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| Figure 1:A desolate battlefield in Flanders, Belgium. This is the sort of image of WW1 that most people think of when the think of the conflict, though it was one of many disparate locales in which the war was fought. |
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Figure 2:
British and Japanese Troops participate in the siege of Tsingtao, a German port
in Northern China. This was over 8,000 miles away from the western front of WW1
in Belgium.
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One such individual who told an engaging story was Gunner
Jack Watkins. Born in 1896 and raised in Aberystwyth, he was well off growing
up, having been born into a quite mercantile family; his father was a wine
merchant. At age 14 he enrolled in Aberystwyth County School along with his
brother Leslie, to whom he entrusted his diaries to upon his death. Whilst at
the school, he met Ivor Morgan, who had enrolled two years earlier; the two
fought together in Palestine, where they became friends.
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Figure 3:A photo of Jack Watkins, found in the Cambrian News in July 1917. As the photo
suggests, and like many soldiers in the war, he was very young.
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Having enlisted in 1915, Jack had to wait until July 1917 to be deployed to the Middle East, travelling through France and across the Mediterranean, becoming part of the British 75th Division. Created in Egypt in 1917, it took soldiers from Britain, South Africa and India, and mostly saw action fighting against Ottoman forces in Palestine.
From 1917-1919, he wrote several diaries documenting his time in the military. These diaries give a day-to-day insight into his life, letting us peer into his war. While many of his entries are mundane, some of them describe in detail the battles in which he fought, including his account of the Sinai and Palestine campaign, between 19th and 25th September 1918. Whilst in Palestine, Jack found himself in a division with Ivor: in his diary Jack repeatedly mentions going to the soldiers’ club with Ivor, and it seems that they were very firm friends within their unit; Ivor’s name is mentioned very regularly, especially towards the end of his life.
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| Figure 4: Above is a page from near the front of Jack's original 1918 diary, which starts with a poem that paraphrases a poem of the same name ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’ by Thomas Babington Macauley, published in 1842. It is followed by several places he was encamped during his time in the middle east. Below this a doodle of a pyramid, a palm tree and camel. Scattered throughout his diaries are doodles such as this one. |
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| Figure 5: Next image shows his 1918 diary and his newer, rewritten diary. At some point these two were stuck together and cannot be prised apart.The newer diary is much more legible and hence easy to read, but excludes some key passages from the originals. (Used with permission of the Ceredigion archive) |
Interestingly, Jack decided to rewrite his diary after the
war, most likely due to the small size of the original, which meant his
handwriting had to be very small, and in some places practically illegible. In
this newer edition, he chooses to omit some of his entries, which can tell us a
lot about him as a person. The key omission he makes is anything related to
Ivor, who died in battle on 18/19th September 1918, during the
final British offensive. It seems that the closeness of their relationship made
it too hard for Jack to write about his friend after the war, even if he was
just copying out his diary. Even the comment in the original diary was brief,
simply writing ‘Haversack lost, Ivor Morgan killed, was speaking to him late
last night'. We
know from his diary entries and from letters to family that Jack wrote to
Ivor’s father, Bunce, to inform him of his son’s untimely passing and to express
his condolences; the fact that he shouldered this responsibility speaks to
close friendship Jack and Ivor shared.
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Figure 6: Ivor Morgan's obituary in the Cambrian News, Late
Sept-Early Oct 1918. Bunce would likely have heard about his son's death from
Jack Watkins.
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Jack’s
diary also features several much less tragic stories. Simple, humdrum day-to-day issues like believing that someone had stolen his bivouac or his mail
getting lost, populate most of the diary, with other activities such as Jack
learning to swim, or teaching his Sergeant Major to
speak French interposed.
Ultimately, Jack’s diary allows readers looking back and
properly engage with the human nature of the war. It is easy to look at the war
in the big picture as the industrial slaughter that it was, though this angle
is very impersonal, and doesn’t allow us to really comprehend the impact the
war brought. Through the death of Jack’s friend Ivor, we can really understand
the profound sense of loss that many soldiers and families felt back home,
something he felt duty bound to write home to Ivor’s father about.
It also
paints us an image of a radically different day to day life that he experienced
in comparison to the life he would have led in Aberystwyth before the war. When
we study the war from the bottom up, looking at the stories of individuals, and
then think about the fact that millions of men and women had stories like this
all over the world, only then can we grasp the big picture of the world
changing and tragic event that was the First World War.
Jack survived the war, but sadly died in the 1920’s of a
respiratory disease he had developed while in the Middle East.
Bibliography:
‘Flanders Fields’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanders_Fields, (September 25 2018), fig.2, accessed 23rd January 2019
'The Siege of Tsingtao’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tsingtao, (December 20 2018), fig.6, accessed 23rd January 2019
Jack Watkins’ Diary, Reference ADX/1652, Ceredigion Archives
The Cambrian News
Blog by Nathan Davies, AberForward Project Assistant
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