The Great War: A–M · Story 2

John Francis Agutter (1895-1975)

William Leveratt had been born in Thrapston, one of twelve children. He married Sarah Agutter on the 9th July 1838 and probably became the first stationmaster of Ringstead Station on the Blisworth to Peterborough line. Sarah was a relative of the Ringstead Agutters. Their son, Charles, followed his father as stationmaster in the village. Two other children, John who became a guard, and Elizabeth Agutter Leveratt who became one of the few women who worked in the ticket offices in the area, also followed their father.

When she was 37 years old Elizabeth married John Agutter, her cousin, and became Elizabeth Agutter Agutter. They had two children. Their daughter, Bessie May, died on September 9th 1893, aged five months and a son, John Francis was born on the 20th January 1895.

John Agutter died on the 4th February 1901 and the widowed Elizabeth took over the running of the farm. She too, died in 1907 and, at the age of twelve, John Francis was an orphan. In the 1911 Census we see that he was sixteen years old and was living and working on his uncle, Thomas Agutter’s farm. In the 1919 Absent Voters’ List for Ringstead he is shown as living at Tithe Farm. Unfortunately the space for a named military unit is empty.

There is a J.F. Agutter in the military records and with other evidence I think we can establish that he is the Ringstead man. Our John’s uncle, John Leveratt, who worked on the railways as a guard, lived in places from Doncaster to London. He married Sarah Rebecca Frankton on the 7th June 1869 in the village of Long Lawford in the Newbold-on-Avon parish. Her father, Thomas Frankton, was the village blacksmith. On John Leveratt’s retirement the couple moved back to Long Lawford where they ran a greengrocery shop. Sarah Leveratt died and John followed in 1917.

If we now return to the orphaned John Francis Agutter, he was living with his uncle Thomas Agutter in Ringstead at Tithe Farm. As we have said, there was a J.F. Agutter who joined the Essex Regiment and we also discover that a “Mr. J.F. Agutter of Lawford, Rugby” was a founding member in 1920 of the 11th Essex Old Comrades Association. The Lawford connection, confirmed by the later Electoral Rolls, verifies that this must be our man.

His records have been mostly destroyed but, by comparing him with another Essex soldier, Private W. Callaghan, whose Regimental Number, 18322, followed immediately after John’s, we can sketch in his army career using his Medal Card and Roll. Callaghan, who was taken as a Prisoner-of-War, would have attested in the 11th (Bermondsey) Battalion of the Essex Regiment which had been formed in September 1914 at Warley of volunteers as part of Kitchener’s Third New Army. It was based at Shoreham in March 1915 before moving to Blackdown Camp in June. John Agutter probably followed a similar path, and we know from his Medal Index Card that he was overseas from the 30th August 1915.

We have used the Men of Essex Volume 11 produced by the Essex Branch of the Western Front Association and written by Bill Fulton for much of the following account of the 11th Battalion of the Essex Regiment’s war.

The 24th Division had suffered in England with a lack of modern weaponry and of experienced officers to train the men. John, with the rest of the Battalion, disembarked in Boulogne on the 30th August 1915. Once there, the men were taken through rigorous training in battlefield tactics but, were still a very naïve unit, when forced to make exhausting marches to their first battle at Loos. This was to be a terrible baptism for the volunteers with much confusion and uncoordinated action. The death of their commanding officer seems of similar foolhardy courage to that of the Light Brigade in the Crimea over fifty years earlier.

. . . when the order to advance was received, Lieut-Colonel Radclyffe simply said ‘11th Essex get out of the trench’ and, leading the Battalion, cane in hand and with a small dog barking at his heels, he walked steadily forward until killed by a burst of

machine gun fire which also killed his second-in-command Major J H Davies and badly wounded. the Adjutant, Captain H H Heppell - seven more 11/Essex officers were to die before the day ended.

The 11th Battalion alone had casualties of 18 Officers and 353 Other Ranks. The High Command realised that experienced units must be part of any Division. Bravery was not enough. The 11th were withdrawn to reform as a fighting unit and were then transferred to the experienced 18th Brigade of the 6th Division on the 27th October 1915 and remained with it until the Armistice.

The 6th Division spent the next ten months in the area of the Ypres Salient in the Flanders mud. It was largely a period of stalemate trench warfare. By November the 11th were on the banks of the Yser Canal which the troops remembered as much for the mud and the rats as for the fighting. So it continued, a war of attrition with constant fear of snipers, artillery fire and gas. The 11th were in and out of the Line as was the usual pattern across the whole Western front.

In August 1916 the Battalion moved to the Somme area and were part of the Battle of Flers-Courcelette from the 15th to 22nd September. As part of this battle the 11th were part of an attempt to capture a German strong point called “The Quadrilateral”. The Essex had a hopeless task against the strongest point of the German defences and lost 20 men killed and 80 other casualties. The Quadrilateral was finally taken but the 6th Division suffered 3,500 casualties in the action.

A successful attack on Lesboeufs followed on the 25th September but Colonel Spring later wrote:

This period was about the most trying I went through during the war. The Somme fighting was done under great physical and mental strain. The ground was so heavy and muddy, cut up by shell-holes, that to walk any distance over it was fatiguing. In addition, we were continuously under shell-fire day and night, as we were living in old German trenches and so were properly taped.

The 11th Essex moved back to the Loos area where they had had so many casualties in 1915 but this time it was a comparatively quiet time but with trench raids and other small actions during which one 11th Essex officer, 2nd Lieutenant Frank Bernard Wearne, was killed and received a V.C. for his gallantry. On the 25th July 1917 they were relieved and had a much-needed rest during August.

At the end of 1917 the 11th were involved in the Battle of Cambrai where tanks played a significant part. It was believed that a single German gun took them all out but recent research has revealed that, although some were put out of action in this way, others survived to continue with the battle.

January 20th 1918 saw them in the Front Line opposite “Nine Elms”, a name given by the army to a group of trees 460 metres east of the Arras-Lens main road, between Thelus and Roclincourt. On the 21st March the Battalion were in the Battle of St Quentin. An attack was expected, but the German “Michael Offensive was much larger than had been prepared for, and the German use of elite stormtroopers to blast holes through weak points and mop up the trapped Allied units was very successful. The 6th Division lost huge numbers of men, killed, wounded and missing, and the 11th Essex, already fighting with half a Battalion ended with only 7 officers and 77 other ranks fit for duty. Casualties from all causes totalled 16 officers and 411 other ranks. Was it in one of these times when new men were brought in to bring the battalion nearer to its full strength that John Agutter was appointed a Lance-corporal?

From late March to November, the 11th were back at the Ypres Salient where the Germans launched a second offensive known to the Allies as the Battle of Lys. This again began as a successful German offensive but gradually it became a war of attrition and the enemy, slowly at first, began to lose ground. When the Battalion reached the Somme area the Americans were now a significant force and it was becoming clear that the Allies would win the war. Small fierce rearguard actions by the retreating Germans still killed and wounded men. The last casualties suffered by the 11th Battalion were on the 25th October 1918. On the 11th November they were in billets in Busquigny when news of the Armistice was received.

The 6th Division moved into Germany as part of the Army of Occupation. The History records:

All ranks worked hard at their equipment and the transport looked almost new, it being a proud and splendid Division which marched, with drums beating and colours flying, across the German frontier into the little town of Malmedy between 13th and 16th December. Marching generally by only one road, the length of the Division, when billeted, varied from 10 to 25 miles.

They were finally based in the Rhineland at Bruehl (Brühl), twelve miles SSW of Cologne by Christmas 1918.

I have not found that John Agutter was wounded or sick and he seems to have gone right through the war without significant physical harm, and was demobilised to Class Z on the 19th April 1919. He may have returned to Ringstead for he was shown as living at Tithe Farm in the first Electoral Register of 1920. By the second Register of that year, however, he was in Main Street in Long Lawford, Warwickshire where we last saw his uncle John Leveratt. It seems most likely that he was lodging there with one of John and Sarah’s children. Whatever the reason, he made the Rugby and Coventry area his home for the rest of his life.

By 1931 he had moved to Botomer Road at Cheylesmore in Warwickshire. He was living there in 1937 at the time of the Coronation of George VI. John celebrated too much and drove into a stationary car. He was arrested by the police. At the Police Court his lawyer pleaded on his behalf:

I ask your Worships to consider this case on the basis of a man who, on a great day, fell from grace.

He also asked for leniency because, John had been “a professional driver for twenty years, for the last 15 with the Hillman Company”, and he had been offered a promotion which depended on him not losing his licence. He also revealed that he had fought throughout the war and had an exemplary record of service. The defence hinted that his army service may have had an effect on him. This may have been just a bid for sympathy but in these biographies we have rarely found evidence of the mental health problems that many of the men must have suffered in the years after they came home.

The court did treat him leniently and he was given a small fine. He never married and in 1939 he was lodging with widow, Rose Jordan, and her daughter Carol, in 5 Latham Road in Coventry. Of course, as a “Mechanic and Driver”, he may have only been there for a night or two or on a more permanent basis. None of the Censuses reveal this.

John died on the 11th September 1975. He had been living at 29 Glebe Close, Conley in Coventry at the time of his death. It would be good to believe that he died quietly at home after his experiences of near death on the Western Front. It was not to be. A month before he died, on August 12th, he stepped off a pavement into the side of a Corporation bus. The Coventry Evening Telegraph of the 2nd October 1975 reported that he had broken his leg and this had failed to heal. His leg had been amputated but the cause of his death, according to the pathologist was “Broncho-pneumonia as a result of his being confined to bed”.

In these biographies we have tried to tell all the stories, including the men who survived into old age. These were the opposite of the men who are usually remembered.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.