Francis George Leyland Wooster
Birth: 13 Jan 1890
Death: 21 April 1953
Tree
Gravestone
World War I: Gallipoli, Egypt, Yser (France)
Rank: Second Lieutenant, 5th Battalion,
Gloucestershire Regiment
Embarkation Vessel: SS Olympic
Destination: Gallipoli, Turkey
POW: 29 Aug 1917 to 20 Dec 1918
Frank Wooster at
War - an extract from ‘Why does Frank Wooster’s name appear in
Montreuil-sur-mer? Who was he, and what did he do?’ by James Gibbs
Note: This extract
refers to Alan Pryce-Jones, to his memoir The Bonus of Laughter
and to his draft obituary of Frank. There is a reference
to Frank’s ‘dream house’ in Montreuil sur mer - the Hôtel d’Acary
that ‘fell in love with’ on a visit to the town in 1910.
Eugène Fould (Fould
Springer) , who is mentioned, had been attracted to Frank when he
spoke about his ‘dream-house’. Pryce Jones writes that Eugène was
infatuated with Frank.
Eugène’s wife, the
very wealthy ‘Mitzi’, nèe Marie-Cäcile de (or von) Springer, came to
feel that there was a strong spiritual bond between herself and her
husband’s friend, Frank. In her widowhood and to the surprise of
many, she was baptised ‘Mary’ and married Frank. Thereby becoming
‘Mrs Mary Wooster’.
After Frank died,
she insisted that he continued to impart both spiritual wisdom and
advice about her garden from beyond the grave. She devoted
considerable energy and money to trying to preserve his memory.
I would be
grateful for additional information, comments and queries on this
material.
James Gibbs
Pryce-Jones
informs us that Frank was in Brighton with his valet when war broke
out. I haven’t been able to find out precisely what had drawn him to
that elegant South coast resort, but the town has much to offer and
the fact that Schuster had a flat there may have provided a
particular incentive.
Despite his health
problems, Frank prepared to volunteer and immediately consulted his
horse-riding friend Harold Brown. Although initially found unfit,
Frank was later accepted by the Norfolk Yeomanry and underwent
training with them. An anecdote has come down from this period to
add to that connected with Alexandra: it seems that during an
exercise Frank was thrown from his mount into the path of many
galloping horses; they all missed him, or avoided him, and he rose
to his feet unscathed. Predictably, he came to see his escape from
injury or death as providential.
Training
completed, Frank was posted to Gallipoli. On the day he sailed on
the S S Olympic, he heard that Brown had been killed.[1]
A coincidence that was sifted for meaning and passed down to
posterity.
As is well known,
the Gallipoli Campaign was ill-thought out and its failure
represented a severe set-back to the Allied war effort. Frank,
apparently, saw action, and recalled, as Pryce-Jones’s recorded in
his draft obituary, shooting a Turk whose wife and children he had
watched – and, the implication is, ‘got to know’ - in the trenches.
While in
Gallipoli, a friendship developed between him and Sir Ian Standish
Monteith Hamilton. According to Pryce-Jones, Hamilton, a soldier of
remarkable courage and vast experience, a novelist, poet and
linguist, admired Frank, or at least his turn out, his consistent
smile and helpful manner. In trying to bring Frank into focus in
these pages, these qualities need to be noted and set beside the
testimony of others who also found him presentable, pleasant and
charming. Mitzi went further and suggested there was a ‘radiance’
about him.
Frank was saved
from being numbered among the very high casualty figures in
Gallipoli because he contracted typhus and was sent home. Always
delicate, it is possible, as Pryce-Jones suggests, that Frank may
never have recovered completely from this illness, that his health,
poor in a childhood and made worse by the infection picked up in
Egypt, was permanently impaired as a result of typhus.
The draft obituary
by Pryce-Jones includes an anecdote about Frank in hospital in
London. It seems that one day the nurses dressed him in blue silk
pyjamas (!) and ushered in a distinguished visitor who was rather
nervous and spoke gruffly with a trace of an accent. The visitor was
George V, and apparently, urged Frank to feel that he had served his
country enough and did not need to rejoin the troops. Pryce-Jones
gives no indication as to the background to this visit, or whether
the king spoke in the same way to all the sick men. The point of the
story is that Frank did not heed the King’s call and returned to the
front line; he was unflinchingly brave and patriotic. He lived to
serve, and, as his next tour of duty was in France, he witnessed
suffering and suffered.
Apparently, Frank
spent more than a year in the trenches at Yser, and during that time
was profoundly distressed by the conditions endured by the animals
used by the troops. He also ‘suffered to see his men and comrades
killed.’ On one occasion, he forwent, Pryce-Jones tells us, an
opportunity to return home. Then, on the day before he was, at long
last, due to go on leave - how these special ‘days’ pile up in
Frank’s tale – or Frank’s tale as mediated by and / or for Mitzi!,
there was a fierce battle that left many wounded men in ‘no man’s
land’. Seeing this, Frank volunteered to go forward with a Red Cross
team, and, while engaged in rescuing the wounded, was taken
prisoner.
He was,
apparently, held for a time in Hôtel de ville at Courtrai,
Flanders, and then arraigned before a court marshal where he was
questioned about gun positions - about which he knew nothing. He was
told he would be shot, presumably as a spy, on the fifth day.
However, the German soldier who brought him his ‘bread and water’,
Feldwebel Klein, asked him if he had any contacts in Holland who
might vouch for him. Frank produced the name ‘Robert May’, and
(miraculously? providentially?) on the fearfully awaited fifth day
his guards told him that they had heard from Holland. Cleared of
suspicion of being a spy, Frank was then taken to Freiburg im
Breisgau where he was held at the University. While there he cooked
for fellow prisoners, and helped to maintain morale.
In his draft
obituary, my source for these uplifting details, Pryce-Jones records
that, during the Autumn of 1917 and while still a German POW, Frank
threw a stick into a tree to knock down apples. As a result he was
accused of taking food that was reserved for Germans and condemned
to three months ‘silent confinement’. However, he actually spent
only about five weeks so sequestered before being let off further
punishment in the name of ‘Prince Max of Baden’. This must have been
‘Maximilian Alexander Friedrich Wilhelm of Baden (10 July 1867 – 6
November 1929), a nobleman and politician who was to play an
important role as the war drew to a close.
Frank was then
offered the chance of freedom in exchange for a German POW, but,
ever the self-sacrificing hero, he preferred to let another soldier
take his place, a man who had children and whose wife had gone mad.
During much of the
time he spent as a prisoner, Frank had been ‘posted’ as ‘missing
presumed dead’, but at some stage he was located and eventually
released. Programmes run in the names of Princess Margaret of
Connaught and the Count Munster may have assisted in this process.
Such formal
military records as I have had access to lack the details reproduced
above. They indicate that Frank reached the rank of Second
Lieutenant, and that he was marked ‘exonerated officers’ list’. This
exoneration carries no pejorative connotations and may have been
occasioned by the sicknesses already mentioned. It means that the
bald military record lacks all the colour and detail found in the
‘family traditions’ that APJ has passed on.
Eugène and Montreuil during the War
Eugène was also drawn into the conflict that
convulsed Europe, becoming an interpreter attached to a General
whose name I have seen rendered ‘Burtshel’. This may have been Eton
and Magdalene educated Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Percival Dearman
Birchall, a Royal Fusilier attached to the 4th Battalion
Canadian Infantry (Central Ontario Regiment). However, since
Birchall
was killed at Ypres on 24 April 1915, Eugène may have worked with other officers as well.
As is well known,
Montreuil became the
General Head Quarters of the British Expeditionary Force and for a
time was the centre of the allied world! The ‘back office’ of a new
kind of military operation occupied buildings in or inside the
ramparts; General Douglas Haig was assigned a mansion, Beaurepaire,
on the road from Montreuil towards Hesdin, and his train was often
drawn up at the station below the town. The War Correspondents, a
distinguished group that included John Buchan and Philip Gibbs,
occupied a Château between Hesdin and St Pol, and nearby properties
accommodated the visitors who wanted to get within the sound of the
front – but rarely visited the forward positions. Haig’s Diaries
together with those kept by his chaplain, the Rev’d George Simpson
Duncan, GHQ by ‘GSO’ (pseudonym of Sir Frank Fox) and the
post-war writings of Philip Gibbs provide glimpses of Montreuil –
of what Gibbs, no relation and particularly perceptive, referred to
as the ‘City of Beautiful Nonsense’. Philip Gibbs wrote:
I came to know
G.H.Q, more closely when it
removed for fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old walled town, once
within sight of the sea, which ebbed over the low-lying ground below
its hill, but now looking across a wide vista of richly cultivated
fields where many hamlets are scattered among clumps of trees. One came
to G.H.Q. from journeys over the wild desert of the battle-fields, where
men lived in ditches and "pill-boxes," muddy, miserable in all things
but spirit, as to a place where the pageantry of war still maintained
its old and dead tradition. It was like one of those pageants which
used to be played in England before the war, picturesque, romantic,
utterly unreal. It was as though men were playing at war here, while
others, sixty miles away, were fighting and dying, in mud and gas-waves
and explosive barrages.
An "open sesame," by means
of a special pass, was needed to enter this City of Beautiful Nonsense.
Below the gateway, up the steep hillside, sentries stood at a white post
across the road, which lifted up on pulleys when the pass had been
examined by a military policeman in a red cap. Then the sentries slapped
their hands on their rifles to the occupants of any motor-car, sure that
more staff- officers were going in to perform those duties which no
private soldier could attempt to understand, believing they belonged to
such mysteries as those of God. Through the narrow streets walked
elderly generals, middle-aged colonels and majors, youthful subalterns
all wearing red hat-bands, red tabs, and the blue-and-red armlet of
G.H.Q., so that colour went with them on their way.
Often one saw the
Commander-in-Chief starting for an afternoon ride, a fine figure, nobly
mounted, with two A.D.C.'s and an escort of Lancers. A pretty sight,
with fluttering pennons on all their lances, and horses groomed to the
last hair. It was prettier than the real thing up in the Salient or
beyond the Somme, where dead bodies lay in upheaved earth among ruins
and slaughtered trees.
War at Montreuil was quite a
pleasant occupation for elderly generals who liked their little stroll
after lunch, and for young Regular officers, released from the painful
necessity of dying for their country, who were glad to get a game of
tennis down below the walls there, after strenuous office work in
-'which they had written "Passed to you" on many "minutes," or had drawn
the most comical caricatures of their immediate chief, and of his
immediate chief, on blotting-pads and writing-blocks.
It seemed, at a mere glance,
that all these military inhabitants of G.H.Q. were great and glorious
soldiers. Some of the youngest of them had a row of decorations, from
Montenegro, Serbia, Italy, Roumania, and other States, as recognition of
gallant service in translating German letters (found in dug-outs by the
fighting men), or arranging for visits of political personages to the
back areas of war or initialing requisitions for pink, blue, green, and
yellow forms which in due course would find their way to battalion
adjutants for immediate filling-up in the middle of an action. The
oldest of them, those white-haired, bronze-faced, grey-eyed generals in
the
administrative side of war
had started their third row of ribbons well before the end of the Somme
battles, and had flower borders on their breasts by the time the
massacres had been accomplished in the fields of Flanders.
As might be expected, Eugène’s duties as an
interpreter periodically took him to Montreuil, and on one visit he
was able to locate, but not look inside, Frank’s ‘dream house’. In
1917, while in Paris recovering from ‘une phlébite’, Eugène had
occasion to tell his wife that meeting Frank, whom he referred to
then and later as the ‘Montreuil Boy’, had had a profound impact on
him: he said that seeing Frank smile ‘changed one’s ‘outlook’.[2]
In about 1918, Eugène, whose work as an interprester took him to
Hesdin, visited Montreuil once again, but, as before, he could only
look from a distance at the ‘dream house’.
Post-War Positions
All three of the central characters in this
narrative came through the ‘war to end wars’ and after it Eugène and
Mitzi gravitated towards Paris where the shape of the new Europe was
being mapped out. Since her wealth was largely derived from Central
Europe, Mitzi took a close interest in the way European boundaries
were being redrawn, and Pryce-Jones relates that Mitzi ‘gained
access to Lloyd George’ at the Peace Conference, and showed him on a
map where the new international boundaries should be drawn – so far
as she was concerned (108) [3].
He wisely cautions that he may be repeating a ‘family legend’. In
fact, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, Springer interests
lay in at least three ‘states, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and
Hungary’. (108)
Frank in the Post-War Period
After the War, Frank sought his destiny bearing
in mind the words of his boyhood epiphany that he was to be needed.
A visit to the widow of the manly Harold Brown led to flight when,
Pryce-Jones records, she made it clear that she wanted to marry him.
He fled to his mother and stayed with her, thinking she might be the
one who needed him. Pryce-Jones records that, one day in 1919, after
sending him out to play golf, she died at Eastry. He does not say,
as was found at the inquest conducted by the Coroner for Kent, F.W.
Hardman, on 19 April, that the cause of death was ’suffocation by
drowning. Suicide while of unsound mind
[4]. Since the Death certificate carried the
information, in the space for ‘occupation’, that Annie was ‘Widow of
Frederick Wooster of Independent Means’ it is not clear how deeply
into the matter Hardman was able to delve. Annie’s deception that
‘Wooster’ was her married rather than her maiden name seems to have
survived her death. The actual method used Annie to kill herself,
involving a bed, ropes and a bucket of water, was very unusual and
was given column inches in a New Zealand newspaper.[5]
Pryce-Jones writes in some detail about what
happened after Annie died, but what he writes makes more sense if we
know about the circumstances of Annie’s passing. It seems that
shortly before Annie’s suicide, her elder son, had contracted polio,
and as a result of this the burden of settling her affairs fell to
Frank. The draft obituary, presumably reproducing information from
Frank, continued:
Unaided [Frank] went
through a worse Hell than the war had been. He often said that
having to live on without Harold and his mother was much harder than
‘going over the top’. Finally, after long lonely hours of cruel hard
work, he managed to get his mother buried at Deal. Everything
crumbled around him. He only then learnt something that tore his
heart more and more. His mother who he had loved so tenderly, to
whom he wished to dedicate his life, left all she possessed, many
charming souvenirs and lovely pieces of furniture, to her sister,
not mentioning either of her sons in her Will.
He was too broken in
health, too deeply unhappy, to stay on in England so decided to
spend most of his time in France, or travelling. He always said that
France had the most hospitable people. No wonder he made friends
wherever he went. He was beautiful, radiant, always thinking of
others, never of himself. No one could imagine the sorrow in his
heart or the handicap of ill-health which inflicted such suffering
upon him.
This is, incidentally, the final section of the
draft obituary, and one must wonder why the account stops at this
point rather than with Frank’s death. As I have stressed already,
Pryce-Jones’s attitude to Frank in this draft obituary is very
unlike that in his memoire. I read this as a rather forced funeral
tribute. It is particularly hard to take the ‘long lonely’ and ‘the
hard, cruel’ in the paragraphs above and by the time we get to the
‘sorrow in his heart’ one must feel that Pryce-Jones’s tongue has
slipped resolutely into his cheek – or that he is expecting readers
to ‘reach for the sick-bag’. He is making a mockery of the form he
has adopted, and no longer expects the dispassionate reader to take
him, or his portrait of the saintly, suffering Frank, seriously.
Elsewhere in his writing about Frank there are drops of vinegar but
here the taste is of several tablets of saccharine. In brief, I
think the portrait of Frank of the draft obituary was painted to
please Mitzi but that Pryce-Jones found himself parodying the eulogy
form and gave up. He completed a quicker, more honest sketch in
The Bonus of Laughter where he felt free from constraints.
James Gibbs copyright 2013
[1] There may be relevant papers in the
Regimental Record Archive.
[2] He seems to have used the English
word ‘outlook’. My source for this is ‘Voici les raisons
exactes..’ the Guide to the Hôtel that may be by Lephay or
Le Roy
The sources I am drawing on were produced for popular
consumption, some colour may have been added and some names,
such as ‘Burtshel’, misheard. ‘une phlébite’ - Circulatory
problems ‘ran’ in the Fould family.
[3] It will be recalled that all the
numbered Pryce-Jones references are to The Bonus of
Laughter, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.
[4] See
mfo.
The death is recorded at Eastry, Kent.
[5] This suicide has been researched for
the Wooster Family Site by members of the family.