A Somerset Lad

To lift the mood of lockdown, I promised myself that during this month of March I would re-read In Pursuit of Spring. It is Edward Thomas’ account of a bicycle ride from London to Somerset in March 1913. Riding westward to  meet the signs of springtime in those days when the season arrived much later than it does a century later.

Thomas left the capital on the morning of Good Friday, 21st March 1913. At Garratt Green in south-west London, he notes:

As I left the Green I noticed Huntspill Road. Why is it Huntspill Road? I thought at once of Huntspill in Somerset. of Highbridge on the Brue, of Brent Knoll, of Burnham and Hunt’s Pond, and the sandhills and the clouded-yellow butterflies that shared the hollows of the sandhills with me in the Summer once. Such is the way of street names, particularly in London suburbs, where free play is given to memory and fancy.

A century later, motorists travelling through Somerset would be familiar with the name “Huntspill” because of a sign on the M5 motorway through Somerset that announces the presence of the Huntspill River, close to where it passes Brent Knoll. Many would know Highbridge and Burnham on Sea, and it would not be necessary to travel near the coast to be familiar with the Brue, which runs between Glastonbury and Street. But in 1913, small settlements and smaller rivers in Somerset would have been unknown to most people in south-west London, as Thomas comments, the naming of streets owed much to memory and fancy.

The propensity for names associated with home to be carried to unfamiliar places sometimes brought an odd sense of reassurance. Moving to Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, there was an area to the east of the Antrim Road that included Somerton Park, Glastonbury Avenue, and Taunton Avenue. Someone from Somerset, or someone who gave free play to memory and fancy, had given names to these roads of leafy suburbia: someone connected to home had been here. Someone who knew a county and a landscape and towns and a people different from Belfast in the Troubles had given names to these places. Moving to Dublin at the end of the Nineties, it was a surprise to encounter a development simply named Somerton off Rochestown Avenue in Dun Laoghaire, along with a fine house called Somerton Lodge, someone who knew a small town a few miles distant from home had been here before me.

Names may be arbitrary, their origins obscure, but they amass a complex of associations and memories. A streetname could evoke sandhills and butterflies for Edward Thomas. Perhaps developers in the present times do careful market research into the possible names for streets, certain names would definitely prompt certain reaction, and not all might be as poetic as those evoked by Huntspill Road.

A website called Wisiwig allows users to watch the coverage of sporting fixtures that might otherwise not be readily available. Its status is never clear, Google carries it and major bookmaking chains place advertising on it. The tacit commercial endorsement presumably means that if it is not fully legitimate, then it is not actually illegal. Access to matches generally requires the closing of pages advertising gambling and pornography, and the avoidance of downloading spyware or Trojanware via tabs that declare users need the updates that are available through just one click.

Having negotiated the web hazards, last night I watched Aviron Bayonnais play RC Toulon in a French Top 14 rugby match.

It is some fourteen years since I started following the fortunes of the Bayonne club and I was not optimistic about their prospects last night. They are currently thirteenth in the Top 14, only Agen, who have lost every match this season, are below them. Last week Bayonne lost 73-3 to ASM Clermont Auvergne. There was a danger of another heavy defeat last night. It was a very different match, one where they never gave up, even when reduced to fourteen players for much of the match after a series of yellow cards. 8-3 down they recovered to 10-8, then were 11-10 down and fought back to 13-11, then, 14-13 down, they made a third comeback to win 16-14. A Bayonne triumph over Toulon is a rare commodity.

But why follow a team in the French Basque country? For the simple reason that for a decade they were the local team during summer holidays on the south-west coast. Going along to the Stade Jean Dauger was always a special moment of the holiday, the crowds were large and very vocal, and the atmosphere was always memorable. The team always struggles to hold its place in the Top 14 and has suffered frequent relegations to Pro 2, but it seems to have little effect on its supporters who are indefatigable in their commitment to the club.

In times when sport is dominated by teams with massive budgets, when some sporting teams are no more than franchises, the power of local loyalty seems to have been forgotten.

If success were the criterion of support for a club, then sporting teams in Somerset would be hard-pressed to survive. Yeovil Town play football in the National League, Somerset County Cricket Club have won a sprinkling of limited over titles, but have never once been county champions. Yet anyone who has been at matches at Yeovil or Taunton will know the enthusiasm of the supporters.

Franchise sport will never match the emotional power of a local team.

Last week marked the anniversary of the death of Thomas Besley, a boy who shall remain forever seventeen years old. There was a poignancy in encountering his grave in a country churchyard.

One can stand on a hilltop at the Somme and see cemeteries stretching in a dotted line as far as one can see. One can drive through the flatlands of Flanders and encounter cemeteries in unexpected places. One can visit the memorials at Thiepval and the Menin Gate and Tyne Cot and countless other places and count tens and tens of thousands of names. One can visit Notre Dame de Lorette and scan the names of the 579,606 men of all sides who died in the region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais between 1914 and 1918. One can contemplate five and six and seven figure numbers, and then a moment comes when a single grave can come with a jolt.

The church of Saint Andrew in the Somerset town of Wiveliscombe is built in the red stone of the surrounding countryside, a deep red that contrasts sharply with the new green spring growth of the churchyard.

A sign at the gate placed by the War Graves Commission says that the cemetery contains Commonwealth War Graves. The CWGC headstones are readily identifiable, one stands against the graveyard wall near the west door of the church, over looked by the imposing tower. The inscription on Thomas Besley’s grave is sparse:

1800 PRIVATE
T.BESLEY
SOMERSET LIGHT INFANTRY
16TH FEBRUARY 1917 AGE 17

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website says that Thomas Besley served in the 3rd/5th Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry and that he was son of Steve and Fanny Besley, of Holelake, Wellington and was born at Wiveliscombe. No details are given of the circumstances of his death.

Thomas Besley’s headstone has the standard inscription provided by the Commission, any additional lettering would have been at the expense of his family; perhaps they were content with the form of words provided, perhaps they felt that being expected to pay for additional lettering only added to the pain.

There seemed a painful incongruity in the intrusion of the reality of the Great War into the tranquility of a country churchyard.

Thomas Besley was seventeen years old. Thomas Besley should not have been in the army, the minimum age for military service was eighteen. He must have falsified his age in order to enlist, no doubt in the company of others who similarly misrepresented their ages. Had he waited for conscription, waited to be called up, his papers would not have arrived until he was eighteen and he may have lived to a ripe old age.