Alan Wakefield on Salonika, Stanley Spencer and the Sandham Memorial Chapel

Amelia Hartney, an intern who worked for the Research Department in spring 2011, talks to Alan Wakefield, Acting Head of Photographs about his work with the National Trust on the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere

Tell me about your current project.

I’m providing advice to the National Trust for a DVD documentary for the Sandham Memorial Chapel to tell the story of the British Army in Salonika. This chapel was built in the 1920s to commemorate the death of a chap, Harry Sandham, who'd been in Salonika during the First World War. Sandham’s family were quite wealthy and managed to purchase a plot of land and get the chapel built. They commissioned Stanley Spencer, the famous artist who had also served in Salonika, to decorate the chapel’s interior. Spencer had always wanted to do a project where he put his war memoirs on a wall and he spent a number of years on these murals.

Stanley Spencer is well represented in IWM’s art collection. Do the paintings we have differ in any way from those in the chapel? Is there a religious element?

Yes, there is. Behind the altar is a large Resurrection scene of the soldiers climbing out of their graves, with crosses piled up. And around the actual walls are these very detailed scenes from his army life. So from when he worked as an orderly on a ward at a war hospital in Bristol there are scenes there of making beds, preparing food and all these basic jobs that an orderly would do. Then he goes to Macedonia where you see the orderlies putting up mosquito nets in the tents, and making large red cross symbols from white and red stones. The figures in Spencer’s art are very stocky and stumpy – so not especially realistic - but the landscapes are exactly like they are now.

Apart from the Sandham chapel, how else is the Salonika campaign remembered today?

The Salonika veterans set up what was called the Salonika Reunion Association in the 1920s and it ran until about 1968. There's now another association, the Salonika Campaign Society, of which I'm chairman, and we carry on the memory and conduct research into the campaign. Most years when I can, I go out to Salonika. In September there's an annual commemoration ceremony led by the Greeks but with the Serbs, the French, the Italians, the British, and the Russians now getting involved as well.

One thing we are trying to do at Doiran - which is where the main British battle was fought - is to set up a small museum - with the town council. We’ve also found the ruins of a house which was used as a headquarters in a village up in the mountains where the Irish fought in 1915. We're trying to purchase that and get it restored. If you talk to any of the farmers there, they'll put their hands in their pockets and say ‘Oh, I found these today’ or ‘Come down to my house and you can see my collection of shells’ – they have stacks of material.

Is there much on Salonika in the public galleries here at IWM?

No, at the moment there's one big case with a few uniforms and lots of other little bits and pieces. That's about it. Hopefully the balance will get redressed with the new centenary galleries.

Tell me about the Irish in 1915.

The 10th Irish were in Gallipoli first, when it was boiling hot, and many came down with dysentery. They were then chucked straight into the mountains of Serbia via Mudros, where they were supposedly re-equipped. Unfortunately, there weren't enough greatcoats to go around, and many were still wearing light-weight khaki drill when they arrived in the mountains. And they had the same blizzard conditions as in Gallipoli in the winter of 1915. The terrain's quite similar as well. When they actually got up the mountains, there was no fighting for about three or four weeks. The Bulgarians just sat on one ridge, and we sat on another. If you read some of the diaries, they're actually very disparaging of the Bulgarians. They say, ‘The Turks wouldn't have done this. The Turks would have been sniping at us, trying to raid our lines.’ They underestimated the Bulgarians and we did exactly the same in 1917 at Doiran.

The thing about the Salonika campaign is that about twenty times as many people were casualties of disease as of actual fighting. It's boiling in summer and freezing in winter, and it was then one of the malarial ‘black spots’ of Europe. They issued mosquito nets, they had chaps taking quinine every day and they tried to eradicate the breeding grounds of the mosquitoes, but they just didn't have the resources to do it. It was only in the 1930s when the Greeks got some American engineers in there to drain the area’s huge shallow lakes, which were basically swamps, that malaria was eradicated. They still have mosquitoes, but no malaria.

Were any VCs won in the campaign?

Yes, two VCs, both to Welsh units. One bloke, Private ‘Stokey’ Lewis, ended up in a trench fighting about eight Germans by himself, was wounded twice and then managed to capture these guys. As he was sending them back across No Man's Land, he found a very badly wounded officer, whom he carried out. The officer unfortunately died afterwards.

The other one was Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Burges, who was with the 7th South Wales Borderers. He was in the second battle of Doiran and the South Wales Borderers were assaulting the main Bulgarian 3rd line position, which was this 2,000ft hill with a huge bunker on the top of it overlooking the battlefield. He got his men pretty close to the lower slopes and he was urging his men forward and he got shot in both legs. When the British withdrew, they left him behind, but when the Bulgarians were forced to retreat about two days later the British found him in a dugout behind the Bulgarian line.

What sparked your interest in Salonika?

I first got interested when I met one of my great uncles. I just thought the First World War involved fighting the Germans on the Western Front. He told me he was fighting Bulgarians in Greece and I thought, ‘What on earth was a bloke from Wiltshire doing that for?’ Now, I get two or three people contacting the Society each month saying, ‘I've just found out my grandfather was in Greece.’ I think people are quite surprised.