Malcolm Barker: One who endured the whole Great War

John “Jack” Waller Hill was 34 years of age and the father of seven children when he was mobilised as a member of the Territorial Army and joined the British Expeditionary Force in France. He was a Quartermaster-sergeant with the North Riding Battery, Royal Field Artillery, and went to war with other local TA volunteers, including his brother George. Jack and George Hill were Whitby-born, and had been working in the town for their father’s company, Thomas Hill and Sons, monumental and general masons.

The gunners went to France in April 1915 with the 50th Northumbrian Division, and arrived in time for the second Battle of Ypres, during which, on April 22, the Germans launched a new and terrible weapon, poison gas.

The battery was in the line by May 13, when its position on Bellewaarde Ridge, in front of Ypres, came under fire in the heaviest gunfire of the war so far, with an estimated 150 rounds a minute falling on the British lines.

There followed a 10-day lull, but at dawn on Whit Monday, May 24, red flares were seen over the German lines, heralding a bombardment and the release of chlorine gas that shrouded the British positions in a greenish-yellow cloud. In the intense fighting that followed, the battery supported the infantry with their antiquated Boer War 15-pounders.

One of the men, Gunner Charles White, later wrote to his parents in Scarborough: “We had an awful time on Whit Monday, the Germans attacked and did not half shell our lot. The North Riding Battery suffered the worst of the lot.”

The casualties that day included a Scarborough lad, James William Clarke, aged 20. His body was placed in a temporary grave but was never recovered, nor was he recorded as missing on the Menin Gate.

Jack Hill survived that introduction to trench warfare, and his luck held in subsequent battles, including the Somme and the third battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele. He returned home alone at the Armistice, however, his brother George having been killed at his side and buried at Abbeville.

Post-war and back in civvies, Jack set up on his own as a stonemason in Church Street, Whitby. The venture thrived, and Jack and Elizabeth resumed adding to their family, first four girls and then, in 1927, a son, Peter, their 12th and last child.

Now 86 and living in Ripon, Peter has made his father’s souvenirs of the Great War available for the centenary exhibition, which is being arranged by the Service Development Officer at Ripon Library, Grzegorz Kubas. They include German field glasses, an artillery-sighting compass, and a hand-written copy of a poem called Any Soldier to his Son.

It had obviously struck a chord with Jack Hill because the copy was in his handwriting, and had been stored with his other reminders of the conflict. The poem begins: What did you do, Dad, in the Great War? and initially describes the routines of soldiering, including peeling potatoes, scrubbing floors and using a shovel, a barrow and a pick.

But it develops into a portrayal of the horrors endured in the trenches:

Where life is one hard labour and a soldier gets his rest/When they leave him in the trench with a bullet in his chest.

It concludes in fury: By all the lads that crossed with me, but never crossed again/By all the prayers their mothers and their sweethearts prayed in vain/Before the things that were that day should ever more befall/May God in common pity destroy us one and all.

The verses were produced anonymously after the Armistice, and seem to have circulated among ex-servicemen. Interestingly, Jack Hill’s copy varies slightly from the published version, indicating an early provenance. He may well have preserved it because it put into words his own experiences of fighting in Flanders – something Peter Hill says his father, who died in 1963, never talked about.

But in 1939, when war returned, Quartermaster-sergeant Hill was soon back in uniform as a member of “Dad’s Army” and remained in the Home Guard for the duration.

The exhibition runs at Ripon Library in The Arcade, Ripon, from August 4 to 9 at usual opening times.

• Malcolm Barker is a former editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post