Percy Topliss

[Ghazala]

Ben Macintyre writes:

"The name of Jesse Robert Short will soon be added to the memorial for British soldiers executed in the First World War, almost a century after he was shot by firing squad for his part in the most famous mutiny of the war.

The Étaples mutiny of 1917 has inspired books, films, songs and swathes of historical speculation. In the 1986 television drama The Monocled Mutineer, Paul McGann played Percy Toplis, a criminal and imposter portrayed as the rebel ringleader. But Toplis probably had nothing to do with the mutiny, and may not even have been in Europe at the time.

The real story of the Étaples mutiny, now finally emerging from official records, is simpler, more poignant and more remarkable than the myths: a tale of two men traumatised by battle, a drunken exchange of words, a brutal miscarriage of justice, and a swift execution carried out in an atmosphere of paranoia over Communist agitation.

Étaples, on the coast of France south of Boulogne, was used as a British military training camp for soldiers on their way to the front. Even by wartime standards, the Bullring was a peculiarly nasty place. The soldier-poet Wilfred Owen called it a vast encampment . . . a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept before the shambles [slaughterhouse].

Owen described the look on the faces of men preparing to return to battle: It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbits.

Tension between the authorities and personnel in the camp had been growing throughout 1917 and in late summer a series of disturbances erupted. Amid simmering unrest, a number of men were arrested and one soldier was accidentally shot by a military policeman. Mutinies had already taken place among French troops and, in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, some of the top brass feared a full-scale military uprising.

At 9pm on September 12, a group of 70 men appeared at the bridge over the River Canche leading from Étaples to the coastal resort of Paris-Plage. Some were carrying placards and waving handkerchiefs on sticks. Some were drunk. Their intention, it seems, was to visit the resort bars, from which they were barred. They were probably more thirsty than actively mutinous.

Among them was the aptly named Jesse Short, a diminutive 30-year-old Welsh-born corporal in the Northumberland Fusiliers with a patchy military record. The son of a miner, Short had first enlisted in 1905 but went Awol and was discharged as incorrigible and worthless.

He re-enlisted under a false name but was discharged again with ignominy. When war broke out in 1914, he again tried to enlist but was rejected as too small for active service. When the height restriction was lowered to 5ft 3in, the tiny soldier was allowed back into uniform.

About 70 members of Shorts battalion died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Short survived but appears to have been wounded and was probably convalescing in Étaples before being sent back to the front.

The officer in command of the picket guarding the bridge that night was a soldier of a very different stamp. Captain Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson of the West Yorkshire Regiment was a former schoolmaster from Ilkley and a gifted amateur poet twice mentioned in dispatches who had won the Military Cross in July 1915.

According to the citation, near St Julien, he assisted to carry a wounded soldier for a distance of 120 yards into cover under circumstances of great difficulty and danger.

Wilkinson wrote poetry about life in the trenches:

'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'.

He lost part of his sight through mustard gas and was horrifically wounded in the Battle of the Somme. He wrote about the resulting surgery with jaunty nonchalance. So far, we have extracted 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.

As the crowd of men surged passed the picket on to the bridge, Wilkinson urged his men to stand firm. At that point, according to court martial documents, Short stepped forward.

Wilkinson testified: The accused detached himself from this party and while I was addressing my Picquet and remonstrating with them for failing to stand fast, the accused started haranguing them. Referring to me he said, You want to put a rope round that buggars neck tie, a stone to it and throw him into the river, and he told the men that they should not listen to me.

The confrontation fizzled out. The crowd dispersed without further incident. When Short reappeared, Wilkinson had him arrested.

Short was court-martialed the next day, found guilty of endeavouring to persuade persons in His Majestys forces to join in a mutiny and sentenced to death. The officer representing him made no attempt to refute the allegations. Shorts only defence was that he had been very drunk.

The death sentence was upheld by the commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Short was executed by firing squad in Boulogne on October 4, 1917.

Haigs diary reflects the authorities fear of left-wing agitation among the troops. The men on the bridge were described as waving flags which were handkerchiefs of all colours including red attached to sticks. Haig noted that men of new drafts with revolutionary ideas . . . had produced red flags and refused to obey orders. Short was killed, in part, out of baseless fears of a left-wing insurrection.

Captain Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson won the Military Cross in July 1915. Wilkinson survived Short by five days. He was killed on October 9, leading the attack on the Passchendaele Ridge. The official report noted: Amid the sea of mud he became separated from his men and was last seen making single handed for the enemy lines. He was 26.

Long after the war, the mutiny was linked to Percy Toplis, a monocle-wearing conman, alleged murderer and deserter, who was finally killed in a shoot-out with police in 1920. But records show that Topliss regiment was en route to India at the time of the incident.

The minuscule mutineer was not a flag-waving revolutionary, tough criminal or smooth imposter, but a hopeless soldier, a drunken man who wanted another drink and made a stupidly aggressive remark that was overheard by an officer. That officer was not some blimpish disciplinarian, no donkey leading lions, but a poet and a soldier of courage, who cannot have foreseen where his actions would lead.

Jesse Short richly deserves to be placed alongside the pardoned deserters on the Shot at Dawn memorial in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. It is a memorial not to wartime bravery, but to ordinary, forgivable human frailty".

[Guest percytopliss]

Has anyone read Chasing Percy instead of the MM? This is a factual book about Percy Topliss. The family name was spelt with a double s

[Guest]

   Would any GWF member know how we stand with regard to National Archives and release of records relating to Etaples-thought to be under 100 year closure-and also not thought to contain Board of Enquiry material????

[KGB]

Would any GWF member know how we stand with regard to National Archives and release of records relating to Etaples-thought to be under 100 year closure-and also not thought to contain Board of Enquiry material????

The 100 year rule can (and probably will) be extended.