Walter Mepham

By M. Stow11

This is the true life story of Walter Mepham, and his elder brother Harry Arthur, of London, England, researched and compiled from the records of the time by his maternal distant cousin, the author Malcolm Stow.
The story was prompted by a postcard found amongst the papers of his late grandmother Henrietta Wells, with the starkly precise date of birth and death of Walter, killed at the First World War Battle of Cambrai.
The story is embellished by the contributions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (from The British Campaign in France and Flanders) and Bertrand Russell (The Ethics of War). These two literary combatants were contemporaneously implicated in the life of Walter, from the Mepham family history in Sussex, England, where Conan Doyle lived and provided encampment for soldiers travelling to the Western Front; and Holborn, London, where Russell lived at the time, and who argued for a rational individualistic pacifism.
These different actualities and historical understandings, and their influence on the families’ decisions to go to war and in Harry’s case to then to refuse to return to the battlefront, are fictionalised around known facts. While Russell discussed openly, and went to prison for his views, Conan Doyle reported directly from the Western Front. And for the Mepham and Wells families who were coming to terms with their own decisions and the outcomes of those deliberations: what it meant to fight a good war, for pride, for King and Country, for bread on the table; and for their parents, Caroline and father Mark Henry, as for their only children, Walter and Harry Arthur, for their children, and families yet to be born.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. Stow11
• Release date: Jul 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311337108

M. Stow11

The author Malcolm Stow was born in Essex England, lived in the east end of London, and now lives in the suburbs. He is a philosophy graduate from the University of London, and hold a masters degree in Social Science Research with the University of East London. He has had a varied career outside of authorship, from working from an early age in kitchens and then bars and cafes in London and the South of France, working the vendange in France, picking melons and fruit, working in Hotels in Aylah Eilat, He has travelled widely for pleasure and work, to the US and Far East, and looking to reach Australia on the Bucket List. After an apprenticeship in plumbing and heating engineering after leaving school, he discovered he did not have the head for numbers and calculations, or the back and knees for this work. He had visited Greece and studied philosophy and history through the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the Library there, completing an education incomplete of at least this aspect of knowledge and life. He went to London University as a mature student, to continue studying philosophy. Following the attaining of this honours degree took up the training, and profession, of Social Work. His writing reflects a deep passion for people and humanity, in the smallest as well as the greatest achievements and failures of our species. He embraces the philosophies, as well as the mythology and religions of peoples across the globe, their politics and economics (in so far as anyone can claim to have any grasp over these latter aspects); and the social and family ties of understanding and compassion, which span all of his works to date. His three works published so far are: Walter Mepham (a first world war (his own) family saga); WarFair4 (a novel); EarthCentre (an epic prose or graphic poem subtitled: An Anthropic Odyysey) and Universal Verses 1-3 (a continuation of EarthCentre:The End of the Universe). All, apart from Walter Mepham, are awaiting final editing and completion through 2014-15, and may only be seen on Smashwords currently.

Book preview

Walter Mepham

Born 14th March 1898

Killed November 30th 1917, Cambrai, France.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 M. Stow

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1503224627

ISBN 13: 9781503224629

Walter Mepham

Dedication

To the enduring memory of 7,048 officers and men of the forces of the British Empire who fell at the Battle of Cambrai, November 20–December 3, 1917, but have no known graves.

Chapters

Part One: Family

Chapter 1: Why We Went to War

Chapter 2: Father’s Family

Chapter 3: Mother’s Family

Chapter 4: Our Parents Meet

Part Two: For or Against

Chapter 5: Conan Doyle

Chapter 6: Lord Bertrand (Bertie) Russell

Chapter 7: Arthur Wells

Chapter 8: Alfred Byfield

Part Three: Sarajevo

Chapter 9: The Assassination in Sarajevo

Chapter 10: The Decision Is Made

Chapter 11: Reports of War

Chapter 12: France

Chapter 13: The Cambrai Operation

Chapter 14: At Flesquieres

Chapter 15: The Boulon Woods

Part Four: Louverval memorial, France, 14th March 1998 and November 30th 2017.

Author’s Note

This is the story of Walter and his elder brother, Harry Arthur Mepham, of London, England, researched and compiled from the records of the time by his maternal distant cousin, the author, Malcolm Stow.

The idea for the story was prompted by a postcard found among the papers of the author’s late grandmother, Henrietta Wells, with the starkly precise dates of birth and death of Walter, killed at the First World War Battle of Cambrai.

The story is embellished by selections from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The British Campaign in France and Flanders and Bertrand Russell’s The Ethics of War. These two literary combatants were both contemporaneously implicated in the life of Walter, from the Mepham family history in Sussex, England, where Conan Doyle lived and supported encampment for soldiers travelling to the Western Front in 1915; and to Holborn, London, where Russell lived at the time, and who argued for a rational individualistic pacifism.

Both authors would have influenced Walter and Harry Arthur’s decisions to go to war; and, in Harry’s case, his refusal to return to the battlefront after 1917.

Their stories are fictionalised around such known facts, the brother’s likely discussions, and their own decisions as the outcome of those shared deliberations. What did it mean to fight a good war? For love of king and country, for personal pride, for bread on the table? For their parents Caroline and Mark Henry Mepham, and for their families and children, and grandchildren yet to be born.

November 30th 1917.

Cambrai, France

Dear Harry Arthur,

I know how much it grieved you to hear of my being lost. How Mother was. How she told you not to go back, and how all the emotion came down on you, and nearly killed you both. How, if Mother had lost us both, as well as Father, then her heart would have…Well, you know it wasn’t you who killed her; it was me.

She knew. It was the dreaded question: Why did we all have to go, leaving her alone to tend wounded and dying soldiers—strangers—in our places?

When Father went to war in 1915, well, that was one thing. Perhaps to persuade us that he would die for us and in our stead. He might not see his grandchildren himself, but Mother would. And that we—one of us, at least—would have a better chance of bringing children, our parent’s grandchildren, into the world and their being remembered in both Father’s, and Mother’s image.

I don’t think they wanted both of us to go to war, and as I am the younger brother, Father went in my stead. But then we did both go, and there was no stopping us. After you and Father went off full of gusto, not wishing but prepared to die, I was the insistent younger son wanting to follow in your footsteps. Prepared to die, to lie, too, about my age as Father did to join up. And then for all of us to be sent abroad.

When I did eventually go, Mother must have felt deserted by all of us. But by me in particular. She knew there was no stopping me, and she kept her hurt to herself, even when we were all together. Do you remember, Harry? When you were on leave during the zeppelin air raids on Croydon in 1916? It was then that I persuaded her to let me go, so that I could get back at those trying to kill us in our beds.

By the time I was trained and set off later in 1916, the year you returned for leave, only to return again, to the second Battle of The Somme.

When news reached mother about my being lost at Cambrai, you were home again. At the hospital, perhaps, and she must have known I would not be coming back. She persuaded you not to return. To abscond from leave, to desert, didn’t she?

How could any of us be blamed? How could we feel disgust anymore, or hatred, or indifference now, or even some sympathy, perhaps, for those dressed up in self-serving political and religious conscientious objection, instead of the bloody uniform of war? They refused for the same reasons, in the end, that we did go to war in the first place: each of us to save ourselves, and our family’s future.

For our family, Harry Arthur, you not only fought, but you found something in common with the no-conscription, white feather lot, the Peace Pledgers, didn’t you? The same reason you absconded, Harry, and Mother persuaded you to so do; that you and yours, would be the next of our line, if mine were not…most of all, you found that my being missing, my uncertain death, although not glorious, would not be in vain.

To my brother, from your brother, Walter Mepham.

Part One: Family

Chapter 1: Why We Went to War

Aldershot Army Training Camp, Hampshire, England, 1916

To Harry: This is our story I write here, awaiting orders to be set off to France, or wherever. We do not yet know and are not told, and should I not return…

This is our story:

I, Walter, was born at home at 56 Walterton Road in the civil parish of Paddington, and registered by our parents at Marylebone in the county of Middlesex (west). We lived off Maida Hill among the plush mansions of Maida Vale and the Harrow Road, the new London suburbs, the grand streets and mews off Kensington by Warwick Road and the Great Western Road.

Over the Thames river at Putney, then the Trade Roads to Surrey, and on to Sussex and Kent where our father and his father and our great grandfather, were born.

Our great-grandfather William Mepham was born in 1805. An agricultural labourer, he began working from a young age while living at cottages on Nethersfield Green, Battle, near Hastings, where, in 1066, the Norman invasion of England was said to have taken place. A date we remember from school—you and me, Harry, we always liked our history, didn’t we? On their way northward, over the South and North Downs—we always laughed at those peculiarly named places too: Going up the downs!—on their way those Normans took in Meopham, a Kentish town of the ancient land of Meapha. Meapha was ruled by an Anglo-Saxon Jute king from modern-day Germany. Our German family name must have been derived from the original village of that name. The earliest recording of the Mepham family name, so spelled, and in Kent, was in the sixteenth century.

Great-grandfather William was born in Kent, and later moved to Sussex and then Hampshire, where you Harry, were born, in 1895; and then as far as the hilly north Thames shore, at Paddington, London, where I was later born.

Our great-grandfather William then lived in Sussex where William the Conqueror conquered all those years ago, and I born at London, where that William later crowned himself King William the First of the English.

Now there is another King William, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, cousin to our own King George, both cousins genealogically of the Royal Tsar Alexander of Russia. Now they, and all of us, are in this Great

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WARFAIR4 for Remembrance Sunday 14th November 2021 Walter Mepham born March 14th 1988 Killed November 30 1917 Cambrai France