The emotive and rare Mention in Despatches and Battle of the Somme Officer casualty 1914-1915 Star trio awarded to Lieutenant W. Shaw, 1/1st Battalion, Cambridgeshire Regiment who served on the Western Front from February 1915 and would take part in the Second Battle of Ypres later being Mentioned in Despatches on 1st January 1916. Shaw would later die of wounds on 27th September 1916 whilst a Prisoner of War in German hands. These wounds were received in a trench raid on a shanty now called ‘The Summer House’ on the Ancre on the night of 16/17th September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, the raid superbly covered by an article written by Michael Durey in the Western Front Association’s ‘Stand To! Publication, edition No.91. He is now buried in Porte-De-Paris Cemetery, Cambrai.
Group of 3: 1914-1915 Star; (2. LIEUT. W. SHAW. CAMB. R.) British War Medal and Victory Medal with Mention in Despatches oak leaf emblem; (LIEUT. W. SHAW.)
Condition: Nearly Extremely Fine
William Shaw was educated at Fitzwilliam Hall, Cambridge, and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant on 14th October 1914, seeing service on the Western Front with his battalion from February 1916, before being promoted Lieutenant on 6th May 1915 and then being Mentioned in Despatches in the London Gazette of 1st June 1916. Shaw later died of wounds received in a trench raid on 16th/17th September 1916 whilst in German hands on 27th September 1916. The son of William and Alice Shaw of 2 Tanner’s Lane, Soham, Cambridgeshire, he is buried in Porte-De-Paris Cemetery, Cambrai.
The action in which Shaw was wounded is covered in a superb article by Michael Durey which appeared in the Western Front Association ‘Stand To! No. 91’ titled ‘Two Minor Demonstrations’: The 1/1st Cambridgeshire Battalion’s Raids on the Ancre, 16-17 September 1916:
The raids on 16/17 September 1916
When the British bombardment began in the early hours of 3 September Riddell had heard one of his young officers shout excitedly: 'Nothing on earth can withstand that. Will this mean the end of the war?' This optimist was the 22-year-old Captain Arthur Innes Adam, late of Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford. Captain Arthur Innes Adam Adam, brother of the subsequently celebrated sociologist Baroness Wootton, had joined the battalion in June 1915 and had had a swift baptism of fire. On his first day in the trenches two officers were mortally wounded, one, Lieutenant Hugh Crookham, having arrived with him, and on 2 July he was himself slightly wounded in the hand by a sniper. Like Rudyard Kipling's son John, Adam was extremely short-sighted and had only passed the army medical after finding a sympathetic doctor who allowed him to take the eye test whilst wearing his spectacles. He had been a child prodigy, reading the Biblical Job and Jeremiah at the tender age of three. Like so many of his fellow subalterns, with his love of music and the Classics, his high-pitched voice and very fair hair-at Balliol he was nicknamed 'The Mouse' and among the soldiers of his Company he was 'Parson Snowy'-he was an unlikely warrior in an age of industrialised carnage. 0 6 l He often confessed to his mother, a widow and academic, that he had little prowess as an officer and that the cause of his enlistment had been 'a desire to become a little less irresolute'. Riddell, however, had seen beyond this diffidence in Adam to confirm his position as commander of 'A' Company, which he had been holding in an acting capacity since January 1916. Adam was to play a crucial role in one of the raids on 16-17 September, together with Lieutenant William Shaw, who had replaced Herman as 2/IC 'A' Company. The only son of a widow-he was just a baby when his father, a farmer, died in 1894, Shaw came from no privileged background. His mother, an official Cambridge University lodging-house keeper, was a superior servant, but her position gave Shaw an unusual perspective on students and their lives. Although he left school to become an apprentice organ builder, he had ambitions and talents. In 1914 he matriculated at Fitzwilliam Hall, Cambridge, which enabled him to study for a degree without being a member of a college. He joined the university OTC as a cadet and on 14 October 1914 was commissioned into the 1/1 Cambridgeshire. He went to France with the battalion in February 1915, fought at Second Ypres and was mentioned in despatches in January 1916. By September 1916, therefore, he was an experienced trench officer.
A shanty on the Ancre
On 12 September the battalion relieved 4/5 Black Watch in the Hamel right section of the trenches. This area included a detached post - a mill on the edge of the Ancre. It was from here between 1.00 am and 3.15 am on the morning of the 13th that a patrol from 'A' Company moved up the northern bank of the river, pacing out the route and making detailed notes of the terrain and every object they passed: hedges, trees and barbed wire. They eventually saw, across the river, what the war diary described as a shanty, from within which they heard a man coughing. Another patrol the next night discovered that the shanty was in fact a brick emplacement (in Riddell's later words, 'a strong-point'), close to the German second line, in which three men were working. The alarm was raised, whistles were blown and the Germans emerged from their workplace wearing their equipment. The patrol managed to retire without casualties. But Adam and Shaw were now hatching a plan. In the meantime, under divisional orders to maintain pressure on the front, Riddell was reluctantly planning a large raid to be carried out by 'C' Company under the command of the 23-year-old Captain Francis Marr. Like Adam, Marr was the son of a Cambridge Don. He had joined the battalion in France in April 1915 and was to survive the war as a brigade major with a DSO and MC. He died in 1942 when U-boat torpedoed the SS City of Cairo. Among the officers who were to take part in this raid was Second Lieutenant Henry Blythe King Allpass, known as Rex to his friends and regrettably called 'Allpress' in the regimental history. The son of a clergyman who had revived the ancient but moribund Sir George Monad School in Chigwell, Allpass had obtained a First Class Honours degree in Modern Languages at Exeter College, Oxford, where one of his friends was J R R Tolkien and where he had had the misfortune to fail to prevent a depressed student friend from shooting himself. In September 1914 he took up the position of Head of Modern Languages at St Bees School in Whitehaven, where he also commanded the Junior OTC. Now acknowledged as one of the 'War Poets' and a Fabian in politics, he was also a comic writer of some talent. He wrote for The Westminster Review and Isis and, having received a commission in the Essex Regiment in February 1916, edited the magazine Stars for Subaltems at Halton Camp. In this he published a series of whimsical letters to his mother, portraying himself as a bumbling innocent: mistaking the adjutant for his colonel and another colonel for a railway porter; forgetting to wear his Sam Browne belt in public; and calling his batman by the wrong name for three long months. He gently parodied some of the army's more arcane customs, as when he suggested that his daily role of inspecting the kit of five cooks and his sergeant was 'rather an arid life for a Man with a Moustache'. Like Adam and many other young men, Allpass' view of the war was ambiguous. He wanted it to stop, but not before he had experienced it firsthand: 'A week in the trenches, one charge, the DSO (which is much more dignified than a VC), and a wound in my left arm' was his preference, (one of his two brothers had been killed with the Sherwood Foresters in August 1915 at Gallipoli.) There was little chance of his achieving his aim whilst in a reserve battalion of the Essex Regiment, so he organised an attachment to the Cambridgeshire’s, joining the 1/1st in the trenches in mid-July 1916. He was appointed Bombing Officer, was present at the 3 September defence of the line and was recommended for the Military Cross. The objectives of this, raid under Marr, according to the war diary, were 'to enter the enemy's trenches, kill Germans and obtain identifications', but the chances of catching the Germans by surprise were minimal, for their greatly reinforced barbed wire defences required daily artillery and trench mortar bombardments before action could be contemplated. Facing the 1/lst Battalion, moreover, was the 119th Reserve Infantry Regiment, comprising mainly Wurtemburgers with a high reputation as a fighting unit. Riddell had little confidence in the plan, but gave his approval once it had been reported that the wire had been cut. He was more sanguine about the other, smaller raid that Adam and Shaw had proposed, which would involve a small number of men, led by Shaw, who, using a ladder to cross the trickle that was then the River Ancre, would either capture or kill the' garrison' in the shanty (now called 'the Summer House'). The larger raid would begin first and would act as a diversion for the smaller one. Riddell was right to be pessimistic. During the night of the 16th, no sooner had the British barrage begun and 'C' Company moved out of Roberts Trench than a strong German counter-barrage struck no man's land. The troops managed to reach the wire, only to find it uncut. The enemy front line was also strongly garrisoned, although the war diary claimed they 'had the wind up'. Man's men were forced back to Roberts Trench. Unfortunately, Allpass had somehow managed to get through some of the wire. He was last seen lying badly wounded beyond the reach of the stretcher-bearers. It was hoped that he might have been taken prisoner, but he was never seen again. One other rank was also reported missing and eight were wounded. Just to the south a larger tragedy was unfolding. In addition to Adam and Shaw, two other officers were involved in the raid on the Summer House. In defensive support was Lieutenant Alfred Bradford, the Lewis Gun Officer. Bom in 1894, he had attended Bedford Grammar School; his father, a widower, was owner of the imposing University Arms Hotel in Cambridge. Bradford initially enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment, was commissioned in May 1915 and joined the 1/lst in France not long after Adam. Finally, overseeing the operation from the mill was the Adjutant, Captain Sir Guy Butlin. A 23-year-old Old Harrovian whose father had been President of the Royal College of Surgeons, Butlin had graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1914 and was training to become a barrister when war broke out. He immediately joined the Cambridgeshire Regiment and went to France with the 1/lst in February 1915. Thus, like all the other officers involved in the operation, he was very experienced in trench warfare.
Fiasco
For reasons that remain unknown, Adam went part of the way with Shaw and the eight other ranks on the bombing mission, remaining on the northern bank where the ladder had been placed. The attack was a fiasco. The previous nightly patrols had put the Germans on alert and they had set up a machine-gun post to cover the Summer House. After an exchange of bombs and rifle fire which, according to the war diary, left several of the defenders dead, the raiders were forced to withdraw. As they crawled back to the stream, it was discovered that a wounded man had been left behind. Fatally, Adam and Shaw, either separately or together, decided to return to find him. Close to the Summer House both were hit by machine-gun fire. In the meantime the rest of the party had returned safely to the mill. There Butlin decided to take his orderly and Bradford back to find the missing officers. They found them lying in a very exposed position. Ordering Bradford back to get help, Butlin remained with the wounded men. A stretcher was brought up and Butlin was in the process of placing the more badly wounded Shaw on it when he too was shot, together with one of the bearers, who managed to crawl away. Butlin then ordered the other stretcher-bearer to get further assistance. By now dawn was breaking and Riddell, having moved to the mill, denied permission to Bradford to return to the wounded by the route used by the raiding party, but he did allow him and his own orderly, Lance Corporal William Nightingale, to seek a passage to the wounded through the dense rushes near the bank of the river. Sometimes up to their necks in water, they managed to find the right place, but no bodies were visible. Both returned safely, although Riddell had to creep out to re-direct Nightingale, who had lost direction and was heading towards a German trench. It was surmised that the Germans had taken the wounded into their trenches as prisoners. All three, however, died, Shaw as late as 27 September. The Germans buried them, but Butlin's body, like Allpass', was never recovered. These two are commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. Adam's remains were later exhumed from a small graveyard and reburied in the Achiet-le-Grand Communal Cemetery Extension. Shaw's body now lies in the Porte-de-Paris Cemetery, Cambrai.
Aftermath
The 1/1 Cambridgeshire played only a small role in the major offensives of 1916 on the Somme battlefront. This explains why the significant impact of trench warfare on the battalion's officer casualties was atypical. Fifteen battalion officers were killed in 1916, six, including Bradford, during the battalion's one major attack in October during the Battle of the Ancre Heights. Altogether, seven were killed in offensives, one in the trenches and no fewer than seven in trench raids. Raiding tactics were still being developed, by trial and error, in 1916 and were to improve as the war ground on, but they were always capable of producing significant casualties. In more ways than one, therefore, they might be seen as offensives 'in miniature' as well as useful training for larger operations. In the regimental history Riddell called the Summer House raid 'a deplorable adventure' and regretted Adam's decision to accompany the raiding party. 'As a soldier he was wrong', he wrote, but 'as they were all mere lads', none could be blamed for the consequences. It is true that all involved were young, either aged 22 or 23, but they were not inexperienced. All but Allpass had been in France for more than a year; Adam was a company commander and Butlin was the battalion's adjutant. These 'two minor demonstrations', as the war diary called them, occurred for tactical and strategic reasons, not in order to give young subalterns experience · of warfare. None was fighting out of a sense of nafve idealism. Misfortune turned into tragedy because of the strong esprit de corps that Riddell had infused into the battalion. A wounded man could not be left alone without some attempt to rescue him. From this unwritten rule, everything else followed.
