Hello everyone, today I've just joined the forum.
At present I am at the finishing stages of making a non-commercial documentary which I intend to put out on the Vimeo platform about the above named officer (my grandfather) who was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers in 1898 at the age of 23. In November, the following year, he went out to South Afrcia with his battalion and very quickly saw action at The Battle of Stormberg - "I did fell down to a turn when I got away. How I got away I don't know but there it is". He was in South Africa until the end of the war by which time he had been promoted to captain.
The motivation to make the documentary came about when recently a cousin of mine made me aware of letters that my grandfather had written from January1900 to July 1902 which were sent to his father, a retired Lt. General. In these letters, he never asks about family matters but describes the war from his point of view. He has a love/hate relationship with this war.
At one moment he can't stand being in this "beastly" country, whereas another minute, he writes that he wouldn't mind three months leave (which he never got) and then come back to resume his military duties.
I came across this website when researching the above mentioned documentary. I was, of course, interested in the images of the Northumberland Fusiliers displayed on the following page -
www.angloboerwar.com/unit-information/im...nd-fusiliers?start=1
My grandfather is in Image 3, middle row second on the right. Also, in Image 6, he is the officer out in front.
I'd never seen these two photographs before.
In one letter, he writes that he got his camera captured by the Boers but somehow or other, he got it back.
A 1st World war military historian, Peter Hodgkinson, who I was in correspondence with about an Accrington Pals documentary that I made (see below) wrote an article about my grandfather about a year ago which was published on The Western Front Association website. In it, he describes in detail, my grandfather's involvement in The Boer War. So, if anybody's a member of this association, you will find the article on their website.
About 18 months ago, I made a documentary about my grandfather during the 1st World War. He was, by 1915, a Lt. Colonel having been promoted from the Special Reserve to command the 11th Battalion Accrington East Lancashire Regiment, better known as the Accrington Pals. He was in command of this battalion from its early days and his role was to train these volunteers into an effective fighting force. He commanded the battalion until the end of the war and was with them on the first day of The Battle Of The Somme when the battalion almost got wiped out in the first 30 minutes of the battle. This battalion was not the only one to suffer such heavy casualties but because Accrington was the smallest borough in Great Britain to have raised a battlaion (which the town was very proud of) the losses were magnified even more. The documentary that I made about the Accrington Pals was premiered on Remembrance Sunday last year at The Civic Centre, Accrington. It can be viewed at the following link if anybody's interested.
vimeo.com/user135392878
Suffice to say, I realise that this is a website which concerns itself with the Boer War as opposed to the 1st World War but my grandfather's experiences of the Boer War were all too relevant and crucial when it came to him taking command of The Accrington Pals. For a start, he was the only soldier in this battalion of some 1340 men who had experienced military combat. All his officers were "pals, just like those in the ranks. He knew the realities of war, although like all other commanders, he was ordered to train his soldiers with tactics which would prove calamitous.
So, having made the documentary about the Accrington Pals, my cousin, as mentioned earlier, surprised me with the letters that Lt. Rickman had written to his father during the Boer War. In many ways, the Boer War documentary, very much based upon my grandfather's letters and photographs, will be a prequel to the documentary about the Accrington Pals. In many ways, I'm very glad that things turned out this way because by having made the later - in terms of historical time - documentary when I researched my grandfather's experiences during the Boer War, I knew what was coming. Admittedly, it gave me a perspective (the curse of historians) that my grandfather didn't have. What, to me, is interesting, is that there were so few commanders at the beginning of the 1st World War who had had combat experience such that any who had the latter were in high demand.
Luckily, for me, my grandfather's letters home during the Boer War have kept me anchored to the ground, so to speak, such that his experiences are written in the here and now and not from historical hindsight. It is this which I think captures "the moment". This up and coming documentary does not aspire to attain to high scholarship, merely to distill my grandfather's experiences of the Boer War.
If David Biggins reads this, I've got a favour to ask.
I'm glad I'm here.
