Page 45 - They Also Served

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John Elkington 1886.
John Ford Elkington was born in Jamaica in 1866, the eldest son of an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Educated at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, while his father was governor of the island, he entered Sandhurst in 1885 and was commissioned the following year into his father’s old regiment.
There followed a steady rise through the
ranks, including service as a captain in
the Boer War and a secondment to the
West African Frontier Force in Northern Nigeria. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1910, he assumed command of the 1st Royal Warwickshire Regiment in February 1914 and, in August of that year, took his battalion to France as part of the BEF. Almost immediately in action at Le Cateau, the 48-year-old Elkington, like so many of his generation, was unprepared for the rigours of modern warfare. One of his subalterns, the future Field Marshal Montgomery, recalls in his memoirs: ‘The colonel came galloping up on his horse and shouted at us to attack. These were the only orders we received and we were driven back by machine gun fire with heavy casualties’.
Caught up in the general retreat from Mons, the 1st Royal Warwickshire Regiment, together with the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Mainwaring, ended up in the town of St Quentin with several hundred exhausted and demoralised soldiers. There, the French mayor informed them that the Germans had surrounded them and intended to shell the town unless the British surrendered. With no real intelligence, and with shells exploding around the perimeter, both colonels prepared a surrender document. However, a cavalry major, Tom Bridges, arrived with his squadron, having found a way through the German lines. Bridges rallied the men, creating an impromptu band using instruments from a toy shop, and led the remnants of both battalions to safety. However, the surrender note was retained by Bridges and formed the basis for a court-martial, resulting in both commanding officers being found guilty and cashiered from the army. No account was made of their unpreparedness for war, their age, or the fact that the surrender
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