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THE VANISHED BATTALION OF THE KING'S OWN SANDRINGHAMS
Most of
the articles featured in the Historic UK website are
limited in terms of their word count in an attempt to
capture and retain the readers’ interest and
imagination. The following article concerning the
Vanished Battalion extends to three times the normal
length for reasons which will become obvious on reading.
The
Background
The men of E Company had grown up
together, playing cricket for the same village team,
chasing the same girls and drinking in the same pubs and
inns. And now, as members of the 5th Territorial
Battalion the Royal Norfolk Regiment, they were about to
go to war together.
It was the hot August of 1914 and groups
of friends or ‘buddies’ across Britain, team-mates and
work colleagues eagerly enlisted to fight the Bosch.
But what the soldiers of E Company had in
common was something rather unusual: they all belonged
to the staff of the Royal Estate at Sandringham.
The company had been formed in 1908 at
the personal request of their employer,
King Edward VII.
He asked Frank Beck, his land agent to undertake the
task. This he did, recruiting more than 100 part-time
soldiers or territorials.
As was the custom in the territorial
battalions of the day, military rank was dictated by
social class. Members of the local gentry like Frank
Beck and his two nephews became the officers. The
estate's foremen, butlers, head gamekeepers and head
gardeners were the NCOs. The farm labourers, grooms and
household servants made up the rank and file.
What happened to the Sandringhams during
the disastrous
Dardanelles
campaign in the middle of their very first battle, on
the afternoon of August 12, 1915? One minute the men,
led by their commanding officer, Sir Horace
Proctor-Beauchamp, were charging bravely against the
Turkish enemy. The next they had disappeared. Their
bodies were never found. There were no survivors. They
did not turn up as prisoners of war.
They simply vanished.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British
Commander-in-Chief in Gallipoli, appeared as puzzled as
everyone else. He reported 'there happened a very
mysterious thing'. Explaining that during the attack,
the Norfolks had drawn somewhat ahead of the rest of the
British line. He went on 'The fighting grew hotter, and
the ground became more wooded and broken.' But Colonel
Beauchamp with 16 officers and 250 men, 'still kept
pushing on, driving the enemy before him.'
'Among these ardent souls was part of a
fine company enlisted from the King's Sandringham
estates. Nothing more was ever seen or heard of any of
them. They charged into the forest and were lost to
sight and sound. Not one of them ever came back.' Their
families had nothing to go on but rumours and a vague
official telegram stating that their loved ones had been
'reported missing'.
 King George V
could gain no further
information other than that the Sandringhams had
conducted themselves with 'ardour and dash'.
Queen Alexandra made inquiries via the
American ambassador in Constantinople to discover
whether any of the missing men might be in Turkish
prisoner-of-war camps. Grieving families contacted the
Red Cross and placed messages in the papers, hoping for
news of their sons and husbands from returning comrades.
But all to no avail.
So what really happened to men of
Sandringham?
The
Events…
Along with thousands of other troops, the
5th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment had set sail from
Liverpool on July 30, 1915, aboard the
luxury liner Aquitania.
At 54, Captain Beck need not have led his
men to war. But despite his age, he was determined to do
so.
'I formed them,' he said bravely, 'How
could I leave them now? The lads will expect me to go
with them; besides I promised their wives and children I
would look after them'.
 The battalion landed at Suvla Bay on
August 10, in the thick of the fighting, and was
immediately ordered inland.
Officers and men were being continually
shot down, not only by rifle fire from the enemy in
front of them, but by snipers.
The climate was broiling by day and
freezing at night. Men were already suffering from
dysentery and from the side-effects of inoculations and
seasick tablets administered during the voyage. There
was a desperate lack of water - two pints were supposed
to last each man three days.
Then, on August 12, just two days after
they had arrived in this arid, hostile land, the 5th
Battalion was told it was to attack that afternoon.
The orders were confused. Some thought
the plan was to clear away the enemy's forward positions
in preparation for the main British assault. Others
believed their target was the village of
Anafarta Saga
on the ridge ahead of them.
The officers were handed maps, which they
soon discovered did not even show the area they were
supposed to be attacking.
Having been in the baking sun all day the
inexperienced troops were thirsty and scared - and now
they were to launch a major assault on a well-armed
enemy in broad daylight and with little cover.
Only Private George Carr, a 14-year-old
Norfolk lad, was to survive the bloodshed of that
afternoon. Exhausted by the battle, he was saved by a
stretcher-bearer called Herbert Saul, a pacifist who
refused to carry a rifle on principle.
At 4.15-pm whistles blew and the Norfolks
began to advance, led by Colonel Beauchamp, waving his
cane and shouting: 'On the Norfolks, on.’ Captain Beck
was at the head of the Sandringhams.
Even though they were still a
mile-and-a-half from the Turkish positions, the order to
fix bayonets and to advance at the double was given. The
slaughter began immediately as the Turkish artillery
trained in on the advancing British soldiers. By the
time the Norfolks reached the enemy lines they were
already exhausted.
A desperate battle ensued, officers and
men being cut down all around by snipers hidden in the
trees. When some of the snipers were later captured,
several turned out to be 16-year-old girls.
Everywhere officers and men of the
battalion were dying. A shell landed close to Frank
Beck. He was last seen sitting under a tree with his
head on one side, either dead or simply too tired to
continue.
In the midst of the bloodshed, Colonel
Beauchamp continued to advance through a wood towards
the Turks' main positions, leading a band of 16 officers
and 250 men. Among them were the Sandringhams.
 Eventually, the Colonel was spotted,
standing with another officer in a farm on the far side
of the wood. 'Now boys,' he shouted, ' we've got the
village. Let's hold it.'
That was the last anyone saw or heard of
Beauchamp, or any of his men, including the Sandringhams.
They had all disappeared, amid the smoke and flying
bullets, never to be seen again.
In 1918 when the war had ended, the War
Graves Commission searched the Gallipoli battlefields.
Of the 36,000 Commonwealth servicemen who died in the
campaign, 13,000 rested in unidentified graves, another
14,000 bodies were simply never found.
During one of these searches a Norfolks
regimental cap badge was found buried in the sand along
with the corpses of a number of soldiers.
The find was reported to the Rev Charles
Pierre-Point Edwards, MC, who was in Gallipoli on a War
Office mission to find out what had happened to the 5th
Norfolks. It was likely that he had been sent there by
Queen Alexandra.
Edwards' examination of the area where
the badge had been found uncovered the remains of 180
bodies; 122 of them were identifiable from their
shoulder flashes as men of the 5th Norfolks.
The bodies had been found scattered over
an area of one square mile, to the rear of the Turkish
front line 'lying most thickly round the ruins of a
small farm'. This, Edwards concluded, was probably the
farm at which Colonel Beauchamp had last been seen.
The surrounding area was wooded, the only
area in the Suvla vicinity that matched with General
Hamilton's description of a forest.
Four years later came news from Turkey of
a gold fob-watch, looted from the body of a British
officer in Gallipoli. It was Frank Beck's. The watch was
later presented to Margeretta Beck, Frank's daughter, on
her wedding day.
And so it is here that the story of the
Vanished Battalion might have ended.
The
Mystery…
Many years later, in April 1965, at the
50th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, a former New
Zealand sapper called Frederick Reichardt issued an
extraordinary testimony.
Supported by three other veterans,
Reichardt claimed to have witnessed the supernatural
disappearance of the 5th Norfolks in August 1915.
According to Reichardt, on the afternoon
in question he and his comrades had watched a formation
of 'six or eight' loaf-shaped clouds hovering over the
area where the Norfolks were pressing home their attack.
Into one of these low lying clouds
marched the advancing battalion. An hour or so later,
the cloud 'very unobtrusively' rose and joined the other
clouds overhead and sailed off, leaving no trace of the
soldiers behind them.
This strange story first appeared in a
New Zealand
publication.
Despite its unreliable provenance and
inconsistencies (Reichardt got the wrong date, the wrong
battalion and the wrong location), this version of
events captured popular imagination at that time.
 More recent and detailed research for a
BBC television documentary in 1991 called "All the
King's Men." suggested that Reichardt's story of the
battalion-lifting cloud may have been a little confused.
More significantly the BBC research unearthed two new
important items of evidence.
The first piece of new evidence was an
account of a conversation with the Rev Pierre-Point
Edwards some years after the war, which revealed an
extraordinary detail he omitted from his official report
about the fate of the 5th Norfolks - namely, that every
one of the bodies he found had been shot in the head.
It was known that the Turks did not like
taking prisoners. This was confirmed by the second piece
of evidence, which told the story of Arthur Webber, who
fought with the Yarmouth Company of the 5th Norfolks
during the battle of August 12, 1915.
According to his sister in-law, Arthur
was shot in the face. As he lay injured on the ground,
he heard the Turkish soldiers shooting and bayoneting
the wounded and the prisoners around him. Only the
intervention of a German officer saved his life. His
comrades were all executed on the spot.
Arthur Webber died in 1969, aged 86,
still with the Turkish sniper's bullet in his head.
Can the true fate of the 5th Battalion
now be more fully explained?
In that after their bold dash through the
wood on the 12th of August…
Colonel Beauchamp and the Sandringhams
were overwhelmed by their Turkish enemies…
They were either captured or they
surrendered…
The Turks took no prisoners…
So they
were butchered…and buried.
Is this what became of the Vanished
Battalion?
Useful links
VIDEO:
All the Kings Men A portrayal of the mysterious
event from World War I which saw the disappearance in
action of the whole Sandringham Company at Gallipolli in
1915. Starring David Jason.
BOOKS:
All the Kings Men - One of the Greatest Mysteries of the
First World War Finally Solved by Nigel McCrery
All the King's
Men by
HRH Prince Edward (Foreword),
Nigel McCrery
©
HUK
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