Identifying the interviewees from the 1964 BBC series: The Great War

[Private Baldrick]

Hello everyone

 

Since the 1964 BBC documentary series: The Great War, did not name most its interviewees, I thought that it would be useful to create a list of everyone who appeared in the series. The following information has come from Max Arthur's: Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Peter Hart's: Voices from the Front: An Oral History of the Great War, the Imperial War Museum's: Voices of the First World War podcasts, and from listening to interviews within the Imperial War Museum's Sound Archive. I would like thank Detlef Siebert for helping me to identify Mr Fursse, Mr von Boschen, Alessandro Magri MacMahon, Mrs Meiler, Mr Boger and Anne Guillemin. Although I have listed the interviewees in order of their appearances per episode, I have also included a quote from each of them, to avoid confusion about who is who.

 

Episode 3:

 

 

 

·         Stefan Westmann, German soldier: “The French retreated with such a haste that we actually had to run after them.”

 

 

 

·         Germaine Soltau, Belgian civilian: “On Thursday the 20^th of August, the Germans entered Brussels. It was a marvellous sunny day, but still I keep the vision of grey all over the town.”

 

 

·         Francois Dolbau: French soldier: “We were shot down like rabbits, because for them it was a real target, because we had red trousers.”

 

 

·         Edward Spears, British officer: “The news had just come in that the German armies were making for a place on the Meuse called Huy – it’s a very difficult word to pronounce in English.”

 

 

 

·         Cuthbert Euan Rabagliati, British Pilot: “We found the whole area completely covered with hordes of field grey uniforms and heavy stuff.”

 

 

 

Episode 4:

 

 

 

·         Walter Burchmore, British soldier: “Quite suddenly, out of the blue, we saw cavalry coming towards us. They’d come out on our right flank. I said: “Good gracious it’s Germans!”, so we immediately started to fire.”

 

 

·         Edward Spears

 

 

·         Henry E. Dally, British soldier: “We’d hardly got our head covered before the ridge about ¾ of a mile away was literally swarming with Germans in field grey uniforms. They advanced and we received the order to rapid fire.”

 

 

·         Robert Cotton Money, British officer: “We were in reserve and the brigade was formed up and orders came that we were required on the left of the line.”

 

 

 

·         John Willis Palmer, British soldier: “I’ve seen infantry there with their feet bleeding. I’ve seen infantry with their boots off and putties wrapped round them. I’ve seen men sobbing and turning round and asking our officers, why the hell can’t we fight, why won’t you let us fight?”

 

 

 

·         Frederick Atkinson, British soldier: “We came across two girls – only young girls they were just helping each other along and they could hardly drag one foot before the other.”

 

 

 

·         Stefan Westmann

 

 

·         A.E. Davis, British soldier: “Shortly after, we passed a place called Villers-Cotterets, which was when the nearness of Paris began to penetrate our tiredness and we noticed the kilometre stones in the side of the road – gradually we were getting nearer and nearer to Paris. 25. 24. 23.”

 

 

Episode 5:

 

 

 

·         Edward Spears

 

 

·         A.E. Davis

 

 

·         Richard Tobin, British soldier: “Some shrapnel. A few high explosives. And then, high in the sky, a train like rumble and whistle – ending with an explosion in the city of Antwerp.”

 

 

 

·         Stefan Westmann

 

 

·         T W Dove, British soldier: “War had been declared and the following Sunday I went with a friend of mine to Shepherd’s Bush Empire to see the picture show there.”

 

 

 

·         Henry Williamson, British soldier: “The whole of no-man’s land, as far as we could see, was grey in khaki. There they were smoking and talking.”

 

 

Episode 6:

 

 

 

·         Kurt Dehn, German officer: “One of the officers on-board the ship where I served, said on one of the first days after the outbreak of war: “I’m quite sure all of us will find our boats lying at the bottom of the sea within the next 10 days.”

 

·         Alfred Frank Joys, British sailor: “It was already while we was breaking the surface of the coal, but as you got lower and lower into the hold, then it got terrible, in fact you was eating coal dust all the time you was down there.”

 

 

·         Khonoma Beaumont-Walker, British officer: “We sent out a mixed patrol – ourselves and the Japanese – and they shot one of our men.”

 

 

·         Thomas Rees, British soldier: “We were out resting, out on the 6^th and 7^th and we got behind the ridge – nice cover, and all of a sudden the Japanese officer came in on horseback, full gallop. He said: Germans finished. Germans finished.”

 

 

·         Sylvester G. Pawley, British sailor: “We formed single line ahead, and Good Hope fired a ranging shot, which was short.”

 

 

·         Ernest Amis, British sailor: “We could feel one or two shots coming and hitting us.”

 

 

·         Alfred J.E. Blackmore, British sailor: “We annihilated her – brought her to rest – and she was in a very bad position.”

 

 

Episode 7:

 

 

 

·         Victor Packer, British soldier: “We’d been brought up on histories of the Boer war and patriotism, heroics and everything. We thought the war was going to be over before we could get there.”

 

 

 

·         Gustav Lachmann, German officer: “The Russian soldier was a very good soldier provided he was properly led.”

 

 

·         George Hancox, Canadian soldier: “Incidentally, every time our artillery opened up on them at that particular time, they would come back tenfold. If our artillery fired 5 or 6 rounds – they’d fire 50 to 60 back at us.”

 

 

·         Cyril A. Lee, British soldier: “Always it was that unequal bashing that got the infantrymen. If we got a gun at all – we had a machine gun it’s true – but that was only a puny effort.”

 

 

 

·         Stanley Down, British soldier: “The earthworks and the barbed wire, such as they were, had been blown to pieces long since.”

 

 

 

·         E.J. Quick, British soldier: “A corporal said to me: come along here. It was a homemade mortar. It looked to me like a piece of rainwater pipe and it was bound all round with what appeared to be a leather swab to take the resistance.”

 

 

 

·         A. Fletcher, British officer: “It was a base ammunition depot for several armies and it was I suppose an ex-builders yard – consisted of about a couple of sheds, a room to put a couple of railway wagons in.”

 

 

 

·         William Rae, Canadian officer: “At about 4pm in the afternoon there was a very heavy bombardment and a little later on we saw the effects of this. The first thing was hundreds of French troops running away.”

 

 

 

·         William Underwood, Canadian soldier: “We tried to rally them as they got level with us and they wouldn’t stay.”

 

 

 

·         W. A. Quinton, British soldier: “One chap had his hand blown off and wrist was fumbling around here at his throat.”

 

 

 

·         Victor Hawkins, British officer: “The effect of this gas was to form a sort of foamy liquid in one’s lungs and more or less drown one – if you were unlucky, because of lot of the men died pretty quickly.”

 

 

 

·         Alan Bray, British soldier, “Half of us were knocked out, either killed or wounded. And going across the meadow – there were a lot more killed and we all stopped and laid down, trying to get what shelter we could from the tremendous rifle fire.”

 

 

 

·         George William Guest, British soldier: “We were in battery of 15 pounders – four guns – and consistently short of ammunition and being allowed four rounds per day.”

 

 

 

Episode 8:

 

 

 

·         Katie Morter, British woman: “Times was very very hard and I only had 12 and 6 a week and therefore I couldn’t go out and spend like anyone else.”

 

 

·         Norman Demuth, British soldier: “They hadn’t any conception of what it was like and on occasions when I did talk about it, my father would argue points of fact that he couldn’t possibly have known about because he wasn’t there.”

 

 

·         Frank Browning: “In 1915, I drove Mr Lloyd George when he was Minister of Munitions on his munitions tour of wales, going from town to town.”

 

 

 

·         Walter Greenwood, British man: “Groups began to form and somebody rushed round and said Keppel’s old butcher’s shop had been broken into by a crowd, and all the eatables stolen.”

 

 

 

·         Harold Carter, British soldier: “I went to the music hall in civilian clothes. A lady come along a white feather in my hand. I looked at it, felt completely disgusted and there wasn’t much I could do about it.”

 

 

 

·         Mary Brough-Robertson, British woman: “These girls were drawn from domestic service, mills, and shops mostly.”

 

 

 

·         M. Hall, British woman: “It was terribly hard, terribly monotonous – but we had a purpose and we meant to do that work and we did.”

 

 

 

Episode 9:

 

 

 

·         Walter Stagles, Australian soldier: “It was pitch dark, then all of a sudden the outline of the cliffs loomed up. As we got closer we were all getting tensed up our nerves wondering what was going to happen, it was so quiet.”

 

 

 

·         W. Flynn, British soldier: “Well they opened up on the shore, they was firing machine guns, rifles, they had these nice little pom-poms shells – they was hitting off the side of the ship and ripping people to pieces and even the bullet if they missed you was hitting people and tearing pieces off.”

 

 

 

·         Frank Brent, Australian soldier: “It was about the most precarious position a bloke could find himself in.”

 

 

 

·         Henry Bowen Barnes, Australian soldier: “I wasn’t one of those burying the dead but I sat on the parapet and afterwards walked over and offered bully beef to one Turk and he smiled and seemed very pleased and passed me two strings of dates.”

 

 

 

·         Henry Blaskett, Australian soldier: “During the day, you could see the vultures heading down towards the bodies, to both Turkish and our own men, and occasionally we would take potshot at them to try and keep them off, particularly if we though there was somebody wounded out in front.”

 

 

·         R.J. Carless, British soldier: “It was a very weakening thing. We walked about after a time like skeletons, finding it difficult even to move at times and of course if one went out of the line, heavy things to lift on fatigue: water carrying, helping to dig roads and so on.”

 

 

 

·         Joseph Murray, British soldier: “The tears were streaming down my cheeks, I just couldn’t restrain them.”

 

 

Episode 10:

 

 

 

·         William Eisenthal, Austrian officer: “The scenery was really marvellous. Just imagine, on top of a 6000 ft mountain – something which tourists come from far away to see.”

 

 

·         Ernest Todd, British soldier: “On a nice summer’s day, you could think: “There wasn’t a war on really.”

 

 

 

·         Richard Talbott Kelly, British officer: “You’re chiefly afraid, you know, of how you will behave when you really meet the worst things that war can produce and I became afraid of seeing my first dead man.”

 

 

 

·         E, Gold, British officer: “I went up to see Sir Douglas Haig, who came out with a light and saw the charts.”

 

 

 

·         John Willis Palmer

 

 

·         Charles Lippett, British soldier: “We hadn’t the faintest idea where we were going and we sang the usual soldiers’ song – Tipperary and all those sorts of things.”

 

 

·         Edward Glendinning, British soldier: “If you can imagine a flock of sheep lying down sleeping in a field, they were as thick as that.”

 

 

Episode 12:

 

 

 

·         Francis Barker Vaughan, British soldier, “We saw that the Canadians were coming, the Australians were coming, the South Africans were coming – they were catching the first available boat to England before the war was over.”

 

 

 

·         Walter Groves, British soldier: “We went to the nearest recruiting officer – none of us knew much about the army.”

 

 

 

·         Reginald Glenn, British soldier: “Our training was done in the local parks and for rifles we had broomsticks.”

 

 

 

·         Charles Carrington, British officer: “When you came out of the line, you were mentally tired, but you were also physically tired and you hoped you were going to get a rest.”

 

 

 

·         Harold Carter

 

 

Episode 13:

 

 

 

·         Stefan Westmann

 

 

·         Reginald J. Mason, British soldier: “Finding I was almost alone I got down to see where the nearest man was. Well, no one else seemed to be standing.”

 

 

·         Charles Taylor, British soldier: “I started crawling towards our lines and I had never seen so many dead men clumped together.”

 

 

·         Arthur Brown, British soldier: “One or two of the guards as they walked by shouted: when are you ******** coming up here? So we said: we’ll up there mate, don’t worry!”

 

 

·         Frank Brent

 

 

·         Marjorie Llewelyn, British woman: “Sheet after sheet of dead and wounded and missing were in day after day, and the first thing one did was to see if there was anyone there whom one knew.”

 

 

 

·         Jack W. Critchley, British soldier: “But then one day, I were in the back of the line and somebody came along and said the war’s finished, just go down about half a mile down the road and look in a field there, you’ll see.”

 

 

·         Sydney White, British soldier: “We cursed these things because as they passed the telephone dugout, we had telephone wires going out from the dugout, radiating like spokes on a bicycle going out to the flanks, to the guns in the rear and to the infantry in the front.”

 

 

 

·         Wilfred Staddon, British officer: “I looked around the countryside through the binoculars and I saw a German howitzer being limbered up.”

 

 

 

·         Richard Henry Tobin

 

 

Episode 14:

 

 

 

·         Mary Brough-Robertson

 

 

·         Katie Morter

 

 

·         Alfred J.E. Blackmore

 

 

·         Charles Falmer, British sailor: “There was a terrific explosion. The guns went up in the air just like matchsticks.”

 

 

·         A.P. Smith, British sailor: “When I saw the Invincible after the explosion – she was just to me one flaming letter V.”

 

 

Episode 15:

 

 

 

·         Philip Sylvester, British soldier: “We used to have to sleep in our clothes and our boots we used to place under our bodies because they used to stiff in the bodies and one couldn’t get them on.”

 

 

 

·         Henry Williamson

 

 

·         George Hancox

 

 

·         Stefan Westmann

 

 

·         Pierre Gautier, French soldier: “We could see that everything in the German line was in order. The machine guns, the men and everything, and even in some the barbed wire was still in place.”

 

 

 

·         Edward Spears

 

 

Episode 17:

 

 

 

·         Alfred James Bromfield, British soldier: “I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t think much of urinating on the handkerchiefs – I didn’t think it was sufficient protection.”

·       

 

Gordon Carey, British officer: “The first idea that sort of flitted through my mind was that the end of the world had come.”

 

 

·         Bryan Frayling, British officer: “The essence of mining in the clay area was silence and secrecy. We wore felt slippers, rubber wheeled trolleys, wooden rails and we spoke in whispers.”

 

 

 

·         Cecil Arthur Lewis, British pilot: “Then suddenly, the whole earth heaved and up from the ground came what really looked more like two enormous Cyprus trees.”

 

 

·         John Roll, Australian sapper: “The whole hillside – everything rocked like a ship at sea.”

 

 

 

·         Richard Talbot Kelly

 

 

·         Richard Henry Tobin

 

 

·         Sydney White

 

 

·         William Bunning, Australian soldier: “It was really surprising to look across and see before you – the green fields of Belgium.”

 

 

·         Cyril A. Lee

 

 

Episode 19:

 

 

 

·         John Willis Palmer

 

·         Miles Reinke, German soldier, “I never had any feelings towards any personal enemy. For me and also for the most of the boys it was the enemy – whether it was the British or French we didn’t mind.”

 

 

·         Sebastian C. Lang, British soldier: “Arriving home on leave I went to my aunt’s house and I found that people wanted to take me out to dinners and theatres and didn’t seem to want to know much about what we were doing out at the front.”

 

 

·         Charles Carrington

 

 

Jack Dillon, British soldier: “When I joined up I was dead scared I wouldn’t get out to France before it was over. I thought it would be over before I’d get there.”

 

 

·         Henry Williamson

 

 

·         Horace Birks, British officer: “We got in, shut down our tanks, and away we went. We had rough compasses in the tanks, and we got our course and we set course for the enemy line.”

 

 

·         Edward Leigh-Jones, British officer: “I crossed the first line. The wire didn’t prove to be any obstacle at all.”

 

 

Episode 20:

 

 

 

·         Benjamin Muse, American man: “One got the impression from reading the papers and hearing the talk that the Germans, or the Huns as we called them then, were a hoard of barbarians who were descending on Europe, about to plunge Europe into another Dark Ages.”

 

 

 

·         Herbe Haase, German woman: “Our diet consisted mainly of turnips one day, and barley and prunes the next. Then it started again.”

 

 

·         M. Hall

 

 

·         Kurt Dehn

 

 

·         Egbert Cadbury, British pilot: “I approached it from the stern, about 300 ft below it, and fired four drums of explosive ammunition into its stern – which immediately started to light.”

 

 

 

·         T.S. Towler, British man: “I looked up and saw that this Zeppelin had been picked out by the searchlights. Then there was a small glow which gradually spread the whole length and afterwards the thing burst into one big conflagration.”

 

 

·         J.C. Hill, British officer: “It was an oily liquid which evaporated very slowly. And because it had such a faint smell – the troops tended to take no notice of it.”

 

 

Episode 21:

 

 

 

·         Richard Henry Tobin

 

 

·         Philip Sylvester

 

 

 

·         William Hall, British soldier: “One of our staff officers rode up on a horse and said, “Now men, I want you to stand firm on this hillside – you’ve got a good position you should be all right.”

 

 

·         Stefan Westmann

 

 

·         Ernest Bryan, British soldier: “We got to Hamm eventually – that was the biggest town there was there outside St Quentin.”

 

 

 

Episode 22:

 

 

 

·         Leon Diament, American soldier: “A shipment of machine-guns finally arrived, and when we opened them, we almost had a revolution.”

 

 

·         Melvin Krulewitch, American marine: “We were trained for war – that was our profession: The regular marines.”

 

 

 

·         Earl Davison, American soldier: “We’d practically broke open a bottle of champagne, when the word came that we were to move the next 48 hours somewhere – we didn’t care where.”

 

 

·         Charles Carrington

 

 

·         John Figarovsky, American soldier: “I was watching through binoculars and they had a creeping barrage that was slowly creeping towards the town of Cantigny which was situated on high ground.”

 

 

 

Episode 23:

 

 

 

·         John Figarovsky

 

 

·         Reginald E. Beall, British soldier: “The going was marvellous. Grass was just like you’d put in your front garden, just like a bit of crumble and tuff and you felt you were in for a joyride.”

 

 

 

·         Stanley Evers, Australian soldier: “The tanks were going forward and taking position after positon. The infantry followed up behind.”

 

 

·         Douglas Wimberley, British officer, “When we got to the wire there, it was terrific. It was about 4 foot high and about 15 yards wide. But the tanks who’d gone in front of it had ploughed through it like a ship in the sea.”

 

 

Episode 24:

 

 

 

·         R. Wallace, British officer: “I had malaria and I looking in this window to the back of me, a room full of young men – great strong young fellas, all dying slowly of heat stroke.”

 

 

·         F.G. Ponting, British soldier: “When we come within 300 yards mark, they opened up pretty heavy lot of shooting.”

 

 

·         William S. Finch, British soldier: “Christmas Eve, they got quite a number of troops in front of us and they started at dawn on their attack. They blew different holes in our walls.”

 

 

·         George Osborne Channer, British officer: “The rations came down finally to 3 ounces of bread and 12 ounces of horsemeat. Horsemeat is very difficult to eat because some of these mules we had had already been fed on mules themselves.”

 

 

·         George Langley, Australian officer, “Our particular job was to follow through with the light horse and get the other side of Gaza and come round towards the sea and so the Turks were actually enclosed with the sea on one side of them and troops all round them.”

 

 

 

·         R.J. Carless

 

 

·         Lawrence Pollock, Australian officer: “Our biggest problem was monotony. You’d see the sun get up in a big red ball in the morning and go down in a big red ball at night. And that was your only sense of time actually.”

 

 

 

·         John Bolton, British soldier: “And then we began to approach the Judean hills. Here we met deluges of rain and as we went up, those hills became colder and colder.”

 

 

 

·         Mr Fursse, British soldier: “After going through Jerusalem, we passed the garden of Gethsemane and went to the top of the Mount of Olives, where we encamped for quite a few days.”

 

Episode 25:

 

 

 

·         Mr von Boschen, Austro-Hungarian man: “There was very great mourning in Vienna. All over the place – in all classes of the population – everybody felt a personal loss.”

 

 

·         Alessandro Magri MacMahon, Italian soldier: “It was impossible for us even to think of abandoning these positions that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. To leave our dead there... we just couldn't believe it. Still, still we had to withdraw.”

 

 

 

·         Mrs Meiler, Austro-Hungarian woman: “It was bitterly cold. The electricity was cut. The gas was cut. The children were really underfed because we had very little.”

 

 

·         William Gibb-Stuart, British soldier: “All we prayed for and hoped for was: let us do something. We joined the army to fight for our country not to plunder about and dig trenches.”

 

 

 

·         Mr Boger, British soldier: “It was then when you had an attack of malaria and you had a chronic fit of depression that it was hardest to keep one’s reason.”

 

 

Episode 26:

 

 

 

·         Herbert Sulzbach, German officer: “I went through the streets of Frankfurt and was not saluted.”

 

 

·         Henry Williamson

 

 

·         William Rae

 

 

·        Benjamin R. Richards, British soldier: “Slowly the news came in officially, that an armistice had been signed, but there was no show of emotion. No one went berserk or anything like that. We were too far gone.”

 

 

·         Keith Officer, Australian officer, “There’d been one German machine gun unit giving our troops a lot of trouble and they kept on firing until practically 11am.”

 

 

·         Anne Guillemin, French woman: “We had had so many years of suffering. Four years of dull suffering, acute suffering.”

Edited 3 March , 2017 by Private Baldrick
Have now identified all of the interviewees, thanks to Detlef Siebert.

[Bernard_Lewis]

Thanks for this.

 

Bernard

[simond9x]

Well, Baldrick, you've outdone yourself this time! Excellent, thanks for the list. I don't have time right now to go through it in detail but will when I can and see if I can help fill in any gaps. I can't remember where but I have a feeling Leonard Ounsworth was featured somewhere in this series (possibly talking about Trones Wood?) - I always thought he had a very 'cheery' voice. I also like hearing Richard Tobin - he seemed like a good story-teller and knew how to pause for best effect. I wish his full account was available online at the IWM.

Edited 10 August , 2016 by simond9x

[Chris_Baker]

I recently helped identify dozens of the interviewees (and an awful lot that were not included in the final cut, or even not filmed) for the BBC. This was to identify not only the individual, but his regiment and unit (and equivalents in naval and air forces). Some of this was used in "I was there: the Great War Interviews", broadcast in 2014. I have all the information but am not sure that I can share it here as it was produced for the BBC. If you wish to contact the Beeb, programme Director Detlef Siebert is your man.

 

"The Great War Interviews"  is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03y76xl. Some of the filmed interviews are online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p01tbj6p

 

I am sure he would not mind me saying that Detlef's email address is detlef.siebert @bbc.co.uk (remove the space before the @).

[Private Baldrick]

On 8/10/2016 at 09:03, Chris_Baker said:

Director Detlef Siebert is your man.

I know that this is a very belated reply, but thank you very much for the advice. I contacted Detlef earlier this week and he helped me identify the last of the interviewees.

Edited 6 December , 2016 by Private Baldrick

[IPT]

I note that Cyril Lee was identified as "British Army" in the credits of 'They Shall Not Grow Old'.

 

My best guess is that he was Cyril Albert Lee (1897-1971), and he was 17th London (?), but i'd be interested to know.

[Private Baldrick]

On ‎13‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 00:39, IPT said:

I note that Cyril Lee was identified as "British Army" in the credits of 'They Shall Not Grow Old'.

 

My best guess is that he was Cyril Albert Lee (1897-1971), and he was 17th London (?), but i'd be interested to know.

 

There is a Sergeant Cyril Lee in Forgotten Voices of the Great War. However, the book does not specify which battalion or regiment he served in, though it does state that he participated in the Second Battle of Ypres and the Battle of Menin Road Ridge. Lee also describes himself as being 17 years old in April 1915, which would fit with him being born in 1897.

[IPT]

Thank you, Balders!

[Martin Feledziak]

On 09/08/2016 at 21:47, Private Baldrick said:

Stefan Westmann

 

Thanks for creating the list.

I just watched the Stefan Interview, from a Youtube video.