Wynberg in South Africa is a long way from Derby and back in 1888 it must have seemed even further away. Not that my great grandfather had much choice in the matter.
He was a soldier of the Queen and by the time he was 21 had seen service in Gibraltar and the West Indies as well South Africa.
He was one of the thousands of regular soldiers who garrisoned the Empire. It was a life of strict routine, clear discipline and at times sheer boredom. But for a young man who had grown up in Provident Street and later Sitwell Street this was indeed an adventure.
The corners of the Empire he visited were hot, exotic and in the case of South Africa potentially dangerous. Only nine years earlier the British Army had been defeated by a Zulu army at the Battle of Isandlwana while holding off another vastly superior Zulu force at Rorke’s Drift. Within a short while of the Zulu defeat, the British faced a series of military engagements with the Boer settlers which ended in 1881 only to begin again eighteen years later.
By then he had served his seven years and been discharged in the summer of 1892, but was called back to the Colours in January 1900 and would no doubt have been back in South Africa but at 33 he was deemed unfit.
I often wonder what it was that caused him to be rejected in the winter of 1900. He later suffered from chest problems and these may have been in evidence, or it might have been the hard life he had lived since enlisting at the age of 18 in 1885.
During his seven years with the First Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment he was hospitalized thirteen times of which eight were for sexually transmitted diseases and had his good conduct pay suspended for a brief spell.
His return to civilian life in Derby was punctuated with at least one drunken brawl with the police and despite living with our great grandmother for ten years he married another woman.
Those ten years saw him and our great grandmother, Eliza crisscross the country from Bedford where they had one child to Birmingham where they had another two and to Kent where they lost a son aged just six months.
Our views of late Victorian marriage are coloured by a prim and proper morality which did not reach every corner of society and certainly did not touch my great grandparents. To all intent and purposes they were married and appeared so on the five birth certificates and one death certificate which were issued between 1896 and 1902. But there is no marriage certificate.
Which may have made it easier for our great grandfather to marry in the November of 1906 in Gravesend in Kent and go on to have another five children.
At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the West Kent Regiment, never went abroad and died in July 1916.
He was and remained an enigma around which family stories have arisen.
Both my Derby family and the family in Kent believed he had served in India. My grandfather gave his own place of birth as Wynberg in South Africa despite the fact that he was actually born in Birmingham and one of Montague’s Kent children always maintained that there was more about his life than they knew.
There remain many corners of his life which are shrouded in mystery. He lived at a time when it was still possible to reinvent yourself with little concern that a paper trail of documents would catch you out. In his case these are sparse enough.
I continue to hope that more will turn up but the passage of time makes this unlikely. Perhaps one day we will visit the military base at Wynberg in the same way that I have seen the drill hall where he signed up in 1914. But in the meantime it will have to be Provident Street.
Earlier stories on great grandfather Montague
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/falling-through-cracks-part-one-story.html
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/falling-through-cracks-part-two-story_25.html
Picture; Montague in the uniform of the West Kents, circ 1914-15, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
No comments:
Post a Comment