents were sluggish in responding to the war effort.

Even in the more populated areas of the county, the recruitment figures were disappointing. In frustration at the relative lack of volunteers, retired Major-General Joseph Laye bitterly attacked his home town of Dawlish at a local recruiting rally. A veteran of the Zulu Wars of the 1870s, he was quoted in the Dawlish Gazette of 15 September 1914 as observing that “Devonians are too content  away from the war in the sunshine.”

In a letter to the Western Morning News in the autumn of that year written under the synonym of  Devonian, one resident pointed out that whilst “we all sing and shout ‘Glorious Devon’ but is it not humiliating to know, so far that not one in every hundred of the population in the county have volunteered their services?” 

Devon’s Lord Lieutenant, Earl Fortescue, was equally unhappy about the county’s poor record of achievement in attracting young men to the battlefield. In the matter of recruitment,  Devonians “had nothing to be proud of”, he was quoted as saying in The Western Times of 24 November 1914. “It was time they applied themselves to a new effort to make up for their shortcomings of the past.”

But it seems that the ‘armchair patriots’ had extremely limited success. By April 1915, the rural 9th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment could boast of only 80 local men and was forced to fill up with Londoners and Midlanders.

In January 1916 the Military Service Bill was introduced in Parliament, providing for the conscription of single men aged 18–41.

It was a grim move, confirming that the slaughter being carried out worldwide by a relentless war machine was now on an industrial scale. The Western Times of 1 June 1917, reporting on the wedding of Corporal W.H. Eales and Miss M. Curtis at St Peter’s Church in Budleigh Salterton, noted that a Mr Park Perriam was best man “in the absence of the bridegroom’s and the bride’s brothers, who were all on active service.”

Their names do not appear on any local war memorials. They were the lucky ones. 

Visit ‘The Great War at Fairlynch’ exhibition at Budleigh Salterton’s very special museum! Reviews include: “Wonderful display on WW1, informative, bright and relevant. Well done!!!”