CAPTAIN ERIC FITZWATER WILKINSON MC, 8TH BATTALION WEST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT (2nd LEEDS RIFLES).

CAPTAIN ERIC FITZWATER WILKINSON MC, 8TH BATTALION WEST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT (2nd LEEDS RIFLES). KILLED IN ACTION 9th OCTOBER 1917 AGED 26.

In early October 1917 and whilst serving on the Western Front, Eric Wilkinson wrote in a letter to his mother, Lily, "..apart from a shrinking of the nerves which I have always had to conquer, I can honestly say that I have no fear of death in me..". Sadly, by the time his mother read these lines her youngest surviving son lay dead on Passchendaele Ridge.

Eric Wilkinson was born in Rochdale in 1891 the third of four sons born to Herbert and Lily Wilkinson. Herbert had worked in banking but seems to have had sufficient income to allow him to retire at an early age. The family moved to Dorset on the south coast where Eric attended the local Grammar School in Dorchester where he appears to have been a model student.

In 1904 the Wilkinson family moved to Ilkley where they lived in a house called Thornycroft on Bolling Road and Eric completed his schooling at Ilkley Grammar School. Academically gifted as well as possessing sporting prowess he was well liked by both staff and his peers. He also enjoyed writing poetry and several of his works were printed in the school magazine 'The Olicanian'.

                   Ilkley Grammar School Cricket Team 1906. Eric seated far left on middle row

At the age of 18 Eric left school and went on to Leeds University to study engineering and whilst there enrolled in the Officer Training Corps. In 1911 he returned to Ilkley Grammar where he was appointed as a master in the school. His parents seem to have moved back to Dorset and he lived in the school which then took boarders.

At the outbreak of war Eric sought a commission and was gazetted as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 8th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment known as the 2nd Leeds Rifles. The battalion arrived in France in April 1915, by which time he had been promoted to lieutenant. On 15th July that year the battalion were in the front line in the Nueve Chappelle sector when Eric and two other men went out on patrol into no-mans Land. One of the men, Rifleman Mudd, received a bullet wound to the chest and was badly wounded whose screams attracted the attention of the Germans who began machine gunning the three men. Together, Eric and Rifleman Gunn managed to drag their wounded comrade back to the British Lines. For his bravery Eric was awarded the Military Cross and Rifleman Gunn the Distinguished Service Medal.

It was about this time that Eric received a bayonet wound to the thigh, however, the circumstances are unknown. After treatment in hospital he was sent for convalescence and it seems that he began writing poetry again. Many of these poems survive as they were published during the war in a volume called 'Sunrise Dreams and other Poems'. To begin with his poems are somewhat patriotic in nature but he frequently resorts to the theme of death. However, it was the Somme offensive in 1916 that seems to have made a dramatic impact on the tone of his writing.

Eric had returned to the front after recuperation and in June 1916 was back with his battalion now preparing for the Somme Offensive. His best friend was another officer in the Leeds Rifles, Captain Leslie Hossell, and together they spent some time away from the trenches at Blackhorse Ridge in the valley of the River Somme.

Eric was wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme when the Leeds Rifles were involved in abortive attacks towards Thiepval. In a letter to his uncle Fitzwater Wray he described what happened:

His part in the great battle of July 1 1916 was the abortive attack on the stronghold of Thiepval. ‘During the night’ he wrote to me ‘I went up to support some men of another division in a trench we had taken and found it had been recaptured. I went in with twelve men and said ‘Hullo!’ to the first person I met, who promptly lobbed a bomb at me. Greatly scandalised, I said ‘English, you thundering fool!’ whereas he and divers unruly other companions did pelt us with bombs. Five of us got away, three wounded’. The horrid wound that fell to his share brought him back to Blighty. Writing from a hospital at Chatham he said ‘So far, we have abstracted one piece of bomb-casing and half a tunic but we suspect the presence of a pair of trousers as I came back the night it happened practically without, and they seem to have gone somewhere’.

It was whilst in hospital that Eric heard of the death in action of his friend Leslie Hossell and his poetry recalls their friendship and reflect a more sombre attitude towards the war. After treatment he was sent to convalesce at Cornwall Hall in Sevenoakes where he struck up a friendship with the Commandant of the hospital Kathleen Mansfield whom he wrote in a letter entirely in verse on the 26^th November 1916.

Dear Commandant

I’m sitting in a room,
The candle lighted, – all the rest in gloom.
Two candles, guttering from bottle necks,
Throw light, and shadow, onto tattered wrecks
Of walls and windows, broken chairs and beds,
(Where French civilians used to lay their heads)
– For you, must know, this used to be the home,
Of tillers of the clayey Picard loam.
The place was shelled to blazes by the Bosch,
– I’m sitting on a tub to write this tosche-.
And so we make our mess, and wake, and sleep
In ruined rooms where small rats crawl and creep
And great rats run, and leap, and gnaw anything
And all around, the desolation clings.
Yet we can sleep the night through, without fear:
No conscious sentries need be watchful here:
A mile behind the line, we’re ‘Out on Rest”,
And, when we go to bed, may get undressed,
Each day we take our men to dig and toil
To clear the trenches of the shell-blown soil
That now is heavy mud: each night, again
Return to billets, that keep out the rain,
To sleep; or, if our work is done at night,
– It sometimes is, – Sleep through the hours of light
Our own guns all around us roar and bay,
And Bosche shells, meant for them, come round our way
But, for six days, the front line, and its cares,
Night-watches, bullets, mortars, bombs and flares,
Are off our minds, and we can sit and write
To those we’ve often thought of in the night;
Or in that long slow hour, when laggard dawn
Peers through a drenching mist on fields forlorn,
Full often, in those hours, a vision seemed
To float before my eyes, or else I dreamed:
I saw the little hospital, and those, –
The memory of whose kindness only grows
With lapse of time; and oftentimes I swore
To write and tell the gratitude I bore.
So, Commandant, before I go to bed,
I call down blessings on your kindly head,
Please give the doc my love, and matron too,
And Sister Crump, and Flo, and all I knew.
And when the work seems hard, and old Fort Pitt,
Sends bounders round, whose manners aren’t a bit,
What colonels manners should be, far from it,
Just say ‘Our Patients’ gratitude is ours, –
‘What care we or the manners of the Powers
‘That Be’, and carry on the same old way.
So when I get a ‘blighty’ some great day
I can return to Seven Oaks and be
Once more a lucky patient in ward III
Believe me to remain, – till time is done

Yours gratefully – Eric F Wilkinson.

In 1917 Eric returned to his battalion in France and was promoted to captain. In July he was with them at Nieuport on the Belgian coast when he was severely gassed along with many of his men. It seems likely that he spent some time in hospital at Etaples in France. He was certainly there on September 11th when he played a leading role in a famous and notorious incident.

Etaples was a base camp where previously wounded soldiers returning to the front were prepared for duty in the trenches. The regime was notoriously harsh and during the summer of 1917 had led to tensions within the camp between the soldiers and the staff. This erupted in September into open mutiny where soldiers refused to follow orders and began running amok. Eric had been placed in charge of an armed picquet guarding the bridge from the camp when a large group of men approached and demanded to be let out. One man, Corporal Jesse Short moved towards Eric and shouted "that bugger ought to have a rope around his neck with a stone on it and be chucked into the river. Eric may have been assaulted but eventually order was restored. Short would be court martialled for his actions and was executed by firing squad. The incident was made famous in the 1980s BBC series 'The Monocled Mutineer.

A few days after these events Eric returned to his unit which was in the Ypres salient preparing for a major attack on the Passchendaele Ridge. At 5pm on the morning of 9th October 1917 the battalion prepared to move out of their assembly area to attack the Passchendale Ridge. Heavy rain made going hard and heavy German machine gun fire caused many British casualties. The Leeds Rifles lost over 300 men including their commanding officer and Eric who was last seen heading the enemy trenches.

Today Captain Eric Wilkinson has no known grave and is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing and remembered with pride on out war memorial in Ilkley.

Of his death his uncle wrote:

Last summer (1917) he was gassed:

‘The Bosche have been trying a new gas on us and I don’t think much of it’. But he was blind for three days and his sight permanently modified.

On Oct 9 last, leading the first wave of attack on some part of the Paschendale Ridge, he fell. His attitude toward death was summed up in some lines he had written:

Mourn not for me too sadly; I have been
For months of an exalted life, a King,
Peer for these months of those whose graves grow green
Where’re the borders of our empire fling
Their mighty arms. And if the crown is death,
Death while I’m fighting for my home and King,
Thank God! The son who drew from you his breath
To death could bring
A not entirely worthless sacrifice,
Because of those brief months when life meant more
Than selfish pleasures. Grudge not then the price
But say, ‘Our country in the storm of war
Has found him fit to fight and die for her.’
And lift your heads in pride for evermore.
but when the leaves the evening breezes stir
Close not the door.
But listen to the wind that hurries by,
To all the Song of Life for tones you knew;
For in the voice of birds, the scent of flowers,
The evening silence and the falling dew,
Through every throbbing pulse of Nature’s powers
I’ll speak to you

And again:

The mother who sent him bowed her head
And wept for the lad she bore;
Yet never she grudged her sacred dead,
For her country’s need was sore
‘He died for his King and the Right,
She said,

Thanks to Sevenoakes WW1 for information about his time in No 76 VAD Hospital and the comments made by Fitzwater Wray and James Cooper for the photographs.

From the Ilkley Gazette