The Bright Company-2

ALL THE BRIGHT COMPANY OF HEAVEN ALL THE BRIGHT COMPANY OF HEAVEN Renny Richardson Menin House an imprint of Tommies Guides Military Booksellers & Publishers Menin House 13 Hunloke Avenue Eastbourne East Sussex BN22 8UL www.tommiesguides.co.uk First published in Great Britain by Menin House Publishers 2011 © 2011 Renny Richardson A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. Apart from any use under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher. ISBN 978-1-908336-00-2 Cover design by Tommies Guides Typeset by Graham Hales Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne CONTENTS PREFACE: REASONS . .13 FOREWORD . .15 INTRODUCTION 17 PART ONE: BUILDERS 1834-1913 . 19 PART TWO: SOLDIERS 1914 45 1915 59 1916 103 1917 . 155 1918 . 203 PART THREE: MEMORIALS 1919-1921 291 PART FOUR: ENDINGS 2010 339 DEDICATION This book is dedicated to the memory of all those men, known and unknown, of the Crawley & Ifield district who fought but in particular to the memories of:- Lieutenant (Acting Captain) Alfred Edward Cook September 29th 1867-August 11th 1938 Second Lieutenant Richard Edward Cook January 9th 1898-April 13th 1918 Private Donald Herbert Cook July 31st 1899-December 29th 1962 with love and admiration 7 All the bright company of Heaven Hold him in their high comradeship, The Dog-Star, and the Sisters Seven, Orion’s Belt and sworded hip – taken from Into Battle (Flanders, April 1915) by Julian Grenfell Not even a sparrow falls to the earth without God’s knowing of it – Matthew 10:29-31 What we do in life echoes in eternity – Ridley Scott, Gladiator. There is a rose that I want to live for Although God knows I may not have met her There is a dance and I should be with her… There is a town unlike any other – The Clash 9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS O book can be written without practical help, support and encouragement I Nneed to thank the following:- my wife Kathryn and our daughters Hollian and Rachel My mother and father My brothers My nieces Jack Thorpe, Karen Dunn, Bob Richardson, Ryan Gearing, Alan Wakefield, Soren Hawkes, Phil Curme, Ivor Lee, Wikipedia, the Great War Forum, the staff at Crawley and Horsham libraries and at the West Sussex Records Office, Russell Gore, Roger Nixon, John Harrison, Brighton Sixth Form College, Brighton Museum, St Peter’s Church, Martin Hayes, the staff at the Novotel Ieper Centrum, the Walker and Ypra Inn pubs, the White Hart, Jason Hargaden, Barbara Babcock, Micheal & Ann Sabag, George & Katie Andrews, Thomas Powell, Gary Hill, Matt Peel, Sarah Hobbs, Steve Dunham, Rachel Smith, Tom Clarke, Eamon Murphy, Ian Murphy, Rob Ewin, Dennis Albertsen, Paul Heaton, Jacqui Roffe, Matthew Chard, Dave & Sue Chard, Richard Evans, Zoe MacDonald, James McCarty, Austin Naylor, Tony & Linda Thorpe, Michelle Goodchild, Michael Murray, and Tony, Louise, Aoife and Seamus of the Ship (keep those green ones coming!) 11 PREFACE: REASONS HIS book came about for a variety of reasons but primarily because of the Tfeeling that I had of ‘rescuing’ the story from the clutches of the past and my determination that it would not be lost again My parents and I wanted to have all the newspaper reports, the war diaries and the service records all as part of one manuscript so that it could be read in a linear fashion The story of the Cook family, Crawley and the Great War had been lost for over forty years and I wanted to ensure that it would survive for my daughters to read one day and for them to be able to pass it on to future generations So in a way, this is the early 21st Century equivalent of the ‘message in a bottle ’ It is a message about the past, from my present, to an unknown future At the centre of what follows is the story of a young boy who, following his father and his heart, went to fight for King and Country in the Great War nearly a hundred years ago It was suggested to me early on that I could perhaps ‘fictionalise’ the story but that would have been to put words in people’s mouths and I found that idea quite wrong I wanted the facts to speak for themselves There comes a time in life when you want to know more about those of your relatives who came before you With the advent of the internet and programmes like ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, interest in family history and genealogy is at an all-time high That time came for me in March 2007 when, following my brother’s trip to Flanders, my mother sent me a picture of a headstone with the name of a young relative of ours who had died during the Great War Second Lieutenant Richard Edward Cook was my Great-grandfather’s elder brother’s only son I think that makes him a third cousin When I noticed that, contrary to the sparse information I had had before, (his date of death was 13th April 1918 and not, as I had originally thought, 13th November 1918), this discrepancy really piqued my interest What had happened to Second Lieutenant R E Cook? His remains are buried at Mendinghem Military Cemetery near a small Belgian village called Proven, about 15 km from Ypres How did he get there? With virtually no trace of him amongst the family documents, no letters, no diaries and just two photographs – how much could I find out about him and his life and death? 13 All the bright company of Heaven Two hours later I had booked myself a trip to the Ypres area I did not know it at the time but this journey was to be just the start of my enquiries Second Lieutenant R E Cook’s part in the First World War is one of a typical everyday officer He never gets mentioned in dispatches, he doesn’t win a medal and is only mentioned in the Battalion War Diaries in passing He did, however, take part in three of the greatest battles the world has ever seen, and by his actions, and by his sacrifice, in some small way, helped determine the outcome of the ‘War to End All Wars’ His story has proved to be the easier to follow, as a war record also exists for Second Lieutenant Alfred Edward Cook, his father, but sadly none exists for his cousin, Private Donald Herbert Cook – I have had to take a certain amount of guesses at their stories Like Tolkien, the tale grew in the telling, as I found that to understand what had happened and what the world was like a hundred years ago, I had to be able to put the Cook family story into context – in other words, I had to understand not just the Great War itself, but also what England and Crawley were like then When I first started to visit Crawley again (we had moved in 1971), I saw the area completely differently as many of the buildings the Cooks built are still standing and many of the places that are mentioned here are still there It is obvious that what the Cook family did during the Great War was just a small part of what Crawley experienced, just as what Crawley experienced was a microcosm of what England and her empire endured during those bleak years One of my abiding memories of growing up in Crawley is of playing on the swings at the Memorial Park, which was on the old Three Bridges Road On the gates of the park are mounted three plaques which list over a hundred names of men from Crawley, including R E Cook, who never came home Those plaques, and those names, are still there, and thousands of people walk past them everyday while visiting the huge County Mall shopping centre As my research continued I found that I was beginning to come across newspaper reports that detailed what had happened to virtually every one of the men listed on the plaques at the Memorial Park Gradually the whole of the story of Crawley’s Great War was revealed in all its suffering and heartbreak and I realised that I was no longer just writing the story of the Cooks – I was writing the story of Crawley as well It is all here – the newspaper articles, the endless casualty reports, the letters home and the public meetings tell the story of a small Sussex town struggling with the impact of a global conflict What follows, then, are fragments of peoples’ lives I can make no guess as to their actual personalities – how they felt, their hopes, their joys, their failings and their despairs can only be imagined 14 FOREWORD S the President of the Erquinghem-Lys Historical Association and Curator of A our local museum, I am delighted that Renny Richardson has given me the opportunity of writing this foreword In this book, the author records the life of his family in the town of Crawley and the life and times of his relative, Second Lieutenant Richard Edward Cook Second Lieutenant Cook arrived in Erquinghem-Lys just before the great German Spring Offensive in April 1918 which came to be called the Georgette Offensive or the Battle of the Lys and it was here, somewhere in the area of the town, he was to meet his fate With the aid of war diaries and eye-witness accounts, Renny describes his relative’s time and his sacrifice on the Western Front, while keeping an eye fixed firmly on events at home in Crawley Although this is the story of Cook, and of Crawley’s Great War, it is also a small part of the story of Erquinghem-Lys Even now, nearly 100 years after the end of the war, people from all parts of the world still come to visit the battlefields and to find the grave of a relative As my father worked for over

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