George Pointing

George Pointing and his brother William Pointing both have surviving papers at the National Archives and so I've updated George's page on the Chailey 1914-1918 site for now.



George was a 19 year old shop assistant working for Sainsbury's in the City of London when he joined the Sussex Yeomanry in 1915. He received a bullet in his left knee in March 1918 which finished his war and left him in hospitals in England for six months. Nevertheless, by 1920, doctors found that he had "recovered" and he was awarded a gratuity of five pounds with "no grounds for further awards".



The service papers in the WO 363 and WO 364 series are full of reports similar to those in George's file and you wonder how many men endured years of pain and discomfort and received no further recompense from their country. I recall interviewing First World War veterans over sixty years after the conflict had ended and the majority of these men were still discomforted by wounds incurred in on the Western Front.



Harold Shephard, of the 1/5th Leicesters was one of those men I interviewed. He'd joined the 5th Leicesters a couple of years before the war and saw service with the battalion until invalided out. In his eighties when I met him, he told me how in recent years he'd been in and out of hospital with breathing problems and how he had explained to the doctor that he thought it was as a result of being gassed on the Somme in 1916. "Oh, you don't want to worry about that my lad" the doctor told him, "that's more than sixty years ago."



"That may be so" replied Harold (who always gave the impression of somebody not to be trifled with), "but, I've got it, and you ain't."

You can read the full transcript of my interview with Harold Shephard on my World War 1 Veterans blog. Here's the link.


FIFTH LEICESTERSHIRE. A Record of the 1/5th Battalion the Leicestershire Regiment, TF, during the War 1914-1919







I'd be interested to know whether Harold Shephard gets a mention in the book above. Perhaps I should click on the link and buy it. This is what the Naval & Military Press say about it:



"This battalion history is based essentially on the War Diary supplemented by contributions from various battalion members. It is a far more detailed one than that of the 1/4th. The battalion, which had its HQ in Loughborough, was also in the Lincoln and Leicester Brigade of the 46th (N Midland) Division. It arrived in France on 28 February 1915 and the first few months were spent in the Armentieres sector and the Salient before moving south to the Loos battlefield. During the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt, which decimated the 1/4th, the battalion was fortunately in reserve; it was a day that caused 46th Division the highest number of casualties of any day of the war - 3,583.

"There is plenty of meat in this history, detailed accounts of actions and events in and out of the trenches, names of officers and other ranks, list of honours and awards - but again no index. There was a moment of excitement when the division was was ordered to Egypt and began to move at the end of December 1915. The battalion (with 1/4th Battalion) embarked at Marseille on 21 January 1916 in the Cunarder Andania, described as a ‘floating palace,’ only to be told the next morning to disembark; the powers that be had changed their minds and the division went back to the trenches. In the fighting at the approaches to the St Quentin Canal, 2Lt J.C Barrett won the VC for gallantry during the battalion attack on Pontruet on 24 September 1918. By the end of the war the battalion had suffered 440 dead of whom 25 were officers. A good history!"

The 5th Leicesters learn bomb throwing

Back in the early 1980s, having recently lost my grandfather and regretting that I'd never spoken to him properly about his own First World War experiences, I decided to set out and interview as many surviving veterans as I could find. My introduction to Chailey happened at this time when I was loaned an autograph album kept by a VAD nurse who'd worked with Sussex 54 VAD in Chailey and Newick. But I was principally interested in meeting the old soldiers and over the next ten years or so I probably interviewed or corresponded with about 100 Great War veterans - mostly in the Chelmsford area where I grew up, and at Loughborough where I went to university. I've recently started re-transcribing these tape-recorded interviews and I'll publish extracts here. As far as Chailey goes, it's slightly off tangent, but it is still WW1 and the old soldier tales are too good not to be shared.

So I'll start with Private Harold Shephard of the 5th Leicesters whom I interviewed in Loughborough in June 1984 when he was 88 years old. Mr Shephard joined the TF in 1911 and by 1915 he was in France. Here he is describing a Mills' bomb training course:

"Before we went to Egypt we had reinforcements come up to us at Marseilles. Now we’d been using the Mills bomb for twelve months near enough in the trenches and all the instructions we’d got were pull the pin out, count three and throw it.

Now in the reinforcements that come out we’d got an instructor as had been instructing on this bomb in England and had never thrown one - not the live thing - he’d thrown the dummy. And he come out to us in Marseilles and he says, I’ve come out from England to give you instructions on this bomb. So we all said, well what instructions are there? So he said, I’m coming to that in a minute, let me describe what I’ve come out here for, I’m stationed with the regiment now.

So he says, this is a Number 5 Mills’ Bomb. He says, you unscrew the bottom like this and take it off and at the top of that there’s a little detonator - and it’s only like a bit of electric wire and it’s about an inch long like that and curled up and then goes into the bomb. Now he took it out – we didn’t know nowt about this – he took it out and he says, now look, I’m going to tell you what not to do. So I says, he's pulling us bloody leg, you know, and all this that and the other. He gets this detonator out - and it weren’t only about that high - and he gets a little pocket knife and he says, now this is what I don’t want you soldiers to do. And he just touched the top of it and off went three of his fingers.

He’d been using the dummies in England but as soon as he got out here he was playing with the live stuff. We all said, fancy a bloody man coming out like that and telling us this when we’d been using them for twelve months.

Harold Shephard died in Loughborough in 1988 at the age of 92.