Doiran – Salonika Campaign Society, 1915-1918

Salonika: The Battle Against Boredom

Yesterday, Dr Jake Gasson¹ presented ‘Salonika: The Battle Against Boredom’ online from the National Army Museum². If you missed the talk, or would like to listen again, you can catch it below or via this link. The talk begins at 15 minutes 24 seconds.

¹Dr Jake Gasson is a National Army Museum Fellow based at King’s College London, where he is a postdoctoral researcher. He obtained a DPhil from Pembroke College, Oxford, specialising in the Macedonian front of the First World War. He is also the first recipient of the Salonika Campaign Society’s Philip Barnes Bursary. Jake joined the Society’s 2024 battlefield visit to Greece, delivering two presentations to the tour party while there. We recently published his article on Searching for Scapegoats: The ‘unreliable Zouaves’ and the Second Battle of Doiran. Jake will also be writing a piece for the The New Mosquito in the future.

²The National Army Museum is a leading authority on the British Army and its impact on society past and present, and has hosted many free online events in the past. You can support its work here.

‘Salonika Secrets’ – a new podcast

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.

Good luck with the search Chris!

…if needs be to stop there for good.

My thanks go to Lucy London (of the excellent Forgotten Poets of the First World War site) for sending on this poem, and details of its author, written in 1915.

A Candid Opinion

Do we want to back to the trenches?
To get biscuits and bully to eat
To get caught by a sniper’s chance bullet
Or crippled with frost bitten feet.

There are some say they’re anxious to get back
There are others who say they are not.
It is not that they care for the danger
Or are frightened that they will get shot.

It’s the awful conditions you live in,
Midst the rain and the mud and the dirt.
Where you’d give a month’s pay for a square meal,
And twice that amount for a shirt.

No, I’m not at all anxious to go back,
But I’ll have to go that’s understood
So I’m willing and ready to go there
And if needs be to stop there for good.

The poem’s author was William Fox Ritchie, born on 15^th June 1887 in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland. William joined Princess Louise’s Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in April 1909 and served in Malta and India. With the outbreak of war he served in Flanders where he suffered from frostbite and, in 1915, was invalided home.

Perhaps as his poem suggests, William felt compelled to return to active service. In 1917 he volunteered and joined 12^thBattalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Salonika. Serjeant William F. Ritchie was killed in action at the Grand Couronne, Salonika on 12^th September 1918. He is buried at Doiran Military Cemetery where his inscription reads, Until the day break and the shadows flee away.

Source: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/3753074

The New Mosquito #40 : September 2019

Members should have received this latest edition of The New Mosquito by now. Please contact the Society if you are expecting a copy, but haven’t received it.

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