Salonika Campaign Society, 1915-1918

Remembering Great Uncle David and 11/Welsh

It was five o’clock in the morning on the edge of hell. Captain Jimmy Eynon looked up through the goggles of his gas mask at Grande Couronne, cursed savagely, and kicked a rugby ball high into the air. Before it fell, a Welshman had been shot to pieces … and another … and another.
from ‘Now the Agony!’ by Gareth Bowen in ‘The South Wales Echo‘, 1964

William Richmond and 10/Black Watch (4)

William Richmond was demobbed in 1919; his medal index card in The National Archives shows that he entered the ‘Class Z Reserve’ on Valentine’s Day. This allowed him to return to civilian life, but there was an obligation to ‘return to the colours’ if necessary, an obligation which was not abolished until 31 March 1920. The card also shows that he was eligible for the famous trio of Great War campaign medals known as Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, named after cartoon characters: the 1914/15 Star (for his service overseas before 31 December 1915), the British War Medal and Victory Medal.

‘Awards and Honours of the Macedonian Campaign’ research project – an update.

We are very grateful to SCS Member, Rob Elliott for leading this project that attempts to compile a single record of the awards and honours given to those serving in the Macedonian Campaign. Full details of the aims of the project can be found here.

Rob, with some help from Society Chairman Alan Wakefield, and Members Harry Fecitt and Andy Siddall, has made remarkable progress in compiling this database of honours. A first release was made on 12th January, containing 1067 entries with 276 citations, and Rob has just published the second update , comprising 1960 names of which 283 have full citations. The database is available on the SCS Members’ Area here.

For a full explanation of the work and progress made so far, please read Rob’s report here.

If you are able to spare some time in helping Rob, please send him a message via the form below.

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Thank you for your response. ✨

William Richmond and 10/Black Watch (3)

In January 1918 General Headquarters (GHQ) in Salonika felt the need to issue memoranda reminding commanders of formations that they were responsible for the efficiency of their units and for the training of all officers and men in them. In certain technical fields training had to be done at army schools but, generally, the purpose of these schools was to support units by training the trainers who would share, what we would now call ‘best practice’, within them. By this time GHQ Salonika had a number of schools under its control, covering subjects such as infantry training, artillery, signals, the Lewis Gun and anti-gas precautions. A School of Physical and Bayonet Training was also set up, with an Assistant Superintendent authorised by the War Office to coordinate and supervise this training, with a staff of 10 NCOs from the Army Gymnastic Staff (Official History vol. 2, chap. III). Our next sight of William Richmond is as a student at this School.

William Richmond and 10/Black Watch (2)

On Burn’s Night (25 January) I introduced William Richmond who, at the age of 20, enlisted in the 10th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Highland Regiment (Black Watch) on 11 September 1914. After finding themselves in various English camps during 1915 and spending two months in France the Battalion, with the rest of 26th Division, started heading off for Salonika – via Marseille – in November 1915.

The SCS Philip Barnes Bursary

The Salonika Campaign Society is delighted to announce The Philip Barnes Bursary. This new initiative is offered to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers undertaking research that will contribute to knowledge of the Salonika Campaign fought across Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria between 1915 and 1918.

The successful candidate will be awarded a subsidised place on the Society’s 2024 battlefield tour. The tour of 9 days (8 nights) will run from Sunday 22 until Monday 30 September and will start and finish in Thessaloniki.

The bursary, named after Philip Barnes, SCS founder and pioneer traveller to the First World War battlefields across Macedonia, will cover accommodation, food and travel within Greece and North Macedonia for the duration of the tour. Travel to and from Greece will be at the candidate’s own expense.

Members and visitors to this site, please forward to anyone you think might be interested or who could promote the Bursary to others. Thank you.

Further details of the Bursary and how to apply are here.

A lost world …

Although the White Tower would have been familiar, my late grandfather would not have recognised modern Thessaloniki – the vibrant Greek city rebuilt after the great fire of 1917 and developed in the decades after that. To him and other members of the British Salonika Force who passed through it was very much an eastern city – not always remembered fondly – populated by a multiplicity of different peoples. Notable among the inhabitants was the strong Jewish community, but the fire of 1917, subsequent upheavals and the appalling events of the Holocaust changed the city forever.

William Richmond and 10/Black Watch (1)

Happy Burn’s Night to all our Scottish readers – wherever you are in the world – and all those Sassenachs who, like me, enjoy nothing more than tucking into a haggis with ‘neeps and tatties’, washed down with a ‘wee dram’!

This seems an ideal occasion to celebrate one of the Scottish units of the British Salonika Force – 10th (Service) Battalion, Royal Highlanders (Black Watch). Formed in Perth in 1914 the Battalion joined 26th Division (77th Brigade) and soon found itself far from the Highlands: on Salisbury Plain, in Bristol and Sutton Veny in Wiltshire. In September 1915 it sailed for France but, after just two months, it was off to Salonika where it remained until returning to the Western Front in June 1918.

That song!

As I suspected, the song that Andy gave us on 7 January – Salonika – has been going round and round in my head. It’s also been leading me down various rabbit holes on the internet. The lyrics are available on a range of websites, alongside some very earnest discussions about the meaning of the song, including some rather fanciful descriptions of the role of Salonika in the First World War: a supply base for the Gallipoli campaign. Really?

Innovative mapping tool now available!

The Trench Maps Place Names Index

As a result of a remarkable piece of work researched and initiated by SCS Membership Secretary, Keith Edmonds, we are pleased to provide a new file to aid research and understanding of the Salonika Campaign.

The Trench Maps Index is a .pdf file which lists approximately 8,500 place names from the Salonika theatre, in alphabetic sequence, together with their corresponding coordinates. The names, and their respective Easting/Northing, have been determined from the collection of maps available from the Society and show:

Place Name
The map from where the location reference (Easting/Northing) was taken
The map scale
The Easting and Northing and
The calculated, corresponding Latitude and Longitude.

Where a location reference has been provided on the respective map, the place’s location is shown in italicised blue text in the index, as in the following example.

An entry from the Trench Maps Place Names Index.

But here’s the thing… clicking on any name shown in blue text will load Google Maps at that location as indicated by a red ‘pin’!

The location of Arthur´s Seat in Google Maps

This ability to locate campaign locations in Google Maps is a remarkable innovation made possible by the research begun by Keith leading to collaboration with Professors Clifford J Mugnier and Gábor Timár.
As a result, Professor Timár presented a paper on the subject, Georeference of the Allied Trench Maps of the WW1 Salonika Front at the 16th ICA Conference, Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage at the Faculty of Geography, Babeş–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania on 22nd-24th September 2022. The co-authors of the paper are listed as Gábor Timár, Keith Edmonds, Clifford J. Mugnier.

This new file is available to all members at the SCS Members’ Area and on all future purchases of the SCS Digital Collection DVDs.