World War One hero Isaac Robinson never told of bravery

ChronicleLive.co.uk: World War One hero Isaac Robinson never told of bravery
HIS bravery was only matched by his modesty.

Curling with age, cuttings from the Chronicle tell the story of Isaac Robinson’s heroism.

But the man himself never spoke of his courage and the first his family knew of his war-time heroics was when they came across the cuttings following his death.

They were found under inches of dust in a Tyneside loft.

Mr Robinson’s family didn’t know their great grandfather was a war hero until they made the find.

After dusting down the newspapers from 1918, Heather Cowan discovered her grandfather was twice awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his bravery and quick thinking.

Mr Robinson, whose body was peppered with shrapnel, captured 150 prisoners when all of his officers had been killed or wounded during the First World War.

And Heather, of the Vigo Estate, Birtley, Gateshead, made the remarkable discovery as she cleared out her late dad’s belongings.

The 66-year-old said: “I didn’t have a clue that my grandad had been such a hero. My dad used to tell us stories about him but we had no idea that he was so brave during the war. It’s remarkable to think that after all this time we have found out what a difference our grandad did during the war.

“When my dad died I was clearing out this belongings and I just came across some of my grandad’s things.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw them. I showed my sons and they couldn’t believe it either.

“We are so proud of what he did and I’m so proud to be able to call him my grandad.”

Mr Robinson was a member of the 1st Battalion, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers.

Since the war ended he had been almost continuously in and out of hospital having shrapnel removed from his body.

Ike, as he was known, was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. On one occasion, when all the officers of his company had been killed or wounded, he took command.

Although his body had been peppered with shrapnel and he could hardly move, he continued to shout orders out to his men until some German soldiers, amazed at his remarkable courage, carried him away.

After nine months in a German prison camp he returned home where he began his ordeal to have the shrapnel removed. He later died of ammonia poisoning in 1939.

When Heather’s dad Bob died 20 years ago, she stored all of this belongings, including the cuttings, in her attic.

Heather added: “We were having a bit of a clear-out and I came across them. I showed them to my son and he said they shouldn’t be hidden away.

“I think we are going to take them to the museum at Alnwick Castle to see if they would like to display them. Other people need to know what he did.”

It could be bugle

The Sun: It Could Be Bugle: Lottery win allows chef to fulfil Last Post dream

LOTTERY winner Neil Baker checked the numbers again to be sure.
3.H.15, 14713. Not his winning ticket, but the plot details and service number for his great-grandfather's First World War grave.

Seeing the name of the 38-year-old infantryman neatly inscribed in the cold stone, he stepped forward to place a wreath of poppies.

Neil's £1.6million win in January could have bought him a new house, a flash car, maybe an exotic holiday or two. It hasn't. None of it.

The former chef, 36, is not most people's idea of a "spend, spend, spend" jackpot winner, but perhaps he has got what most of us would like from a Lottery windfall.

His cash has bought him the time to do all the simple things he hoped to do but never got round to while working all hours to pay the bills.

For seven years before his big win, Neil and mum Margaret had been planning to visit the Belgian war grave of Margaret's grandfather, Private Sydney Carver, killed, like so many, in the Great War.

And musician Neil wanted to play the Last Post at the graveside, in honour of the great-grandfather he never knew and also in remembrance of his dad John, a bugler in the Boys' Brigade, who had always planned to do the same but died in 2004 with his wish unfulfilled.

Now Neil stood beside the white limestone memorial, one of many in the immaculately kept Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Tournai, Belgium, and his lips were suddenly dry.

His nerves were nothing like the butterflies he felt when he got round to checking his Lottery numbers on a Sunday night in January.

"It was Mum who checked the ticket and she said, 'We've got all of these,'" recalled Neil, from Bridgwater, Somerset.

"We always did four lines with family birthdays and the like, and one Lucky Dip line to make it up to a round fiver, and normally we would be lucky to get a tenner once in a blue moon."

The Lucky Dip numbers - 5, 20, 25, 30, 36 and 47 - had come up for Neil and a joint winner.

He said: "At 11.10pm on a Sunday there was no one to speak to at Lottery HQ, just an answering machine. I was shaking and talking gibberish and we checked the numbers again on the TV.

"I didn't sleep much and the next day, when Camelot rang back and I heard how much I'd won, I was running around shouting."

As head chef at the Tudor Hotel in Bridgwater, working up to 70 hours a week, Neil still could not pass on the amazing news because his boss was away for the day.

"I had to sit on the news until that night and work a normal shift," he said. "I cut the top of my finger because I could not concentrate."

When his boss returned, Neil could finally reveal his good fortune.

He said: "When I told him, he said, 'You'd better get me a whisky!'

"I had all sorts of lieu days owing but I could not leave them in the lurch so I gave them a week's notice.

"I did think at times in that week, 'What the hell am I doing here?' "

News soon got out but Neil was glad that another bigger Lottery win a week later took the heat off him.

Neil, who plays for Bridgwater amateur rugby side Morganians, said: "Lots of people know me, through the rugby club and the hotel and they all congratulated me, but no fair-weather friends suddenly appeared.

"The friends I had are the friends I have still got, which is great."

Neil insisted at the time that the win would not change him and he wasn't kidding. He is staying in his £100,000 childhood home so he can care for his wheelchair-bound mum, who has lived there for 50 years.

He is also happy to stick with his nine-year-old Jaguar X-Type car.

In fact his only extravagance has been to have the dents knocked out of his dad's old bugle and the silver on it replated at a cost of £300.

"The house has got everything we need, so why move?" he said. "You can't move your memories.

"I know it's a lot of money but you could blow it all in a month if you wanted to buy daft cars and a big house.

"That's just not me. I'm glad the jackpot was shared so someone else got a chance to enjoy the money too."

Even though Neil stopped work, he soon found himself busy helping to decorate a neighbour's house and repair his mum's shed.

He said: "I did think when I was covered in paint and dust, 'I could afford to pay someone else to do this,' but I just got on with it. We have lovely neighbours."

He treated himself and his mum to a few trips to steam train sites at York, Swindon and Minehead, and they are planning a holiday in Cornwall or Scotland or, at a push, maybe a cruise.

Neil said: "Why go abroad when Britain has some of the loveliest countryside in the world? It's just lovely to have the time to go and see it."

He has also realised the joy of having his own private bank manager: "Suddenly, instead of ringing and being held in a queue for three hours or having to go to see them, you ring up and they come round to see you! I can't get my head round it."

Neil received advice from Lotto chiefs and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on how to realise his ambition and trace his great-grandfather's grave.

Sydney Carver was 34 and a river pilot when he enlisted in 1914, training with his new comrades at Surrey's Deepcut barracks with no uniforms or rifles.

But by 1915 he was in action in France, serving in the 7th Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, and somehow went on to live through the carnage and slaughter of major battles including the Somme and Ypres.

Neil believes that in June 1918, Sydney survived the shelling of a train on which the battalion were travelling but may have been in a patrol which suffered casualties fighting the Germans at Ablain Saint Nazaire, near Lens.

Sydney died the following month in hospital in Tournai, Belgium.

Unknown to his wife and family, who would not hear of his death until October that year, he was buried. But his body was later moved to the war graves extension to the civil cemetery in Tournai.

Now here Neil was in front of his great-grandfather's gravestone.

The night before, he and his mother had heard the haunting strains of the Last Post in a ceremony that unfolds every evening at the Menin Gate in Ypres.


As he stood over his forefather's last resting place, Neil pursed his lips, puffed out his cheeks and the first notes echoed from his bugle across the cemetery.

Margaret wiped a tear from her eye. Then, after Neil's moving rendition of the Last Post, she said: "His dad would have been so proud. I am so proud of Neil.

"He is the son I never thought I would have. The doctors said I could not conceive and I was eight and a half months pregnant before I realised. Perhaps that is why we are so close."



Wearing his great-grandfather's war medals, Neil said: "It has been very poignant; almost surreal - like not really being here. I had always wanted to come but never had the time because of work.

"Playing Dad's bugle at my great-grandfather's grave is very important to me and the Lottery win has made it possible.

"I wanted to pay my respects to someone who gave their life for his country so we could all grow up to do the things we want to do.

"I did not want to cry and I managed to hold it in, but you are very aware of being surrounded by the graves of 600 young men who never lived to do the things they wanted to do.

"The only shame is that Dad was not here beside me, blowing his bugle."

Great War generals are lampooned as donkeys. Dan Snow's great-grandfather's story reveals they were victims too

Daily Mail: Great War generals are lampooned as donkeys. Dan Snow's great-grandfather's story reveals they were victims too

Like many children of my generation, I learnt my history from the BBC's Blackadder; when it came to the First World War, I thought Stephen Fry's portrayal of blustering, incompetent General Melchett was entirely accurate. Generals were aristocratic, callous and quite possibly bloodthirsty.

Even now, it is widely thought senior officers were 'donkeys' who sent 'lions', the brave young troops, to their slaughter. A more maligned group of men in British history it would be hard to find.

There was a portrait of one of these absurd generals hanging in our family home. He has the trademark Snow features: Roman nose, squinty eyes and a box-like skull. He sits in military khaki, red tabs on his collar, a chest packed with medals, glaring out as if staring down the Mahdi of Sudan, King Cetshwayo's elite Zulu warriors or the Kaiser's troops, all of whom he faced in a long Army career. This was my great-grandfather, Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow, one of the commanders on the Western Front.

We knew he had been there on the first day of the Somme, the darkest day in British military history when 60,000 young men were killed or injured. But he was a distant figure to his own children and my father (the journalist Peter Snow) only met him as a baby. To me, he was just a face in a painting. We never really talked about 'the General'.

Then, at the age of 30, I took part in a BBC1 programme to mark the 90th anniversary of the Armistice and examine my great-grandfather's role in the First World War. It was time, I thought, to own up to my unfashionable relative.

Yet in the course of their work, the programme's researchers unearthed a wealth of material that has changed my view not just of General Snow, but of the war itself. In particular, they had uncovered a memoir and letters in which you can hear the old man's words and thoughts uninterrupted by time - a unique account from the top of the British Army stretching from the terrible retreat from Mons in the summer of 1914 to the mud-clogged horror of Ypres in 1915. It was not designed for publication and it contains no excuses or justifications for his actions.

Instead, it comes with a simple instruction: 'If, when that time arrives, my son, or grandson, or whoever is in possession of this story, thinks that its publication would be of interest, let him publish it by all means. The actors will be dead and no one's feelings will be hurt.'

I decided to take him at his word and, with the excellent historian Mark Pottle, edited the story of an Army's struggle to overcome obstacles that would have baffled even the Duke of Wellington. The First World War was a turning point: in one generation war had changed beyond recognition and it was the job of Snow and his fellow generals to come up with answers.

It was not as if he lacked experience. On the contrary, Snow had been a fine junior officer and fought in far-flung corners of the globe, wherever the British Empire had need of him. He had been a hardened enforcer for the Queen Empress Victoria, traversing desert, jungle and savannah.

He fought Zulus in South Africa and the Mahdi in Sudan, where he carried a bottle of champagne with him to Khartoum and drank it when his troops had avenged the death of General Gordon, who was killed fighting the Mahdi's warriors in 1885. By the time he was promoted to major general, he and fellow senior British commanders had seen more combat than their contemporaries in the French or German armies.

On the eve of war he was commanding the 4th Division in Britain, assimilating the lessons of the 1899-1902 Boer War for the possibility of war in Europe.

Around 100,000 British troops headed for the Continent in August and September 1914, but they were ill-prepared and most would be dead or wounded within months. They were short of heavy artillery, high-explosive shells, machine guns, and even helmets. There was not a single anti-aircraft gun with this British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

Too many of Snow's men were reservists who struggled with the marching and hot summer weather. They inflicted grave casualties on the Germans but were forced to retreat. My ancestor rode a horse around the battlefield of Le Cateau (near Cambrai in northern France), making him one of the last British generals to command in a major battle on horseback.

His criticism of the retreat that followed the battle is frank: 'The higher staffs had had no practice in command, and although they had been well trained in the theory of the writing and issue of orders, they failed in the practice...Added to this we all suffered from the fault common to all Englishmen, a fault we did not know we suffered from till war revealed it, a total lack of imagination.'

It is often supposed that he and other senior officers had been safe in their comfortable chateaux, well out of danger. The truth is somewhat different. British generals spent a surprising amount of time on the front line and 70 were killed or died of wounds on the Western Front. Five were killed in the first six months alone.

My great-grandfather was seriously injured. He was forced to return to Britain after his horse fell and he crashed to the ground, shattering his pelvis. He would never fully recover, yet his war was not over. With the onset of trench warfare - on a front stretching from the Channel to the Alps - the Army had to be expanded, and Snow, aged 56, was summoned to the War Office for a meeting with Lord Kitchener.
Soldiering on: General Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow in France during the First World War
He was told he was heading back to France with a hastily cobbledtogether division. In Snow's own words: 'I told Lord Kitchener that I had not nearly recovered from my accident, and that I doubted whether I was yet in good enough health to carry out such an arduous task. He said that that had nothing to do with the matter.'

Worse still, the terrible losses on the Western Front meant Snow's men were needed before their training was complete. This time he found himself commanding a division in the hell that was Flanders. All these years later, the soil was still clinging like clown shoes to my boots when I went to visit, the flat fields merging with grey cloud.

In his memoirs, Snow was deeply critical of himself and others, from the inexperience of the British gunners to the shortage of ammunition.

Yet the circumstances he faced verged on the impossible. The revolution in firepower had given the defending side the ability to bring a wall of steel and explosives down on anyone brave enough to attack. Radio was in its infancy. Telephone cables were severed, messengers were picked off by snipers armed with rifles of hitherto undreamed of power and accuracy. Thousands of miles of newly invented barbed wire posed an intractable problem.

Then there was the mud. On one occasion, after moving to a new sector, he wrote: 'We lost several men on the first night, drowned or smothered. The men had either to stand in water, knee deep, with every prospect of sinking in deeper still, or hang on the side of the trench. Later in the war we should have overcome the difficulty but at this time the men were overworked in keeping the front trenches in order, and we were all inexperienced.

'On one occasion one of my staff said to a Corporal of the Engineers, "Now you are an engineer; cannot you devise some method of draining this trench?" to which he replied, "I am afraid, Sir, that I cannot; you see before the war I was a Christmas card maker by trade."

'The wet trenches soon began to tell on the men's feet...Very soon an average of three hundred men a day were being evacuated, and there was little chance of any of these men returning for months. We did all we could, but the Division rapidly became a skeleton of what it had been.'

Generals in the First World War were confronted with problems that would have stretched the greatest of commandersYet nothing was done to help: 'We were not provided with wood wherewith to make trench-boards, and no extra socks or waterproof boots were forthcoming. We were only censured for having so many sick.'

This war was unlike anything any of them had prepared for or imagined. This was never truer than on April 22, 1915 as Snow watched the Germans unleash their first full-scale chemical attack on the Western Front.

My great-grandfather describes the moment vividly: 'I noticed a whitish blue mist to the north-east of us over the French lines. It was the sort of mist one expects to see over water meadows on a frosty night. We were rather puzzled by it. We soon noticed a peculiar smell which made our noses and throats tingle, but it was some time before we realised that this was the much-talked-of gas.'

The German chemical assault had come close to tearing a decisive hole in the French and British defences but, after terrible fighting, it became clear the Allied line had been bent but not broken.

Snow commanded from a flimsy bunker under constant enemy fire. He described how 'at night we cleared out the tables and slept on the floor packed like sardines. The noise was terrific, what with telephone bells ringing and shells bursting nearby.' His tenacity earned him a knighthood and a promotion.

Snow's memoir finishes after Ypres in 1915 but his darkest days of the war still lay ahead. In the summer of 1916 Britain's vast new volunteer army was ready for its first full-scale offensive. On the fateful day, July 1, the battle of the Somme began.

Snow's men attacked the strongest stretch of German line as a diversion for the main assault, which went in to the south. Even by the standards of that bloody and futile day, the attack of Snow's VII Corps was a disaster.

Snow and his staff were in a chateau by that stage, and I went there myself. It feels a long way from the carnage of the trenches but, in his defence, he was closer to the action than military commanders are today. In the aftermath, it appears Snow attempted to shift the blame away from himself, writing to his seniors that: 'I regret to have to report that the 46th Division in yesterday's operations showed a lack of offensive spirit.'

This was after the men had fought their way through unbroken barbed wire. Then, once they did manage to get into the German trench system, they held off counterattacks until they had run out of ammunition and were forced to use shovels and their bare hands. It was an inexcusable attempt to shift the blame.

After a spell at Arras and then at Cambrai, where he helped repel a devastating assault by German veterans of the Eastern Front, it seems the stress started getting to the old war horse. Snow wrote to his wife saying he believed it was time to make way for a younger man. Did someone have a word and ask him to resign? I would love to know.

He must have been disappointed to miss the triumphant summer of
1918. An event that he and so many others had worked so hard, and sacrificed so much, to bring about.

Generals in the First World War were confronted with a mass of problems that would have stretched the greatest of commanders. My great-grandfather was no Wellington, but his memoirs give a powerful insight into his struggle to build a coherent picture of the battlefield.

He will not be remembered for military genius but I hope he will be remembered for writing this honest, critical and objective account of his time in charge. I am proud of him.

Confusion Of Command: The Memoirs Of Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas D'Oyly 'Snowball' Snow, edited by Dan Snow and Mark Pottle, is published by Frontline Books at £19.99. To order your copy for£15.99 with free p& p, call The Review Bookstore on 0845 155 0713 or visit www.MailLife.co.uk/Books.

Quotes: Friedrich Von Bernhardi

"War is a biological necessity."

Friedrich Adolf Julius von Bernhardi (November 22, 1849 – December 11, 1930) was a Prussian general and military historian. He was one of the best-selling authors prior to World War I. A militarist, he is perhaps best known for his bellicose book Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War), printed in 1911. He advocated a policy of ruthless aggression and complete disregard of treaties and regarded war as a "divine business".


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"Wars and Why They Start,"
The Military Quotation Book: More than 1,200 of the Best Quotations About War, Leadership, Courage, Victory and Defeat, edited by James Charlton, 2002.

Quotes: Georges Clemenceau

"It is far easier to make war than to make peace."

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (8 September 1841 – 24 November 1929) was a French statesman, physician, and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, and again from 1917 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference in the aftermath of the war. He is commonly nicknamed "Le Tigre" (The Tiger) and "Père-la-Victoire" (Father Victory) for his determination as a wartime leader.

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"Wars and Why They Start,"
The Military Quotation Book: More than 1,200 of the Best Quotations About War, Leadership, Courage, Victory and Defeat, edited by James Charlton, 2002.

An odd memento of Zeppelin raid on Shields

An odd memento of Zeppelin raid on Shields
By JANIS BLOWER
Published on Friday 22 April 2011 10:24

YOUNG boys collected shrapnel during the Second World War.

But the First World War also turns out to have had its juvenile trophy-hunting.

Admittedly, you might not know what this was at first glance. But it actually recalls both a dramatic wartime episode and a lost coastal feature of Shields.

This goes back to a note, recently, on the Zeppelin raid over Jarrow during the Great War.

I was subsequently intrigued to hear from South Shields Museum that they have their own memento of a Zeppelin raid in the summer of 1916.

Seen here held by museum volunteer Dorothy Fleet, it’s a fragment of glass which the Zeppelin blew out of a window at Salmon’s Hall, the house, also known as Marsden Cottage, which used to stand above Manhaven.

It was donated to the museum by the son of John Westoby who grew-up in South Shields and collected it as a trophy during the First World War, when he was about 14. A piece of paper behind the glass tells its story.

Interestingly, Dorothy has researched the history of Salmon’s Hall, which could be traced back to at least 1809.

A description of it when it was sold in 1830 paints a picture of a rather sumptuous residence, with a coach house, stables and outbuildings, and 27 acres of grassland attached.

The name derived from Thomas Salmon, South Shields’s first Town Clerk, who enjoyed coble sailing from the coast there – though the hall itself predated his ownership.

It was later leased by the Harton Coal company, as cottages for its workmen.

The last to live there, leaving in 1937, were a couple called Miller, Mr Miller having worked at Whitburn Colliery for 40 years. The Gazette noted at the time that they were leaving their oil lamps for a home with electricity...

CIA Releases Classified Documents From World War I

Newsmax: CIA Releases Classified Documents From World War I

The CIA has declassified a cache of documents from World War I concerning such national secrets such as recipes for invisible ink and solutions to dissolve seals on letters.

“When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people,” The Washington Post quoted CIA Director Leon Panetta as saying.

The documents, some written in French, can be viewed in the agency website’s Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room.

The papers indicate the dangers that CIA ops braved in their quest to protect national security. For example, the recipe for the concoction to open letters covertly comes with the warning: “Do not inhale fumes,” the Post reported.

The Office of Naval Intelligence had custody of the documents during World War I before they fell under CIA purview. The agency rejected a Freedom of Information Act request to release them as recently as 1999. The CIA defended the nearly 100 years of classification, noting that the methods involved in sophisticated invisible writing had not changed, the Post reported.

“In recent years, the chemistry of making secret ink and the lighting used to detect it has greatly improved,” a CIA spokesman told the Post.