Page 140 - The Royal Lancers Chapka 2018

138 REGIMENTAL JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL LANCERS (QUEEN ELIZABETHS’ OWN)
The 9th Lancers and the assault on the ‘Quadrilateral’ during the Battle of the Somme, 15 September 1916
On 20th October 1916 the London Gazette contained the follow- ing citations for two officers of the 9th Lancers:
Distinguished Service Order:
Major Arthur Morton Grenfell, Yeo. For conspicuous gallantry. He rallied a considerable number of men who were retiring, and, with some of his own working party, led them forward and consolidated a position under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire. Later, while trying to get a wounded officer back to safety, he was himself wounded.
Military Cross:
Lieutenant William Guy Gisborne, Lrs. For conspicuous gallantry. He assisted his senior officer in rallying a number of infantry, who had lost their officers and were retiring. They led them forward and consoli- dated a position under fire. Later, when his senior officer was wounded, he brought him in under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire.
The action for which these officers were decorated took place on the Somme battlefield on 15th September 1916, when tanks were used for the first time. A large dismounted party from the 1st Cavalry Division had been working since 9th September on creating a track to the front line, to be used by the mounted cavalry in the event of an infantry breakthrough. At 6.20 am on the 15th, Zero hour for the assault, the working party were just behind the infantry jumping-off line, their tools ready to take the track forward but also carrying their rifles and ammunition. Ahead of them between Ginchy and Leuze Wood lay the ‘Quad- rilateral’, a rectilinear strongpoint of German trenches some 300 by 150 yards across that had resisted all previous assaults. It oc- cupied a high point on the German line, affording unimpeded fire for its machine guns in all directions. To the awaiting infan- try of 6th Division, everything now hinged on the tanks, and yet only one had made it forward into the Quadrilateral. The stage was set for a catastrophe that saw the British infantry walk into massed German machine gun fire just as they had done at the outset of the battle on 1st July, with the same appalling level
of casualties for very little gain.
Artefacts revealed by ploughing on the battlefield in 2018 – two British 18 pounder shrapnel cases, a large shell fragment, a live Mills bomb and a section of the railway track that ran towards the Quadrilateral (in front of the trees on the horizon)
Tom Verrinder (far left, second row down) with his troop of the 9L in France shortly after his return from the dismounted party in November 1916 (© Ann Verrinder Gibbins)
One of the men in the 9L detachment that day was my grand- father, Tom Verrinder, who served in the regiment along with his brother Edgar and often spoke to me of seeing the first tanks go into action and get ‘stuck in the mud.’ My interest in recon- structing the events of that day led me to research the war diaries of all of the units involved, as well as to visit the battlefield to trace the route of the track. Although the 1st Cavalry Division Dismounted Party was a battalion-sized unit – comprising about 80 men from each regiment of the nine regiments of the divi- sion – there is no war diary. The only reference to its actions on 15th September is in the diary of the 1st Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, which notes ‘At 1300 OC rode up line to reconnoi- tre, and found attack on left held up 1st Cav. working party hav- ing sustained some casualties at head of track owing to enemy
post near Ginchy Telegraph being still holding out.’ (Ginchy Telegraph was the site of a Napoleonic period semaphore station near the Quadrilateral that was used as a map reference point). The diaries of the infantry units that day prove un- informative, understandably so as they had lost many of their officers and the
entries are focussed mainly on casualties.
The breakthrough for me came in the First World War papers of Arthur Morton Gren- fell in the Grenfell Family Papers at Queen Mary, University of London. The Grenfell family has a particular connection with the 9th Lancers because two of Arthur’s younger brothers, the twins Riversdale and Francis Grenfell, were killed serving with the regiment
Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Arthur Morton Grenfell, Buckinghamshire
Yeomanry (Royal Bucks Hussars), 1914. He was born in 1873
and commissioned into the Royal Bucks Hussars
in 1901 (Queen Mary, University of London Archives: Grenfell
Family Papers; NL/GRE/32/7; Photographs of Arthur Grenfell,
1914)