Richard Capell Letters - Introduction

By Michael Robbins

The war of 1914-18, now known as the First World War, was called by the people of that time "the Great War". For Britain, it lasted for fifty-one months. Over 6,211,000 men and women from the British Isles were enlisted in the armed forces. Once the battle had been joined on land, engagement was continuous, with a daily trickle or stream of casualties, not only when offensive or defensive fighting raged, but all the time, in "quiet" sectors just as in active ones. Every day from the beginning the Royal Navy was patrolling in dangerous waters; the Army was always in action from the first clash at Mons on 23 August 1914; reconnaissance from the air began in the same month, and aerial fighting and bombing grew to be a whole new branch of warfare.

More than 2,600,000 of the British forces became casualties; of these, 744,000 were killed or died on active service, 170,000 were made prisoner, and 1,693,000 were wounded. Never in their history have the nerve and spiritual endurance of the British people been so severely and so continuously tested.

As time went on, almost everyone in the civilian population became subject to the fear that at any moment the news might come that a loved one had been killed or wounded. Few escaped that continuous anguish. Anxiety was made greater because those at home had little idea of what the war was like for the fighting men engaged in it. Their imagination might perhaps comprehend, with effort, the violence and brutality of battle; but they could have little notion of the shattering effects of boredom and pointless routine that filled so much of soldiers' lives, even on active service. The home public was badly informed about the facts of life on the Western front or behind it, at first because of a bleak and unimaginative censorship and then because the despatches of accredited newspaper correspondents were usually so optimistic that they were plainly fatuous. The gulf of misunderstanding between serving soldiers and civilians at home was almost total.

Letters from fighting men to their families might have provided some means to convey understanding and bridge the gulf; but the bridge could be at best only a very fragile one. First, there was the censorship, exercised immediately by unit officers and in the second place farther back at the base. This was designed to prevent any clue being given in letters as to where the writer's unit was. Some soldiers made ingenious attempts to convey this information, like the (surely legendary) message that the writer was 'where Polonius was', i.e. behind the Arras; but most of them did not try.

In the second place, the soldiers themselves were mostly bewildered by their surroundings and the novelty of the whole experience. In 1914 many men who enlisted had never been more than a few miles from their own homes; perhaps one in a hundred outside the seaport towns had ever met a "foreigner". And in the third place, few of them had the skill and practice in writing that were needed to convey even so much as they would have been allowed to describe. So the gulf of incomprehension remained. A letter meant that the writer was alive when it was written, and not much more. (The pre-printed Field Post Card, called the "whizz-bang", did convey precisely that message.) There were rare spells of leave, when the men must have been more concerned to pick up the threads of home life than to enlarge on their experiences and so increase, if that were possible, their families' stock of fears.

The letters printed in this selection were written by a man in the ranks who was exceptional in not suffering from all these hindrances. He had to write what would be passed by the censors, like everyone else (he invented a little code for places, but he seems hardly ever to have used it). But he had lived for a time in the north of France and knew French well, in the colloquial as well as the literary form; and he could speak German too. He was a writer by trade - not a literary man, but a journalist; he had a wide range of cultural interests; and he was a deeply thoughtful and sensitive man, with a strong attachment to a large family.

Richard Capell was born at Northampton on 23 March 1885, the eldest child of Richard Lovat Capell, ironmonger and supplier of agricultural machinery, and his wife Charlotte, born Robinson. She was the daughter of a farmer of Harrold, Bedfordshire, who like many others was ruined by the rains and agricultural depression of the late 1870s and had to remove to a more modest holding at Flore, Northamptonshire. The Capell family rapidly grew until Richard had six sisters and four brothers: Isabel, who married Frank Ashworth Briggs, a brilliant Daily Mail writer who was severely injured in a motor-cycle accident in the spring of 1914 and lingered painfully on until he died in 1918; Mary, who married Herbert Pettit in 1918; Margaret, who married Stanley Layzell in East Africa in 1914 and managed an estate there on her own while he was away; Josephine, who married Gordon Robbins, Times journalist, in 1914; Edith, who after the war married William Fairley of the Colonial Public Works service; Rosalind, who worked in her father's business and on the land; James (Evans), Royal Army Service Corps and a Scottish infantry regiment, who later also went to East Africa; Fraser, Royal Garrison Artillery, who became a doctor at Mildenhall, Suffolk, and in north London; Alex, who was at Woolwich when the war ended and became a regular officer in the Royal Artillery; and Harold, too young for the first war but engaged in the second.

These details are set out at some length because his family attachments were an essential part of the fabric of Richard Capell's life. His father and mother were deeply committed to the Congregationalist faith which was so strong an element in the society of the English Midlands. Their way of life was firmly governed by their nonconformist and liberal convictions - indeed, Charlotte Capell was not satisfied with the aims of the British Women's Temperance Union and established the British Women's Total Abstinence Union in Northampton. But this did not mean that the family life was joyless or "puritanical", in the sense now usually attached to the word. There was room for pleasure in literature and art and music. Music was indeed very much in their lives, stimulated by the strong tradition of congregational singing in the chapel; there was singing, and instrumental music too, in their home.

Richard went to Bedford Modern School as a day boy, at first having to travel for forty minutes each way in the Midland Railway train from Northampton, later lodging in Bedford during the week. His father had been sent to a boarding school and determined that none of his children should ever have to suffer that. Richard later used to say that he loathed his time at the school. He was passionately devoted to music and began to learn the cello, intending to become a performer. He studied in Northampton under C.J. King, in London under C. van der Straeten, and in Lille under G. Penaud; but he concluded that an executant's career was not for him, and he learned the journalist's trade as a sub-editor in Northampton. The knowledge of practical journalism he gained there was important for his subsequent life as a specialist writer for newspapers. He joined the Daily Mail as its music critic in 1911. These were exciting times on the London musical scene, with the young Thomas Beecham emerging, the explosively novel Russian ballet of Diaghilev, Nijinski, and Pavolova, and a generation of great singers - Chaliapin, Jean de Reszke, Destinn, Melba.

Richard was in Edinburgh at the end of July 1914 when the storm broke. He was quickly filled with a genuine and consuming hatred of Germany for what its armies were doing in Belgium and seemed likely to do in France. He knew he could never make a fighting man; yet, like almost every other young Englishman of his generation and upbringing, he knew he must do something to help stop such frightfulness. He enlisted in the Voluntary Aid Detachment in August 1914 and found himself a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps, 6th (London) Field Ambulance, part of the Territorial Army in what became the 47th (London) Division. What happened to him after that is recorded in the extracts from his letters.

He stayed in the ranks throughout the war. He was once or twice tempted to go for an infantry commission, as several of those who enlisted with him did; but he felt sure he would be not good at it. He won the Military Medal in the fighting opposite Vimy in 1916 and had been promoted to sergeant by 1918.

Something must be said about Richard Capell's later career, to show what kind of man he was. He returned to the Daily Mail in 1919 and wrote as its music critic. He took singing lessons from Julian Kimbell, not to become a singer but to gain understanding of the technique. He edited the Monthly Musical Record for Augener's from 1928 to 1933; he became proprietor of Music and Letters in 1936, taking it over from A.H. Fox-Strangeways, and edited it himself from 1950; he wrote his fine book Schubert's Songs for the 1928 centenary - it was published by Ernest Benn in 1928 and reissued by Duckworth in 1957, almost unaltered, for it needed very little revision; he did a "Benn's Sixpenny", a little 80-page book, on Opera in 1930; and he was incessantly translating the texts of Schubert songs, with a fine ear for the English on the printed page and constant regard for the singer. In 1933 he moved to the Daily Telegraph, not without regret at leaving the Mail, which he thought had always treated him well. But the Telegraph could offer him space not only for notices of operas, concerts, and recitals but also for a three-column spread, "The World of Music", every Saturday. From then until the outbreak of war in 1939 few Saturdays went by without a lively essay contributed by him. They included some gems of criticism and interpretation now to be found only in the yellowing files of the D.T.

Throughout this period he lived with his two wartime friends, Roffe and "Willett", for a long time in Red Lion Square, Holborn, then in Cosmo Place, Queen Square. These three bachelors managed to accommodate their different lifestyles - Roffe was an electrical engineer with the L.M.S. Railway, "Willett" in the head office of Courtaulds, Capell a journalist who worked late into the night and rarely got out of bed before lunch-time - and they lived harmoniously together until the second war drove them apart.

When the second war came in 1939, Richard could not bear to go on, as he called it, "scribbling" concert notices when so many more important things were happening. He persuaded the Daily Telegraph to send him, at the age of 54, as a correspondent with the French Army. He was there at the fall of France and escaped, incurring various adventures on the way, through Dijon and Bordeaux. He was not content to stay in England and got himself sent by the Telegraph to the Middle East in 1941. With the Western Desert army and the Desert Air Force he went forward to Benghazi in 1942 and back to Cairo. In 1944 he was in the Aegean, taking rough trips on small craft, then in Greece and Italy. He went back to Greece again to report the miserable doings at the end of the year and in 1945, when the British Army, sent there as a policing and relief force, had to repel the attempt of ELAS to take over the country for the Communist party. His diary of these events was published as Simiomata: a Greek Notebook in 1945. Much of what he wrote for the Telegraph and in the book gave great offence at the time, when large parts of the press would have it believed that the British intervention was unjust and repressive. Now it seems that his judgement was a good deal clearer than that of the other correspondents, British and American - all except Fred Salusbury of the Daily Herald. He was awarded the OBE in 1946 for his wartime services.

He came back to England in 1945 and after a spell in a military hospital resumed his work for the Daily Telegraph. He continued to translate the words of Schubert songs, to a total of some 200. He could not get back into his house in Cosmo Place, requisitioned by the local council, so he lived in Kensington Square with his sister Josephine Robbins. He spent much time at the Savile Club, in conversation and bridge; and it was close to a bridge table there that he collapsed and died on 21 June 1954.

Are these then the letters of a totally untypical soldier, conveying nothing but one exceptional man's view of the war? No; rather they can lead the readers of later generations to understand the lives and thoughts of the millions of unmilitary men who were caught up in that catastrophe. Richard enlisted because of a moral compulsion, but not on any high wave of emotion. He suffered no such "disenchantment" as another journalist, C.E. Montague of the Manchester Guardian, memorably expressed in his book with that title (1921); for he had never been enchanted. He thought that a distasteful job had to be done and seen through to success; and he could not shirk from being one of those actively and immediately taking part in it. He had no doubt about the necessity of the whole thing, though he felt himself perfectly free to criticise stupid routine, poor officers and NCOs, and incompetence and pretension of various kinds, just as he was quick to recognise character and skill and bravery in others. In these ways he was typical of the citizen-soldiers of both wars, whose ambition was to become ex-service men as soon as possible, provided that the job had been properly finished.

His life in the Army was so completely different from the one he was living before the war that he could almost, as it were, start afresh. At once small things that he had never given more than a passing thought to before became important; clean underclothes, or the possession of a combined knife-and-fork or a Primus stove that worked, could make the difference between misery and happiness. The idea of having a bed to sleep on, except in hospital, was so remote that it was hardly a dream. Almost incessant movement, usually occurring just when some of the minor comforts had been achieved, meant that nothing in the way of military inessentials could be kept - no letters from home, not even a volume of Aeschylus. Above all, there was the loss of valued friends.

These letters contribute a good deal to our understanding of the morale of the British Army on the Western front, from the relatively care-free days in the spring of 1915 through the wasteful tragedies of Festubert and Loos to the blunting of the sharp edge of the Kitchener armies at Vimy and the Somme in 1916, through the foulness of the Ypres salient in 1917, the weariness and depression of the 1917-18 winter and the last and hardest defensive battle that began on 21 March 1918, to the final advance.

Richard's letters to his mother (which seem to have arrived regularly, for there are few obvious gaps in the flow except when he was active in the front line or was in hospital or on leave) have survived, together with a smaller number written to his sisters. These have been latterly in the keeping of his niece Christina Tebbutt, his sister Mary's daughter. They have been deciphered (for while it is flowing and elegant it is not an easy hand to read) and transcribed with skill and devotion from the originals, mostly written in indelible pencil on flimsy paper now frayed, by her daughter Rosalind Lund. What remained of his musical library, after various personal bequests had been met, was deposited at the University of Nottingham.

The principle of selection of the extracts chosen is to include all descriptive passages which seem likely to be of general interest; to give a certain amount of material about day-to-day life in the Ambulance, which though in itself apparently trivial helps to create the background of petty cares and joys against which the more stirring or evocative passages need to be read; and although much about family affairs has been omitted, enough has been left in to show the man in the round. It would mislead the read to give only the purple passages; for much of war experience is very grey.

The connecting passages of comment and explanation are my own. Identifications of places and some persons are drawn from the bare factual outline compiled by Frank Coleman, A Brief Record of the 6th London Field Ambulance (47th London Division) during the War (London: John Beale, Sons and Danielsson [1924]) and from the divisional history, edited by A.H. Maude, The 47th (London) Division 1914-19 (London: Amalgamated Press, 1922), and of course from the internal evidence of the letters themselves. I have filled out the dates, correcting some few where the writer had got them wrong by a day or two. No one who has been a soldier on active service will be surprised that he was not always quite certain about the date or the day of the week. I have not burdened the text and distracted the reader by showing where every omission occurs; where rows of dots, ... , appear, these are Richard's own, his way of indicating a change of subject. The paragraphing and some of the punctuation are mine. His inverted commas, always present in his letters round words or phrases that sounded "slangy" to him, are left in here. Though many of these expressions have been accepted into standard English, these marks are interesting as showing what then sounded novel to a sensitive ear and might have been thought unacceptable, without that form of apology, to his mother and family.

At some points I have relied on what I remember of my uncle's conversation; when I was a schoolboy he used to come to our house on most Sunday evenings, and I listened entranced to his talk about all kinds of things - music, Sanskrit, astronomy, philosophy, whatever it might be; and I saw much of him in Cairo in 1943-4 and in Athens in 1944-5. But he did not speak much about his experience of war, and reading these letters revealed to me a great deal about his war, his times, and the man himself. They are offered not as a contribution to military history, as an objective and scientific study of the operations of the first world war; but they reveal a lot about the circumstances, the minds, the trivialities, and some of the extremities in which the men of that army were involved.