Bare Chronicle of Existence

Rebecca Clarke

Description

On the very same day as his brother, Arnold enrolled to serve in WW1. He signed up for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves and in April 1915 set sail on HMS India. A few short months later, he found himself floating in the North Sea. This is his story and the story of the men who found themselves interned in Norway for the remainder of the war. It is a story of loneliness and love. Of conflict and of isolation. It is a story from WW1 that is rarely told but one that deserves to be.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781398456471
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

A B are C hronicle of E xistence
Stories and Letters from Internment in Norway During WW1
Rebecca Clarke
Austin Macauley Publishers
2022-11-30
A Bare Chronicle of Existence About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Prologue Richard Arnold Clarke – “But Procrastination and Delay Are My Only Portion in this World.” HMS India – “She is a Good Sea Boat.” 10th Cruiser Squadron Conducting Inspections of Suspicious Ships 10th Cruiser Squadron Crew Submarine Warfare HMS India So, Where Does Arnold Fit In? The Log of the H. M. S. India --> Sinking of HMS India— “Submarine on Starboard Bow” Report by Sub-Lieut. Alltree R.N.R, Jørstadmoen, 11 October 1915 Statement by Assistant Engineer Patmore Statement by Midshipman H.R Jenkins R.N.R READ ALL ABOUT IT—what did the papers say? What Happened to Arnold? --> What to Do with the Sunken Sailors? Where Was Arnold? What were the family doing? --> The First Few Months— “Well, News is Scarce.” First Half of 1916 – “Hopes, Ambitions and Ideals have Gone.” Second Half of 1916 – “Not Letters but a Bare Chronicle of Existence.” First Half of 1917 – “The News Is Forced.” Second Half of 1917 – “I Regret My Letters Often Get Left Unwritten Nowadays.” First Half of 1918 – “London Seems a Long Way Off.” Second Half of 1918 — “I Am in No Wise over Brimming with Cheerfulness.” A Caricaturist’s View – “A Great Humourist Has Obviously Not Let this Opportunity Go.” What Next? What Are the Stories of and What Happened to some of the HMS India Crew? Charles William Nelson John Tindling William Tilley William Knight Lamb Robert Charles Maynard Able Seaman George Ward Blacksmith’s Mate William Gardiner Able Seaman/Gunner Will Keats Commander William G A Kennedy Harold Musselwhite Thomas Joseph Sanders John Roland Adams --> Rogues Gallery The Rest of Arnold’s Life Epilogue References Appendix The Clarke Family Hms India Casualties HMS India Gotaland Survivors HMS India Surviving Interned Crew
About the Author
Rebecca was born in Australia and now lives in London with her husband and dogs and any combination of her three children (depending on who has decided to move in this week.) Rebecca spends her non-writing time singing, sailing, swimming, or walking the dogs. The rest of the time is spent sorting the family archives finding more inspiration for stories about every day, interesting people.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Richard Arnold Clarke and to his son Arnold Richard Clarke and to his son James Richard Clarke and to his son Seamus Matthew Clarke.
Copyright Information ©
Rebecca Clarke 2022
The right of Rebecca Clarke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The story, experiences, and words are the author’s alone.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781398456464 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781398456471 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published 2022
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd ® 1 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5AA
Text, letter Description automatically generated
Prologue
I came to learn of R Arnold Clarke and his sisters soon after I began a teenage romance with his grandson. Arnold was dead by then but his presence and that of his sisters, was not. My husband, James, grew up in a leafy Eastern suburb of Melbourne, Australia with his family and had a holiday house in the seaside town I grew up in. His father, Richard, was from Northern Ireland but had settled in Melbourne upon marriage.
When first visiting their house, I remember being impressed by all the antique furniture. The living room had a large leather topped desk and above it, a portrait of a man with a huge moustache and small eyeglasses. Whilst it was a formal portrait, the man in question had a twinkle in his eye and I got the feeling that he was a gentle soul. The house was filled with furniture, art works, photos and mementos like this portrait and I learnt that they all came from Henbury. Henbury was the extended family home in New Milton, a large village in the New Forest in Hampshire. The home of Richard’s maiden aunts.
As I became a part of the family, I came to know more of the family history and the vast amounts of memorabilia stored in antique dressers, boxes, old shipping trunks and files. I had never seen one family with so much in the way of diaries, letters, photographs and I was to learn that what I was seeing in these early days was just scratching the surface.
The treasure trove that made up the family archive had been inherited by Richard. He and his sister Christine were the only descendants from a large family of five sisters and two brothers and were responsible for the managing of the estates of not only their parents but their aunts as well. Richard had moved to Australia after falling in love with Margaret but got the chance to return to England in the mid-1970s for work and was able to bring his young family with him.
The two years spent in London gave Richard the opportunity to share his wife Margaret, daughter Kate and son James with his aunt Edith and briefly with Aunt Anne (Queenie) in the New Forest and with his father in Belfast. Richard’s aunts were in or nearing their nineties at this stage but still lived together in Henbury, the house that their father had moved to in 1918.
Sadly, the other aunt, Winifred, had died in late April 1977 and Richard and family arriving in June the same year just missed seeing her again. Only five months after arriving in England, Aunt Anne (as Richard called her) died and on the very same day Arnold, in Belfast, had a stroke.
The Clarke family returned to Melbourne in 1978 and settled into a more stable life. In 1984, Aunt Edith passed away at the impressive age of 98. The issue of clearing Henbury then fell to Richard and his sister, Christine. To say that the aunts had held on to everything is putting it mildly. I have found receipts and hotel brochures from the post war era and multiple boxes of photographs of people we will never be able to identify.
Richard and Christine had to work out what would happen to a house full of antique furniture (much of it from their aunt’s childhood house in High Street, Gravesend) as well as books and letters, diaries and stamps, photos and paintings. What would happen was to pack most of it up, put it in a container and sail it across the seas to Australia where the drawers were repacked with the saved memorabilia and many boxes were stored without even being opened. The job of sorting through them was such a big one and there was little free time to dedicate to it amid busy family life.
In the early 1990s a portion of the letters began to be read by new eyes with a friend of the family deciding to include Edith and Winifred’s writings in a PHD. The discussions at this time piqued my interest and about fifteen years later, when Richard and Margaret retired and moved to a new house, I was only too happy to become custodian to the boxes of letters, diaries and photographs.
Clearing a space in a wardrobe in the study and I piled up the boxes and dragged them out every now and then to try to sort through and make sense of them. They were certainly fuel for the imagination—diaries dating back to 1898 telling of a holiday taken by a twelve-year-old girl on a three masted steam yacht owned by a rich aunt and of family holidays to the Victorian and Edwardian fashionable seaside resorts of England and train journeys to Scotland to spend more time with the rich aunt in huge houses nestled in the Scottish Highlands. Letters from Newnham College, Cambridge where one of the aunts studied in the first decade of the 20th century. Photos of girls performing drills and exercises at a college for physical education set up just for young women.
It was such fascinating stuff and I knew I wanted to do something with it—to bring it out into the world. Lurking behind the wealth of material written and collected by the aunts was the story of the youngest child, Richard Arnold Clarke, and the time he had spent as a Prisoner of War in Norway in the First World War.
Time passed quickly and my time was taken by the seemingly never-ending commitment of child raising and teaching and running a house whilst my husband worked away. In 2013, we were offered the opportunity to live in London for a year. We grasped the opportunity with eager hands, packed up three children, billeted out 2 dogs and set off. The year quickly turned into two years and before we knew it, we had bought a house and moved the contents of our storage facility into our new West London residence—the contents including 6 boxes of diaries and letters.
By this time, I was only home educating one child, the other two having made their way to tertiary education and I found myself with more time. It was exciting to open these boxes and start the adventure of sorting and discovering again. I dove headlong into transcribing the diaries and letters of Edith, Anne and Winifred and starting planning how I might bring these stories to life, but Arnold kept lurking in the background. Mentioned in letters but hard to find in the census and official documentation. He intrigued me.
I visited the National Archives in search of background information on the aunts and was reminded of the files I had looked at with my father-in-law some years back. The files dealing with the ship Arnold had been on during WW1 and the subsequent torpedo attack and internment of its crew. I decided I would come back