Frequently Asked Questions
- Why did you call the book ‘The Death of The ‘Dukes’?
- In 1967 General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley GBE KCB DSO + Bar MC had written a book about 1st Ypres entitled ‘The Death of an Army’. As my book covered the same period but only concerned one constituent part of ‘The Old Contemptibles’ I decided to give it a similar title but relating only to The ‘Dukes’. I had hoped that more people would ‘get’ the connection.
- How did you come to write such a book on The ‘Dukes’?
- ‘While undertaking family research in the early 2000s my brother, Bob, discovered the WWI letters of Lt Rowland Hely Owen of 2nd Battalion The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment - our grandfather’s Battalion. Later, while undertaking more research at the Regimental HQ of the ‘Dukes’ in Halifax we discovered that one of the archivists there, Cyril Ford, had researched Lt Owen’s family history. Believing that Owen’s letters deserved a wider audience we decided to write them up into a book for possible publication. The 50 letters only amounted to about 25,000 words - when the accepted amount for a slim history volume seemed to be around 60,000 words. At that stage I really didn’t know where I was going to find another 35,000 words from. A historian friend advised me to place the letters into the timeline of the war and the Battalion’s part in it. In 2007 the service records of WWI soldiers became available on-line and, by some form of luck, I was able to find the majority of the records of the men who had embarked to war with our grandfather in August, 1914. By putting the details of those men onto spreadsheets I was able to produce a number of ‘never-before-seen’ statistics relating to an original battalion of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).
- What compelled you add a Part II to the book to include in-depth analyses of Wasmes and of the original battalion?
- It struck me that there were suddenly many books of ‘letters home from the front’ being published in the lead up to the centenary of WWI but what we had was possibly something entirely different. We had Rowland’s letters and a timeline of the first ten months of WWI with many first-hand accounts but, additionally, we had enough raw data to provide a complete analysis of the ‘original’ 2nd Battalion. So, I took it entirely upon myself to write the resulting book in two separate parts dealing, in Part I, with the first ten moths of WWI during which time most of the ‘original’ Battalion, including Lt Rowland Hely Owen, were ‘lost’, and Part II with an analysis of what really happened at the Battle at Wasmes and a statistical analysis of the ‘original’ Battalion.
As my research had grown I had became increasingly puzzled as to what had actually transpired at Wasmes on 24th August, 1914, because the ‘Dukes’ casualty figures from that battle varied from ‘around 300’ to ‘over 500’ depending on the source. The Official History of the war gives the figure as 400. The empirical figures for the ‘Dukes’ ‘losses’ at Wasmes proved somewhat surprising!
Ultimately, it took me about ten years longer than I had originally anticipated to complete all the research and to write the book. However, my initial concern about not having enough material to achieve 60,000 words was not to be borne out by the fact that the final 604 page book contains almost 300,000 words! Even then I had to leave out a lot of material and photographs, etc. After the book was printed more information started to come in which is why we have a section of this website dedicated to ‘Additional Information’.
This is a unique venture. I don’t think anyone has done something like this before about an ‘original’ Battalion of the BEF, so if you would like to find out what really became of the entirety of one of the first Battalions into France & Flanders in 1914 then give it a read.
Profits from the book are going to Registered Charity No 246188.
Graham SARGEANT (Author)
