In the second of our bonus episodes, we look at the memoirs of a siege battery gunner in the Great War, Malcolm Vivian, a First World War veteran who I first met 40 years ago.

And this is some of his story.

Welcome to the second of our Season 8 bonus episodes.

The main podcast season is over before we return for Season 9 in September, but these episodes are something extra to round the season off, but with it a little bit shorter than the main podcasts.

In this bonus episode, we return to the subject of Great War Veterans, something that is at the heart, really, of the Old Frontline podcast in so many ways.

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you will know that back in the 1980s and 90s, I was very, very lucky to interview a substantial number of First World War veterans, over 350 of them.

And I was living then in Sussex, so close to Kent and Hampshire as well, which was a big retirement area for people from all over the UK.

And at that time, in what was then around about the 70th anniversary of the First World War, there was a huge number of veterans alive, and it wasn't easy to necessarily track them down in those far-off pre-internet days.

To track anybody down wasn't an easy prospect, but there were a few ways of doing it.

Martin Middlebrook, for example, in the back of his First Day of the Somme book, listed all of the veterans that he'd interviewed for the research, And for some reason, and when I asked him about this many years later, he couldn't really explain it.

For some reason, he listed the town and the county where they were living at the time that he spoke to them.

And using phone books, you could track these guys down.

And I would go to my library, made a list of all the ones that were in Sussex, for example, went through the phone books, found them.

And then got home and rang these guys up and said, are you Mr.

Brown who was in the Middlesex Regiment in Mash Valley?

Did you serve at Guimauve or wherever it was?

And got quite a good positive response to this.

None of them put the phone down on me.

Mostly they were very pleased to be asked that question and wanted to have a chat about it.

And I used to kind of assess them on the phone to see what they were like, how chatty they were, what kind of language they used to describe aspects of the war, and then would kind of take it from there.

And there were some that you could sense were a bit reticent, and I didn't push that.

It wasn't my place to push them to talk about something that obviously had affected them in such a way.

But there were others I could also sense that they were absolutely chomping at the bit to talk about it.

I think I tapped into that generation right at the...

correct time that they'd got to this point where they were almost confessional and wanted to somehow impart that experience that they'd had but to a stranger not to their own family not to their kith and kin but to someone who'd come along ask them the right questions that they could trust in as much of a way they could trust a stranger and many of them I got to know very well and they hopefully got to trust me very well too and And that incredible period of my life when I was interviewing these guys began.

And I started when I was at school in my own town.

But when I went off to university living right down on the south coast, I discovered quite a few retirement homes.

And in those were substantial numbers of First World War veterans.

So it kind of went from there and I expanded out into Kent and to Hampshire.

But I also ended up going abroad.

all around the country, up to Derbyshire, up to Sheffield, even up to Barnsley, long before I ever lived there.

I went up to Barnsley to go to an event to meet some of the very last Barnsley pals, for example.

So it was an incredible moment and I think at times I perhaps didn't always realise how significant it was because this was that kind of one minute to midnight moment for that generation.

Within a decade or so of me beginning to talk to these men, the vast majority of them that I spoke to were gone and the ones that had very long periods of wartime service or had achieved rank, they too went very, very quickly because I just caught the kind of tail end of those kind of soldiers who were there.

If I jumped on a decade or so from when I began interviewing these men what you were left with were 18 and 19 year old conscripts who'd served in the last months of the war and there was nothing wrong with that of course it was incredibly interesting talking to these men whose early youth had been defined by war experience and they had a very different perspective often to the men who'd volunteered right at the beginning but they only saw A fraction of the war.

Compared to some.

Who I've mentioned many times.

Like George Butler.

Who was there from 1915.

Right through to when he was badly wounded.

In the Battle of the Lease in April 1918.

And many many others besides.

So my search process.

began far and wide and when I joined the Western Front Association which was a First World War remembrance organisation founded by author John Giles again someone I've mentioned many times on the podcast the WFA was a fantastic organisation to join for a young budding historian like me fascinated by the Great War it offered so much the magazine the early ones and I have them all on my bookcase I'm just looking across to them now I have them all there and they have so much information in there and many of it from veterans and some of the veterans used to put little adverts in there with their addresses and I used to write to them and ask if I could come and see them or talk to them so that was another way into meeting some of these guys and I then put some little adverts in there myself about specific bits of information and I inquired in one about a siege battery officer who'd been killed at the Battle of Messines and for some reason I got his siege battery wrong he was 93rd siege battery and for some reason I put 96 and a veteran member of the WFA read that saw the name of his unit 96 Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery being an officer in that unit himself he knew everyone that served in it he had their unit history and this man was not listed and was not known to him so he wrote to me to say I think you've got this wrong because he definitely didn't serve with our unit and that got us chatting and that person was Malcolm Vivian and he became one of of my closest veteran friends there was a group of them I interviewed all those hundreds but there was a group of them a small select group through lots of different circumstances that I became particularly close to and he was definitely one of them now he lived a long way from me I was just about to go off to university down to that Sussex coast and he lived down in Plymouth in fact he lived at Saltash and I went to see him, went down that summer, took a bus down there, went over to meet him.

We went down the pub a few times.

I was there for a few days and we met up on several occasions.

And then I would go back and I'd go back and I'd go back because not only did he contact me and I wrote back to him, when I wrote back to him, I sent him a stamped address envelope.

I mean, who remembers those these days?

And in fact, I've got that stamped address envelope in front of me now.

I'm looking at it.

It's got my old address sticker on it and the postmark is Plymouth Cornwall West Devon stamped 5th February 1985 And this is the first proper letter that he sent me back.

He wrote a long, long piece in there about aspects of his war service.

And when I responded with more questions, he said, I can see that you are a serious student of this conflict and you want to know more.

And it's important that your generation carries this forward.

So I'm going to write to you and I'm going to tell you everything, whatever everything meant.

And what it meant was reams and reams of material.

And I've got all this in a folder.

I kept all my research in folders in those days and I had a cupboard in my room where I kept all those folders and I've got them all still and I've got tons of correspondence from not just Malcolm but from a lot of other veterans.

There were some that I could never get to but they liked writing and they would put a lot down and perhaps maybe they put more in writing than they would have done if I stood in front of them.

So on top of all those that I met and interviewed there were a lot more that just wrote to me as well anyway with Malcolm I got both and we became very close I think in those last years of his life and he meant an awful lot to me and when he passed away it was quite hard because this was a man who connected me to that war to that generation and so many aspects of the layers of the First World War from the experience through to nature he bird spotted at the front for example that with his loss a big big hole opened up in my life really and I think that was a turning point for me in which I kind of made a conscious decision not to track down anymore I'd got to a point where I'd interviewed a lot and got a lot from them but with the death of Malcolm and others It hurt and I couldn't keep experiencing that.

So as the time came for me to head off to France to do whatever it was I was going to do there, eventually write a book and then several books, that kind of period of my life of interviewing veterans had come to an end.

But I was so privileged, so lucky, so fortunate to spend so much time with these men.

And in this bonus episode, I've got so much material from Malcolm and I am going to use more of it in future episodes.

podcast but I've got some material to give you a kind of flavor of it here and the kind of things that that he sent me so who was Malcolm Vivian Malcolm Vivian was born on the 21st of November 1895 into the oldest Cornish family.

I think on record that they are considered to be the oldest family.

And they have a family seat at a place called Trelawaran.

He was never born there, never went there except to see a few cousins.

And his father, Hugh Norris Vivian, married Constance Horton who was born in Newport, Virginia in the United States.

So she was American.

Malcolm had an American mum.

Malcolm was one of three brothers.

He was a sister as well, but the three brothers, of course, all went on to serve in the Great War.

Hugh Wren Vivian, he was the black sheep, as Malcolm once called him, who served in the ranks of the Scots Guards.

I'm not entirely sure why he did that.

He didn't seem to have gone off to university.

He left...

private school and then went into the Scots Guards as an ordinary soldier and then he was commissioned into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry and got an MC in 1918 and was badly wounded.

The other brother was Beresford Horton Vivian, whose middle name was his mother's maiden name.

He served in the 38th Welsh Division in one of their Royal Field Artillery Brigades and fought with them at Mamet's Wood.

He died of wounds at Ypres in August 1917.

He is buried close to Popperinger in Dozingham Military Cemetery and I tried to get Malcolm to come with me on a trip to go and visit his grave because he nearly saw the grave in 1918 when he was up the road at Pervis never got a chance to get down there to go and see the cross of course as it would have been then, the wooden cross and that cross still survives, it's in the churchyard of a church ruined minor in Cornwall, I think it's been taken into the church now, it used to be outside but he wouldn't come, he said that he preferred to remember the front as he called it as it was not as it is today so those two brothers went through one badly wounded one killed and Malcolm through the war himself now he was educated privately and he was living in Glamorganshire although the family were from Cornwall they had a house in Glamorganshire and that's where he went to school from and that's where he won a place at Queen's College Oxford from and went there just before the outbreak of war and his time in Oxford was cut short by the outbreak of that conflict.

He was commissioned soon afterwards into the Glamorgan Royal Garrison Artillery part of the territorial force and that became the 96 siege battery Royal Garrison Artillery which was equipped with 9.2 inch guns so some of the bigger siege guns that were used on the western front not the biggest but some of the bigger and they required a huge amount of moving around as Malcolm described in his various accounts of it.

He went to France with that unit in the spring of 1916 went through the Somme through the Battle of Arras and on the Hindenburg line for quite some time Didn't serve in the Third Battle of Ypres, but his unit moved up to the Flanders coast when the British Army occupied the front between the very coastal belt itself and Newport and Ramscapel.

And he was in Pervis and Ramscapel and that sector spotting for the guns.

There's a big tall observation tower still there today in Pervis that was built inside a granary, I think.

And he certainly used that.

I took some pictures of it and he remembered it on one of my trips.

So he was in that sector.

And then he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps trained as an observer and then when that became the RAF he put in for pilot training and by the time he'd done all that the war was over so he never flew in combat much to his regret after the war he settled in Salt Ash in Cornwall he married his sweetheart Fairy Birrell whose father was a colonel and local JP and owned a big paper mill in Debartonshire Scotland he lost all of his money as pretty much his entire family did in the stock market crash in the late 1920s 20s and he ended up working for Joe Lyons in their tea shops and was manager of all of the Joe Lyons in London by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

He was on the reserve then, went back into the army, was recommissioned into the Royal Artillery and became a gunner officer at Suez in charge of the anti-aircraft defences until he was sent home sick in 1941 and was mentioned in dispatches for his time in that conflict there.

So he wrote me dozens and dozens and dozens of letters outlining all these different aspects of his war experiences a lot about the second world war a lot about life in the interwar period as a civilian and all the things that kind of meant something to him and when we met up we would talk about all kinds of things that his letters had flagged up so it was an incredible experience really spending that amount of time with one man and what I want to do in this bonus episode is kind of give you a bit of a sense of it by reading some of the material So we'll start with one of his earliest letters that he sent to me, kind of outlining his history leading into the war itself.

My next brother, a first-class honours Oxford maths scholar, was wounded in the hand by a sniper, the Forward Observations Officer's chief menace.

As a battery captain in the 21st Division at Luz, he was subsequently killed as a battery captain with A Battery, 121 Brigade, 38th Welsh Division at Pilcom Ridge during the 3rd Battle of Ypres.

The first brother won the MC and the second was mentioned in dispatches.

I left school aged 18 at the end of July 1914 and on August 13th was commissioned into the Glamorgan RGA Territorials, a unit engaged in the coastal defence of the ports of Cardiff, Penarth, Barry to Port Talbot and also Swansea.

This proving unnecessary, in the summer of 1915, one company, commanded by my first cousin, Major Courtney Vivian Robinson, was formed together with new recruits, the 49th Siege Battery, which was equipped with four times six-inch howitzers, and they joined the BEF in time for the Battle of Loos.

My cousin sadly died of Asian flu at the end of the Great War just after the armistice.

We followed our company consisting of 90 Glamorgans plus 60 odd new enlistments which I picked up from Great Yarmouth and all of that was formed into the 96 Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery equipped with four 9.2 inch howitzers.

They were under the command of a regular officer, Major C.H.M.

Stringer, DSO.

He'd been out with No.

1 Siege Battery earlier in the war.

We trained at Pembroke Dock, Sheerness, Lyd for firing tests, mobilised in glorious weather at Stockcross near Newbury and landed in France on May 24th, 1916 in time to take up positions in the opening of the Somme Battle.

Our officers and men were of high calibre.

The Glamorgans included many miners and steelworkers who were used to physical hard work apart from the major aged 32 we were Captain C.R.

Brown a young manager in the steelworks myself having trained in the school OTC and very fit having played rugby all through the Easter holidays with a first class Welsh club Sammy Evans a burly 28 year old chartered accountant who'd been a private in the HAC during the first battle of Ypres carpenter a very efficient and likeable engineer and second lieutenant Nigel Norman, straight from Woolwich, who in World War II as a group captain was killed in a glider crash.

Bill Brown soon left us to command another Glamorgan battery, the 74th Siege Battery, and won the DSO.

After a while I was made up to captain, and as such won the Military Cross and had two mentions in dispatches.

Evans got the MC and a mention.

I thank God I was in a mechanised unit and so spared the agony of seeing our horses maimed dreadfully or killed.

I was a forward observation officer for six days in our OP in front of Hebutern and facing Gomakor on what's the destruction of both the 46th and the 56th Divisions.

We were continuously in action to the attack on Serre and Beaumont-Hamelin-Thiapval on November 13th 1916.

I was forward observation officer and I remember that attack well.

From the ridge on which I stood I saw the dark of the western front horizon suddenly blaze with flashing lights as the guns opened up at zero hour.

The next time I saw anything similar was at Christmas morning 1940 when the Admiral von Hepper and Prince Eugen opened fire on our slow convoy between Greenland and Africa.

But that's another war.

At Serre we watched helplessly as wounded infantrymen slipped into the mud and drowned.

After Sere, we moved north to various positions in the Arras area, and then 48 hours before zero on Easter Monday, April 9th, I was pushed forward with two guns for a detached command for a month.

By the way, siege artillery were core troops and never came out of action, except when moving to another position.

We stayed in action for all the later attacks on the Hindenburg Line, then moved up to Lever, a very hot place indeed, for the attack by the Canadian Corps on Len and Hill 70.

Our casualties here were heavy.

Later we moved up to the Ypres Salient and then to the battle that never was, to the village of Pervis in the flooded area.

We were the only guns plus a battery of French 75mm, the famous Soissons-Caz.

After a period during which we fired 5,000 rounds, we were unable to open fire without being overwhelmed.

The land was flat and flooded, the camouflage screens had been destroyed, and our four guns stood out like mammoth elephants.

Whatever had been planned had to be called off, and we returned to the Canadians.

Soon after, my transfer to the RFC came through.

The 9.2-inch howitzer was a magnificent gun, the gun of the war.

Don't tell any X-18-pounder or 6-inch howitzer merchants this, but it had one drawback.

All guns of lesser calibre could be fired off their wheels, even the 8-inch howitzer, which had a powerful spade to absorb the recoil.

Consequently, they could be packed up and moved to a site very easily.

The 12-inch rail or road mounting was so huge that they had permanent sites in the back areas.

But the 9.2 alone had to be dismantled into three sections, platform, cradle, barrel, all in transit towed behind a caterpillar tractor.

In addition, an enormous iron box had to be fitted to the front of the platform and filled with earth to counterbalance recall and downward thrust.

Done in pitch darkness by Hurricane This next part of his account relates specifically to the Battle of Arras, the opening phase of Arras.

And Malcolm spent a lot of time in that sector as a siege battery gunner and as a forward observation officer of Foo.

And this is what he has to say about it.

We had just moved up into a position southwest of Arras to be ready for the battle and had two rough nights.

Zero hour for the attack was 5.30am on Easter Monday, April 9th.

On the 7th, I was in the line registering on some targets when Carpenter arrived with two fresh linesmen and said...

I've come up to take over, Skip.

The old man wants you back at once.

There's a flap on.

Left section has stood down and right section is dismounting its guns.

So off I went with my two Irish linesmen.

Patsy said, what are we going to go back for, sir?

I replied, I've got a nasty feeling, Patsy.

Paddy chipped in with, perhaps we're going to a dinner party, sir.

My answer was, I have a suspicion we're going to be the dinner, Paddy.

When we got back to the battery, I could see the tarpaulin still on number one and number two guns, but three and four...

having been taken down.

I reported to the major in the mess, and he called out, White, our mess batman, bring in Captain Vivian's dinner.

So in came my bully Stu with spuds and pineapple chunks.

Then he said, Malcolm, group want two 9.2s right now and for the attack, and you've got the job.

They want them up at Agni, somewhere in the area I've marked on this map on a central bearing of approximately 95 degrees.

You'll be administered by myself as always, but will receive operation orders direct from group.

The road up there is under direct observation, so the guns and ammo can't go up till after dark.

I can only give you one officer.

I imagine you'll want Evans, but I'll give you a sergeant, Sergeant Parsons, an excellent regular NCO who'd been out previously.

You can have Sergeant Lowe and two other linesmen beside your two Irish and Bombardier Vedmore as dispatch rider.

Oh, and as you're up there already, groups say, can you act as brigade forward observation officer?

I've written it all out as far as I can see, but you'll have to act on your own a lot.

You and Bombardier Vedmore can go up on your motorcycles as soon as you're ready to find a suitable position, mark the gun positions out, and the dark Vedmore can ride back to meet the guns and guide them to the position.

What are you laughing at?

I said, it's so funny.

I gave Brigadier Knapp, the man in charge, a lecture on 9.2 mobility, or lack of it, and now he dumps this in my lap.

41 hours to zero, snowing like hell.

The ride up, over, an awful road into the ruins of Agni, already packed to bulging point with troops for the attack, and we had to find somewhere to put the guns in, get them mounted, locate the infantry and our targets, register on the targets from an OP, an observation post, come back, see everything's okay, get some sleep, then go up for the attack.

Please, sir, I want another dispatch rider, as communications are likely to be difficult.

Ah well, better get on with the job.

White, please ask Sergeant Jackson and Bombardier Vedmore to come back here to me.

They make a lot of sandwiches and fill my flask with whiskey and water.

When the two NCOs arrived, I said, we're off on a private war.

Collect everything necessary for marking out the two gun positions and put them on three triumphs.

Vedmore, you and I will be going up soon with the dispatch riders.

I'll leave it to you to choose who to take.

Jackson, you'll be coming up later with the guns.

Vedmore, you'll help me find and mark out the gun site.

We'll have to find some recognisable point where the guns coming up after dark can be met by you and then guided to the site.

I'll have to stay and hold it against other would-be occupants.

So off we went with our bikes laden like Christmas trees.

It was snowing and the road was in a ghastly state of potholes and very greasy.

We found a place with great difficulty, marked it out using my compass to get the centre line correct.

The guns and ammo came up, were mounted and ready for action just after dawn.

I went out with the linesman to find an observation post and lay a wire.

We, or rather I, identified the targets.

We fired a few rounds on each one to register, found the infantry HQ, introduced myself, and returned to the guns.

I laid down on the command post floor for a doss, and soon after, Brigadier General Knapp arrived.

They shook me and said, The General!

I half sat up and saluted them, and fell back, dead asleep.

They did it again, with the same result.

Mr Evans, one of the officers, said, He's being called at 3am, sir.

He's going over.

Knapp said, I know, let him sleep, tell him I'm pleased with the sight.

I didn't meet him again, but he most strongly recommended me for the military cross, which I didn't get.

But as far as I was concerned, Knapp's strong recommendation, being the man that he was, was in itself an accolade.

So that was the eve, the lead up to the Battle of Arras in April 1917 and his guns and his observation post and the firing with the infantry HQ that he mentions, they were men from the 56th London Division who he'd seen be in action at Gormacore the year before and he was very, very close to the war poet Edward Thomas who was also a forward observer that day, also spotting for siege battery guns like his but in another siege battery.

Malcolm Did get his MC at Hill 70, supporting the Canadians in August of 1917.

Perhaps that's a story we'll tell another day.

And then he went right through the war, as we've said.

This is just a sample, really, of what I've got on some of these men and the kind of things, the legacies that they left me.

And much of this, I've got to say, was the inspiration to start this podcast all those years ago.

And...

It's time, I think, to share more of this.

So perhaps these bonus episodes, whatever we're going to call them, will evolve into something else because The voices of that generation, a generation that in itself is now silent with the last veteran passing away, with the death of Harry Patch and the end of that long line of men who had marched so far, so wide and for so long across those great battlefields of the First World War.

It's important to ensure that those voices aren't entirely silenced.

because new generations, just like me, 40 years ago, visiting Malcolm Vivian as a young man, new generations will want to understand this conflict, will be inspired by this conflict, fascinated by it, and it's important that these voices are out there for them to hear too.

We're forever learning in the subject of the Great War, forever finding things that sheds new light on the subject, and forever brings us back to those layers upon layers of the old frontline.

You've been listening to an episode of The Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reid.

You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor, you can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod, Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast.

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Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.