Frank Jarvis
Frank Jarvis
was born in Felsted in 1896.
He was the son Mr and Mrs Robert Jarvis, of Bannister
Green, Felsted.
In 1901 the census records the family as living in one of the Gate
Cottages at Pond Park:
Robert Jarvis - 37 - Horseman
Elizabeth Jarvis - 41
Albert - 9
Frank - 4
The 1911 census again records the family living at Pond Park Gate,
Felstead:
Robert Jarvis - age 48 - Horseman on Farm - born Felstead
Elizabeth Jarvis - age 53 - born Felstead
Annie Jarvis - age 30 - servant domestic - born Felstead
Frank Jarvis - age 14 - Houseboy Domestic - born Felstead
Frank Jarvis served as a Private soldier in the 1st/5th Battalion the Border Regiment. He died aged 22 on 2nd October 1918. He is buried at Bellicourt British Cemetery. (Photograph courtesy Chris Weekes)
The Essex Weekly News of 15th November 1918 carried the following in its Roll of Honour:
Pte. Frank Jarvis, Border Regt., killed on Oct 2, was the youngest son of Mr. Robert Jarvis, Pond Park Gate, Felsted, and was 23 years of age.
A VALIANT ESSEX BOY by Chris Weekes
Felsted is a typical village near to the county town of Chelmsford in Essex. It was the area in the early 20th century where my maternal grand mother’s extended family of Jarvises lived and worked as part of the enormous agricultural industry. My grandmother, Winifred Jarvis, was born in 1902 into a large family who lived on Woods Farm Bannister Green Felsted where her father Arthur was the farm bailiff. Arthur had a cousin Robert Jarvis who was a horseman and lived at Pond Gate Cottages Felsted with his sons Albert born 1892 and Frank born 1896.
At the outbreak of the war in August 1914 Frank was working in domestic service and unlike his brother he had not joined the territorials so had not been called up in 1914/15. Unfortunately, his army service records have not survived so that I have had to rely on other sources of information to construct a picture of his WW1 experiences. As his name appears on the Felsted War memorial we know that he died so that the starting point was to look at the Soldiers Died in the Great War data base. This tells us that he enlisted at Braintree Essex and at the time of his death in October 1918 he was serving with the Border Regiment. Finding his Medal Index card shows that he was initially in the Essex regiment before transferring to the Borderers. According to Ian Hook of the Essex Regiment Museum, Frank was put into the 3/6 Battalion Essex Regiment, a training unit and was sent overseas to a depot in France before being transferred to the 3/5 Border regiment no 5598. This is confirmed from the Medal Roll of the Border regiment at Kew and by Stuart Eastwood the curator of the Border Regiment museum in Carlisle. His database shows that 175 men were transferred from the Essex to the Border Regiment in the late summer of 1916. To find out more about this I sought the assistance of Chris Baker’s Fourteeneighteen research. This confirmed the above but also added that Frank Jarvis might have volunteered under the Derby Scheme between January and March 1916 or have been conscripted on 2 March 1916 and mobilized on 27th March 1916. Being in the 3/6 Essex training battalion he would have done his basic training at Halton Park in Buckinghamshire before being posted with a draft of other Essex men to France on 29 August 1916. However, before embarking for France they appear to have been transferred to the 3/5 Battalion Borderers another home based training unit. The army bureaucracy was such that as a territorial the only way to be transferred from one regiment to another was firstly to be transferred to another territorial unit. What is unusual about Frank Jarvis is that these paper transfer exercises are recorded on the Border Regiment Medal Roll so that we have the total picture of his army career. So Frank and the 175 other Essex men moved from the base depot to the 7th Battalion Borderers on 25 September 1916 and he became Private 27587.
The 7th Battalion
Border regiment part of Kitchener’s New Army had been in France since July
1915 and was in the 51st brigade of 17th (Northern)
Division. It had been involved in the Somme on July 3rd around
Fricourt and in August it had held Delville Wood before being moved to St
Amand on 4th September 1916. According to the Regimental history
of the Great War by H C Wylly, when Frank joined the 7th
Battalion it was behind the front lines at Ville sur Ancre. In November it
was moved back into the front line at Trones Wood . The 7th
Battalion War diary WO 95/ 2008 entry for 1st November 1916 says
"Relieved the
Sherwood Foresters in the front line. Relief was difficult because of
darkness, absence of landmarks and the state of communication trenches which
were waist deep in mud"
On 2 November, the Battalion
attacked the German Zenith trench which was a complete success in the moon
light with few casualties. The Battalion was relieved and went back to
Montauban village where it received the commendation of the C in C Field
Marshall Haig
"C in C desires that
his congratulations on the well won success may be conveyed to the G O C
Division and to the officers and men of the battalions who carried out the
operation."
December 1916 was spent in training and brigade reserve at Guillemont including Christmas festivities. The War diary gives no description of how they celebrated Christmas or what they ate but although it must have been very different to a family Christmas in Felsted, I am certain that much was done to help the men forget the war for just a day .
The organizational structure of the B E F was based upon sections, platoons, companies, battalions, divisions, corps and armies. The men most associated themselves with their regimental battalion, the core unit of the fighting machine which was constantly being revised through wartime experiences. Haig as C in C had to manage and manipulate his forces up and down a front line which, as the war progressed, got longer and longer as the B E F took over more ground from the French. Thus it was in the spring of 1917 that the 17th Division was moved about like a pawn in a giant game of military chess. In March 1917 it began in XIVth Corps of 4th Army, then got moved to II nd Corps of 5th Army before going to XIXth Corps of 3rd Army. At this time it was around Gezaincourt S .W. of Doullens training for the Battle Of Arras.
The Battle of Arras is not as well known as the Somme or Third Ypres and yet, in 39 days from 9th April to 17th May it became the most bitter contest for the infantry battalions. The result was 159000 casualties a daily rate of 4076 compared with 2923 on the Somme and 2323 at Passchendaele. Yet, Arras was only a diversionary battle agreed reluctantly by Haig to take the enemy’s attention away from a planned French assault in the Champagne. Had Arras only lasted until 14th April it would have been extremely successful with a relatively low casualty rate. Haig was forced to carry on into May 1917 with greater casualty rates and long term consequences for the 7th Borderers and Frank Jarvis personally.
The 7th Battalion
war Diary tells us that they eventually arrived in Arras on 10th
April and went into the cellars of the Library Museum. The City was full of
B E F troops many of whom were living in the tunnels under the city dug by
the tunneling companies. The War Diary entry for 10/4/1917 says
"Battalion at 50
minutes notice to move. Weather still severe. Snow blizzard. The inveterate
propensity of the British soldier to light fires and make tea at the
slightest opportunity was again emphasized."
On 11th April 51st
Brigade which had been in the Divisional reserve moved to Railway Triangle
north of the village of Monchy le Preux and occupied dugouts in the railway
embankment. They were not used for any of the attacks so that on 21st April
they were back in the library cellars for a bath and a rest. This was short
lived for on 22nd April they moved into support and then
communication trenches and on 23rd the 51st Brigade attacked on
the North side of the River Scarpe. This heralded the recommencement of the
Battle of Arras along the whole front. As said before Haig had wanted to end
it after 14th April and to concentrate his forces in Ypres to the
North. He was not allowed to do this and the consequence was that the
German’s had had ample time to beef up their defences. On St George’s Day 23rd
April 1917 7th Borderers found themselves attacking on the east
of the Village of Pelves, north of Monchy le Preux. The 7th
Battalion war diary provides a detailed explanation of the attack and its
objectives.
"At Zero hour 4 45 am
a standing barrage was put down on Bayonet trench. A creeping barrage began
200 yards west of Bayonet trench and moved at a rate of 3 minutes per 100
yards. Both barrages lifted at plus 10 and then crept E at a rate of 4
minutes per 100 yards as far as the Blue line. Two tanks were detailed for
the attack on Pelves. Battalion advanced at zero hour."
7th Borderers were attacking Bayonet trench but did not get far as they came under intense machine gun fire from River Trench and from across the other side of the river Scarpe. The survivors had to withdraw back to the assembly trenches from where they had attacked. Many men were caught in shell holes and had to find their way back under cover of darkness. In the early hours of April 24th 7th Battalion survivors were ordered back to the Railway Triangle. The battalion had suffered heavily with 19 killed, 186 wounded and 214 missing. Jonathan Nicholls in his excellent book on the Battle of Arras “Cheerful Sacrifice” describes how the 7th Borderers and South Staffords of 17th Division lead the assault up the slopes between the river Scarpe and Monchy le Preux. The Colonel of the Border regiment had said to his men “ Bayonets will be fixed for dealing with the enemy at close quarters with cold steel“”
BUT the Border men mainly miners, dalesmen and farmers from Kendal, Whitehaven and Cockermouth together with the Essex agricultural boys never got anywhere near to the enemy to use their bayonets.
An eye witness in the 7th
Battalion recounts the 23rd April 1917 St George’s Day.
"It was my
first and last action. I was totally terrified. I kept well back from the
creeping barrage. You could see shells bursting only 50 Yards in front. The
barbed wire was not properly cut. There were paths through the wire and like
animals we crowded into the paths. Machine guns were trained on the gaps,
blokes fell in heaps. I never saw a single German that day yet the whole
battalion was wiped out."
This is what Frank Jarvis experienced and more than likely he had the same feelings as his fellow 7th Battalion man. The same fate befell the 8th South Staffords and 7th Lincolns of the 51st Brigade the latter lost 200 men in five minutes !!!! This attack was a return to the slaughter rates of the early Somme.
Next day an officer from the 7th
Borderers wrote to his wife.
"We had a very rotten
day yesterday. Nearly all the officers who did the attack were killed or
wounded. I got through all right but was out in No Man’s land from 5 30 am
to 9 30 pm and then managed to get past in front of the Boche line with some
of my company in the dark "
None of Frank Jarvis’s Service records have survived so we do not know officially whether he was one of the many wounded on 23rd April. However his medal roll entry shows that at some point he was in the 3rd ( Reserve ) Battalion Border regiment which was a UK based training unit. This suggests that he had been wounded and been sent back to a UK hospital and then onto a Border regiment training unit which in 1917 was based at Great Crosby near Liverpool. According to the Long, Long Trail website, 57% of wounded men were sent back to the UK for treatment and convalescence. Obviously Frank Jarvis wounds were not serious enough to prevent him from travelling so he had what was known as a “Blighty one”. Whilst the list of military hospitals is easily available, I can find no explanation as to how it was decided where an individual wounded man was sent. As the casualty lists expanded so did the range of hospitals across the country. In addition, command depots were established to provide rehabilitation prior to a return to the regimental training depot. So Frank must have gone through the process of treatment, recovery, convalescence, rehabilitation and retraining in the 3rd (Reserve) Borders. With no surviving service records, we have no precise date as to when Frank returned to the Front but we do know that he was sent back to join the 6th Battalion Borderers sometime in the summer of 1917.
The 6th Border regiment was in the 33rd Brigade 11th (Northern) Division. This Division had been in Gallipoli before joining the latter part of the Battle of the Somme and in the late summer of 1917 had just been involved in the Messines Ridge attack. According to the War Diary WO95/1817 in August 1917 the 6th Battalion was at St Julien, Ypres sector when it received 153 OR’s as reinforcement prior to its involvement in the Battle of Langemarck. Frank was likely to have been one of them. On 22 August at 4 45 am the barrage commenced and after 42 minutes it moved forward followed by C and D companies of 6th Borderers. In spite of intense enemy machine gun and artillery fire they achieved their objective and consolidated it so that on the night of 24/25th August they were relieved by the South Staffords. There were more stints in the front line trenches before on 29th August they were taken out of the action having suffered 74 casualties. Frank was back where he had left off in April 1917 in the thick of a battle.
The War diary tells us that September 1917 was spent in training around Houtkerque and then on 4th October they returned to the front line as support to the 33rd brigade but in fact not being used in any action. The remainder of 1917 saw many moves around the area ending with a spell in a hut camp at Nouex les Mines.
1918 dawned with the B E F defending a larger section of the front line and rumours of a big German offensive circulating .The high rate of attrition in the 1917 offensives had taken its toll and, as we now know, Lloyd George’s reluctance even refusal to release UK based reserves resulted in a reorganization of the Divisional composition of the B E F in France. The number of battalions in each brigade was reduced from 4 to 3. Thus it was on 4th February 7 officers and 150 OR’s of company C left the 6th Battalion to join the ranks of the 11th Battalion Border Regiment known as the Lonsdales having been formed by the Earl of Lonsdale in 1914. Frank was one of these men as we can see from the very lengthy Medal Roll. He was now in his fifth different battalion of the Border regiment since August 1916!
The 11th Battalion was in the 97th Brigade of the 32nd Division and in February 1918 it was in Caribou Camp near to Elverdinghe, Ypres where it had carried out a number of daring trench raids on the enemy prior to his Spring offensive. When the offensive commenced on 21st March 1918 the 11th Battalion was hastily moved south to take up defensive positions around Moyenneville and Ayette. From their War Diary it appears that the 11th took little part in what became known as the first Battle of the Somme 1918 or the St Michael offensive to the Germans.
This was effectively the end of the Lonsdales active fighting because on May 10th the 5th and 11th Battalions of the Border Regiment were amalgamated and the 11th part was despatched to Feuquieres to train the incoming “dough boys” of the 328 US infantry Division. This they did until on 31st July 1918 the 11th Battalion was officially disbanded and the men, including Frank Jarvis, transferred to the 1/5th Battalion. remaining in the 32nd Division.
Frank had been fortunate in
that he and his Border comrades had managed to avoid the battles of the Lys
and the Aisne . On 6th August the 1/5th Battalion and
its new recruits was inspected by George V and was then immediately moved to
the front by train and foot ready for an attack on the railway line between
Hallencourt and Fresnoy. This was the beginning of the Battle of Amiens, the
last great battle and the 100 Days to Victory. In the book “Amiens 1918”
reference is made to the 1/5th Battalion involvement
"10th
August ------ 5th Battalion Border regiment on the left the
advance at first went smoothly. Against stiffening opposition the Borderers
reached the 1916 British Front line at 10am. Ahead lay the ominous 1916 No
Man’s land the site of one of history’s greatest slaughters."
The Battalion was having quite
an effect on the action so much so that they were receiving compliments from
other units. The Regimental history mentions one.
"We are all proud of
what the Borders have been and are doing. Please give them our best wishes
and congratulations. Brig General Ford"
On 5th September the forward momentum continued as the 97th Brigade crossed the river Somme at Brie. Nothing seemed able to stop the allies as they swept on so that by 6th September the 5th was on the Tertry--- Peronne road. On 12th September battalion was relieved and went back to Villers Bretonneux for a well earned rest.
On 24th September it marched back to the rapidly moving front. The 32nd division was now in IX th Corps of the 4th Army. On 29th September this Corps was to attack the Hindenburg Line with the 46th (North Midlands) division in the front supported by the 32nd. They crossed the St Quentin canal and on October 1st 1918 they attacked Joncourt at 8am successfully taking the village and moving on at 4pm to attack Sequehert which was taken by the Royal Scots. The 5th Borders entered the village of Preselles but heavy machine gun fire forced them out and they had to withdraw to a Railway Embankment overlooked by enemy artillery from higher ground to the east. On October 2nd the battalion’s position in this railway embankment was heavily shelled by the enemy resulting in one killed and 17 wounded. Sadly the one killed was Frank Jarvis the valiant Essex farm boy who had survived over two years of fighting only to die 6 weeks before the end of the war.
The 32nd Division
was withdrawn exhausted from the advance for rest and recuperation. The
Divisional Commander made an appreciation of the 97th Brigade.
"He realises the
extreme difficulty of the operations and that though apparently costly
especially in the last 2 days, the casualties caused to us are small
compared with those inflicted on the enemy."
The doctrine of attrition which had been at the centre of the B E F ‘s strategy from 1915 held fast in those last 100 days.
Chris Baker’s fourteeneighteen
research on Frank Jarvis concludes thus:
"On October 2nd
1918 32nd Division were in the fourth day of a continuous
advance. The British army had effected a major break through of the
Hindenburg Line and was advancing on a broad front. 5th Borderers
had commenced their attack on 29th September and by 1st
October had sustained considerable casualties and were tiring."
Frank Jarvis Private 27587 is
buried in Bellicourt British Cemetery which was started after the battle in
late 1918 and significantly enlarged after the armistice through the
consolidation of many surrounding small cemeteries. It may be that Frank was
initially buried in one of these. His parents must have been informed
relatively quickly after October 2nd. His death was reported on
November 8th in the Essex Chronicle and on November 15th
in the Essex weekly News Roll of Honour.
"Pte Frank Jarvis
Border Regiment killed on October 2nd. Son of Mr Robert Jarvis
Pond Park Gate Felstead and was 23 years of age."
As is always the case, those
who died in WW1 are well commemorated and Frank Jarvis is no exception. His
name appears in the data base Soldiers Died in the Great War 1914 – 1919, in
the Bellicourt British Cemetery, on the Felsted village war memorial and
Rolls of Honour in its two churches and notably in the Border
Regiment’s Roll of Honour in Carlisle Cathedral which has the inscription;
LET THOSE WHO
COME AFTER SEE TO IT THAT THEIR NAMES BE NOT FORGOTTEN.
Frank is not forgotten and as we move closer to the centenary of the Great War we can celebrate his short life and his bravery and courage.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NATIONAL
ARCHIVES KEW LONDON Medal index cards
Medal Rolls
WAR DIARIES
WO95/2008 7TH BATTALION BORDERS
WO95/1817 6TH BATTALION BORDERS
W095/2403 11TH BATTALION BORDERS
WO95/2402 1/5TH BATTALION BORDERS
THE BORDER
REGIMENT IN THE GREAT WAR by H C WYLLY GALE & POLDEN
Pages 97,98,103,129 to 132,151.152.173,174,179 to 181 195 to 197 , and 218
to 221.
CHEERFUL SACRIFICE by JONATHAN NICHOLLS PEN and SWORD 2005 Page 187.
MONCHY LE PREUX by COLIN FOX PEN and SWORD 2000 Page 73.
AMIENS 1918 The Last Great Battle by MCWILLIAMS & STEEL HISTORY PRESS 2008 Page 234
FOURTEENEIGHTEEN RESEARCH by CHRIS BAKER
CARLISLE CATHEDRAL ROLL OF HONOUR
CUMBRIA’S MILITARY MUSEUM CARLISLE
ESSEX REGIMENT MUSEUM CHELMSFORD
FELSTED ROLL OF HONOUR
WFA/IWM MAPS OF THE FRONT
MICHELIN 301 LOCAL MAP PAS DE CALAIS