the end of the phone whenever I thought about him. It was the silence that troubled me most, because it seemed it could never be broken.
When it became clear that he really had left nothing behind, my increasing desire to find out more about Edward Connelly forced me to take a different approach, an approach that led to two resolutions. If I couldn’t find Edward’s own personal story then I’d try to piece it together in other ways. I’d find other people’s stories. I’d seek out letters and diaries of lads like Edward, ordinary young men born at the twilight of a century and thrust into extraordinary circumstances while they were barely coming to terms with adulthood. Lads who never rose through the ranks, who didn’t write inspiring stanzas that would fill anthologies for decades to come, who in most cases did nothing special except survive. Lads who would have known the reality of the dugout, the duckboard, the puttee, the mess tin, the endless parade ground drilling, the channel crossing, the glare of the Very light, the whistle of the incoming shell, the banter, the songs, the latrines, the zing of a passing bullet, the ceaseless rain, the cloying mud and the constant presence of death.
I might not get to know Edward Connelly personally, but if I could get to know the lads who were there and left their memories behind then maybe, just maybe, I might know something of Edward Connelly, the life he led and the war he endured and almost survived.
In addition I wanted to make amends, probably to assuage my own wishy-washy feelings of guilt as much as anything. But I sincerely believed that the family owed Edward something for the near century of silence. When I found the Harlebeke New British Cemetery on a map I knew exactly what I had to do. I’d set off to walk from his birthplace in West London and keep walking until I reached his grave in Flanders, making a literal journey through his life and his war. A pilgrimage of sorts, and a penance, I suppose. From my home in London I could board a couple of trains and be at his graveside in barely three hours, but that felt far too easy; he deserved more of an effort than that. If I was going to be Edward’s first ever visitor I’d have to put in a bit more work than tapping my card details into the Eurostar website and booking a hotel. By making the journey from his cradle to his grave – on foot, out on the road, free of distraction – I’d have time to think about him and his war: crossing the channel as he did and seeing the horizons he saw, the towns he passed through and, finally, the grave where he lies.
From archive to footpath, I was going in search of Edward Connelly, the forgotten soldier.
2
‘The boy from Soapsuds Island’
Edward Connelly was born on 25 April 1899, on the cusp of the twentieth century and in the twilight of the Victorian age. Indeed, as Edward drew his first breath, final tweaks were being made to the plans to mark Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday celebrations: in high streets across the land men sawed and hammered away on massive triumphal arches to be covered in flowers and draped with flags and banners.
Elsewhere, the new, £27,000 Palace Pier in Brighton was undergoing its last lick of paint ahead of its grand opening a few weeks hence. Aston Villa and Liverpool were neck and neck at the top of the Football League as the season entered its final weeks; W.G. Grace was a few weeks away from playing his final Test match.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had just completed its serialisation in Blackwood’s Magazine, while Rudyard Kipling had recently published ‘The White Man’s Burden’. Edward Elgar was putting the final touches to his Enigma Variations as Monet was establishing himself on the fifth floor of London’s Savoy Hotel, ready to commence his famous series of Thames paintings.
Guglielmo Marconi was sending the first radio signals across the English Channel, on the other side of which the messy Dreyfus affair was finally drawing to a close: the much-sinned-against French officer would be out of prison before the century ended. The Boxer Rebellion was prompting endless column inches in British newspapers on the moral failings of the Chinese, while even further away the British Antarctic Expedition was hunkering down for the first ever over-wintering on the continent.
Art, music, exploration, literature, sport, science, imperialism: as the nineteenth century eased towards its close, the themes that had defined it were preparing to push on into its successor. All of this was happening a long way from Gadsden Mews in North Kensington, however, where Edward Charles John Connelly was born to George and Marion Connelly ten months after their marriage the previous year.
Mews properties may sound quite fancy these days, but as London slums went Gadsden Mews was among the worst. It was a small, cramped, overcrowded clutch of dingy tenement buildings squeezed into a tiny space to the rear of other streets of slum housing, the centre of a triangular street pattern that began with the borders of the Great Western Railway to the north, the Grand Union Canal to the south and east and Ladbroke Grove to the west and shrank concentrically to the cramped, claustrophobic dankness of Gadsden Mews. Victorian poverty campaigner Charles Booth noted around the time of Edward’s birth that Gadsden Mews was ‘very poor looking, dirty, grimy’. The area had grown up rapidly from the 1840s with the coming of the railways and the canal, to become known as one of London’s worst slums. So many women worked as laundresses – including Edward’s mother and grandmother – that the area became known as ‘Soapsuds Island’. Charities including the Protestant missions did their best to alleviate some of the poverty, but it was a losing battle. This was the world into which Edward Connelly, the boy from Soapsuds Island, was born.
In many ways Edward was a product of the century that was ending as he entered it. He came from Irish stock: his great-grandfather John and great-grandmother Catherine had come to London from a small townland outside Youghal in the east of County Cork in 1842. It was just before the Great Famine, but there had been a number of smaller famines at the time and the Connellys were living in a tiny one-room house, trying in vain to live off the land. John, as the eldest, had to leave to make one less mouth to feed. He took advantage of a price war between steam packet companies to find a cheap passage on the crowded deck of a boat that docked at Shadwell in East London some time in 1842, where he and Catherine would live in various tenements for the rest of their lives while John got what work he could ‘on the stones’ at the docks until his death from tuberculosis in 1890 at the age of sixty-five. The desperate times are no better demonstrated than by the four months’ hard labour John did in Newgate Prison in 1852 after he was caught selling watches stolen from the hold of a ship on which he was working.
Around 1890 Edward’s father George moved from the East End to the burgeoning North-West London Irish community in search of work on the railways. While living among Irish immigrants in Admiral Place, a stone’s throw from the mews in Kensal Town, he courted an English girl living in the same building; they married and the newlyweds took a room in Gadsden Mews as their first marital home.
Marion Christopher, Edward’s mother, came from Dorset agricultural stock. The Christophers had lived for many generations in and around Blandford in Dorset, never owning land but always working it. Her parents joined the increasing migration from the uncertainty of the countryside to the greater employment prospects of the cities at the height of the Industrial Revolution, making the long journey from rural Dorset to the tenements of West London in 1874. Marion was the first Christopher to be born among the cramped, dirty streets of North Kensington, in the summer of 1877 to George and Mary Jane Christopher. George had been in the Royal Artillery for a period as a younger man, but on moving to London he found himself getting whatever labouring work he could.
At the time of Edward’s birth, Marion’s younger brother Robert Christopher had just left for the Boer War as a soldier with the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment, the same regiment that Edward would join eighteen years later. Robert had enlisted the previous year at the age of seventeen and would spend three years fighting in South Africa before being wounded and sent home to England
