In December of last year, we posted about a podcast series that featured an interview with Society member Chris Loader who had travelled with the Society on the September 2023 SCS Battlefield Tour to visit the grave of his great-great-grandfather, Henry Albert Obadiah Loader.
Inspired by a visit to Doiran Military Cemetery during the tour, Chris has now branched out to record his own podcast series: Salonika Secrets.
‘Salonika Secrets’ – a new podcast from Society member Chris Loader
The podcast tells of Chris’s search to identify an unknown British officer commemorated at Doiran. Without giving too much away, Chris has so far managed to narrow down the identity to an officer who served in the 12th Hampshire Regiment. You can listen to the podcast free on Spotify, Amazon and Apple and, no doubt, other podcast providers. Chris also posts updates and extra information on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) here.
When I discovered that today is World Frog Day, I doubted that I could find any frogs with a Salonika connection. Then a memory stirred of a story read in The Mosquito – the journal of the Salonika Reunion Association – but would I find it again … ?
Although women who had served in Salonika – in whatever capacity – were eligible to join the SRA from the very start, they didn’t gain their own specific section in The Mosquito until September 1931 (issue 15), with Eileen Moore’s ‘Woman’s Page’. Later, this was expanded to ‘Women’s Pages’ and continued for the rest of The Mosquito’s long existence. So it was only right and proper that the final issue in May 1969 – a longer, glossier souvenir album, entitled Salonika Memories 1915-1919 – included it’s own ‘Women’s Pages’. By now this was edited by Miss N. M. Simcox. In her final editorial, she had this to say:
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.
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?
In Episode 68 of Tales from the Battlefields (see previous post) the podcast starts with part of a song by Irish musician Jimmy Crowley. I was intrigued to find out more about the tune…
According to an article in The Irish Examiner the song was popular around the time of the First World War but had fallen out of use in later decades before being discovered by Crowley, “The jaunty ballad is sung from two different female perspectives — the first, a woman whose husband has enlisted in World War I, the title referring to the Greek city of Thessaloniki, which was home to a British military base. These women were known as ‘seperas’ as they were paid separation allowance by the British government when their husbands went off to fight. The other woman in the song is the wife of a ‘slacker’, the term given to men who did not join the army. The women in the song swap jibes and sprinkled through the song are references to Cork locations such as the Coliseum and characters including Dicky Glue, a well-known pawnbroker… It would have been popular as a street ballad up to the time of the Second World War. It is a tremendous song because it gives an insight into the lives of women around the time of the First World War. It kind of died out later, when ballads became uncool, because they were associated with the poor and uneducated. They would have started coming back into vogue with the rise of folk music in the 1960s.”
The song has since been recorded by ‘The Dubliners’ and even appeared on Later with Jools Holland in 2015 played by ‘Lynched’:
Lynched – Salonika – Later… with Jools Holland – BBC Two
Tales from the Battlefields is a free podcast from battlefield guide and researcher Terry Whenham. It focuses on “the unheard stories of men who served on the Western Front during World War 1.”
However, in Episode 68 of the podcast, Terry interviews Chris Loader who travelled with the Society on the SCS Battlefield Tour in September this year. Chris describes the background to the campaign and his visit to the location where his two-times grandfather on his father’s side, Private Henry Loader of the 10th Hampshire’s, was mortally wounded in September 1918. I listened with a lot of interest to the story of Henry – and Chris’s research and visit – and I’m sure you will find it a worthwhile use of your time too. In my humble opinion of course!
You can listen to the podcast for free on Apple, Amazon Music, Spotify and directly from thispage.
Lembet Road Cemetery – final resting place of Henry Loader. Image from CWGC
I imagine BBC Radio Three’s long-running programme ‘Composer of the Week’ has looked at English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams and his career, many times. I remember listening to a previous episode some time ago and being irritated as his First World War army service was glossed over and no mention made of his time with the BSF. I am pleased to say, though, that last week’s series – A Vaughan Williams Christmas – mentions Christmas 1916 which he spent beneath Mount Olympus with his 60th Division Field Ambulance unit. You can listen to the programme for a while longer online here:
Although Vaughan Williams apparently noted down Greek tunes, none is played in the programme, but you do get performances of his lovely seasonal music and symphonies, plus a full performance of his much-loved The Lark Ascending.
I can only think of one way to finish this post and that is with this Greek Christmas tune, which has featured in previous Christmas posts and featured in Aladdin in Macedonia – the first of the 85th Field Ambulance pantomimes:
It is with great grief that I wish to tell you your son has died of wounds received in the recent attack. Our company was ordered to take up a position on the left flank of a brigade which was taking a village a mile to our front. We know the Bulgars were entrenched there. It was successfully carried out and the trenches taken and held. Your son was hit in the charge gallantly leading his men. I saw him at once and had him taken back. He was hit in the side but was not in great pain. We had great hopes of his recovery but last Saturday he had a relapse and died on Sunday morning. We buried him in a small cemetery where other are laid who in like manner have given their lives for their Country
I’m grateful to a recent correspondent with the Society for bringing to attention (to me at least!) the work of artist Henry Lamb. In 2014, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester had an exhibition, The Sensory War, to mark the 100th anniversary of WW1. One of the works exhibited was by Lamb: Advanced Dressing Station on the Struma 1916
Ana Carden-Coyne, who co-curated the exhbition Visions of the Front 1916-18, for the Somme centenary also featured the painting and describes it in this way:
“The scene of a dressing station focuses on the relationship between a wounded man and a stretcher-bearer, who attends him with a cup of water, a great relief that many soldiers wrote about as the comfort given between men. Thirst and cold were understood much later in the war as signs of hemorrhage and shock. The bearer’s hand gently touches the wounded man’s head, providing comfort symbolic of the pietà (Christian iconography of Mary cradling Jesus’ corpse). Indeed, the pietà was often used in war-time humanitarian images of nurses caring for wounded men. But Lamb transforms the theme into an effigy of masculine care and the intimate brotherhood of shared suffering. Placed on the ledge of a shallow trench, the stretcher resembles an altar. In the right hand corner is a Thomas splint used for compound fractures, from which soldiers could die. Pathos is also created by the figure on the left, head in hand, perhaps affected by malaria, a common disease of this front, or perhaps a reference to psychological suffering. The central figure stands over the patient, staring pensively into the distance. Made three years after the end of the war, the composition of this painting symbolises the pain and succour of the entire conflict.”
There’s also discussion of the painting by one of the team at The Whitworth here:
Henry Lamb was born in Australia in 1883 and educated at Manchester Grammar School, before studying medicine at Manchester University Medical School and Guy’s Hospital in London. He abandoned medicine in 1906 to study painting at the Chelsea School of Art but “with the outbreak of the first world war Lamb returned to his study of medicine and served as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, Salonika and Palestine where he was awarded the Military Cross. He was not an official war artist but was always sketching and drawing in spare moments. These sketches with memories from his time on the Macedonian Front and the Palestine campaign formed the basis of large-scale paintings made after the war. ‘Irish Troops in the Judaen Hills’, now in the Imeperial War Museum, and ‘Advanced Dressing Station on the Struma’ for Manchester City Art Gallery are amongst the most extraordinary of his career. In 1928 he married Lady Pansy Pakenham and moved to the quiet Wiltshire village of Coombe Bissett where they would remain for the rest of their lives. Lamb was appointed an official war artist for the second world war and after first wanting to document the war cabinet decided on portraits of soldiers and studies of servicemen at work across the South of England. At the same time as his appointment as a war artist Lamb was elected as an associate of the Royal Academy and a Trustee of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. He was finally awarded full membership of the Royal Academy in 1949.” Sources here and here.
Salonika Campaign Society, 1915-1918 