Love & war

ARTHUR AND FLORENCE HARRINGTON

Arthur Harrington, a regular soldier attached as Regimental Sergeant-Major to the London Rifle Brigade (part of the Territorial Force, which in peacetime was made up of parttime soldiers), left behind his pregnant wife Florence Harrington and their young daughter Margaret when he departed for France with the British Expeditionary Force in late 1914. Arthur came from a military family: he fought in the Boer War with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC), receiving the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and his father and five brothers also fought with the KRRC. 

In his letters home from the First World War, he wrote about how much he missed his wife and daughter:

‘You and my darling child are constantly in my thoughts... God bless you both, my dearie, and keep you well till I can enfold you in my arms again.’

He wrote to his wife regularly, revealing how desperately he missed them during the winter of 1914:

‘I think of you even when I lie down at night, on rising in the morning, whilst on the march – in fact in all my waking hours, and only hope that you are both as fit and well as myself at the present moment… Kiss my darling daughter for her daddy, and with the fondest love to yourself.’

On another occasion he wrote:

‘She [Margaret] must know that her daddy constantly thinks of her and her mother and that he looks forward to the day, though that may be some distance off , when he will be able to take both of them in his arms again.’

Florence, meanwhile, sent him a picture of herself and their daughter. In the letter that Arthur wrote to thank her for the photo – ‘It is now my chief treasure in actual possession’ – he mentioned that his brigade had suff ered their first fatality: ‘We lost our first man yesterday. Killed by a shell.’

As her pregnancy advanced, his letters revealed his increasing concern for her wellbeing:

‘Above all things, my dearest,’ he wrote, ‘fight against the feelings of loneliness and depression which I know must assail you at times…’


At the end of January, Arthur briefly returned home on leave to visit his now heavily pregnant wife. His letters to her on his return to the front are extremely tender. In one particularly romantic and moving letter, from early March 1915, he openly wrote of his love for her:

‘The frequent expressions of your tender love for me touch me very deeply. It is indeed a comfort to me always that you are able to say that your life during the last three years, since we were happily united at the altar, has been a happy one. It is only what you deserve, dearest, for you have been a model wife and I have plenty of reason to bless the day you became my wife and true helpmeet. Please God many happy days together are still in store for us, at least such will be the case if any efforts of mine avail. I crave for you and my Margaret so but must be like many other men out here in being patient.’

His letters from this period were also deeply concerned with Florence’s impending delivery:
‘When you are able to inform me that you have been safely delivered, dearest, my mind will be considerably relieved... You are constantly in my thoughts. I wish it were possible to be with you and to be able to bear some of the pain when your time comes.’

As her due date came closer, so his letters became more frequent:

‘As it isn’t possible to be with you, to try to cheer and comfort you in your hour of trial, I have determined to send a brief epistle each day until it is over, in the hope that you may derive some little solace and support from same.’

Arthur finally received the news he had been waiting for on 14 April 1915. Florence had safely given birth to a baby girl, whom they decided to christen Joan.

‘The wire announcing your safe delivery reached me yesterday evening at 6 o’clock. You scarcely need to be told how glad I was to get the intelligence of you having had a satisfactory time and that all had gone well… Of course when you feel well and strong enough you must send me a full description of the new arrival... Don’t on any account be in a hurry to leave your bed.

I know you will desire to be there as short a time as possible but getting up too quickly might only result in you having to return there. Well, darling, thank God you are alright… Heaps of love to you and “le petite fi lle” from your loving hubby, Arthur.’
Left: Florence visited Arthur, encamped in Surrey, in 1914. Right: Arthur Harrington in the uniform of the King's Royal Corps, wearing his Boer War medals

Tragically, just two weeks later, on 28 April, Arthur was killed by an exploding shell while eating breakfast. He was 46 years old, and had been married to Florence for only three years. He is buried at Ypres, in the Menin Gate memorial cemetery.

Two weeks after his death, Florence received a letter that must have made her very proud. It was written from the orderly room of the London Rifle Brigade at Haywards Heath (the signature is illegible) on 9 May.

‘My dear Mrs Harrington,
I could not, during the first few days of your terrible anguish, intrude upon you with a letter, but I may now ask you to accept my most heartfelt sympathy. Your dear husband was a very, very, dear friend of mine and his loss to us all is absolutely irreparable. Deeply as I had learnt to admire his many grand qualities in the old days, I discovered even more during the first two months of mobilisation when I was so closely associated with him. At each of our stopping places he looked after me like the real friend he was, taking me to the same billets as he had, and letting me share his tent at Bisley and Crowborough. His companionship was truly delightful and a most marvellous foil to the miserable treatment I received from the “heads”.

We have lost many old friends and had many shocks, but none has been such a terrible blow to us all. Even those men who, less fortunate than I, knew him only slightly, are terribly grieved, and I can assure you that the heart of every member of the London Rifl e Brigade goes out to you in your time of trial. My wife has told me how bravely you received the news; may your bravery remain with you. Please let me know at any time if the Regiment can do anything for you as we shall all look upon it as a privilege to do anything that our dear old Sergeant Major would have wished...’

ANTHONY RYSHWORTHHILL AND VALERIE ERSKINE HOWE

Anthony Ryshworth-Hill was a captain of the South Lancashire Regiment and a veteran of Dunkirk who, in April 1942, was sent to attend a training course in Oxford. Here he met 21-year-old Valerie Erskine Howe, the cousin of a friend. She had only recently come out of an engagement, and over the course of the spring they became romantically involved. The two corresponded after Anthony was sent to North Africa as a staff officer with Operation Torch in November 1942; both were given to flights of fancy and wrote in a jocular vein.

Valerie had joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the army. Based at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain, she drove a Wolseley staff car, which she called ‘Alice’, and was also a dispatch rider. Anthony had returned to regimental duty upon promotion to major and when the Anglo- American 5th Army invaded Italy in September 1943, he was a company commander with the 6th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment.

He won the Military Cross for his role in the breakout from the Salerno beachhead; although, in writing to Valerie, he humorously parodied his heroism, ensuring by the same token that nothing he divulged could alarm the censor:

‘“Jenkins!”

“Sir.”

“Have you wiped the blood off my Tommy Gun yet?”

“Yes sir, and I’ve cleaned up the Colt Automatic and dug the shrapnel out of your left boot.”

“Good. Now get me some dum-dum ammo. Those last few Bosch I shot didn’t die quick enough.”

“Sir. A letter from Lady Valerie sir.”

“Ah. Take the body off the table and wipe those entrails away.”

“Yes sir. You’ll be having dinner at the usual hour?”

“Yes Jenkins. And bring me a pint of German blood to go with it.”’

‘All over Italy, they sing so prettily tra la la la la, tra la la la! Well they don’t sing where I am. It looks as if Satan, in a black mood, had been kicking hell out of one of the filthiest corners of his ghetto. Unfortunately I was there when he was at work. However, birds sing now and people delve among rubble for belongings... someone is going to give me a medal any minute – I don’t quite know what for... and a cow – which lived through a lot of stuff the Germans didn’t live through – gives me a quart of milk each evening.’

Valerie, in return, teasingly tantalised Anthony with her own routine:
“Hullo – I’m FRIGHTFULLY BUSY – sh-sh – it is ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENTIAL – shall I tell you, it is SECRET. It is only that I should not really be here because I’m carrying Dispatches. They look AWFULLY IMPORTANT but one cannot help feeling that most of them are as important as so many rolls of – paper. Anyhow, it is fun on a motor-cycle: it is not so good when it rains, but then everything has its reverse side, and she doesn’t wear things inside-out all the time, does she – no she doesn’t.’


Beneath the humour, however, she makes it clear that he is never far from her thoughts, concluding:

‘I somehow wish it was cotton-frock weather in Oxford and you would be wearing your corduroy trousers and – things. I expect I would spill the tea with excitement.’

A couple of months later Valerie sent Anthony a letter plastered with small head-and-shoulder portraits of herself in a uniform (see opposite page). The accompanying message was as light-hearted as ever:

‘Hullo! Does this look anything like what you thought it would [look] like? Some of it is terribly tense and some of it, I think, terribly, seriously, English – but as a matter of fact I really do laugh Quite a lot…

Soon, I will send you just one photograph that isn’t anything like any of those and is nothing to do with the Army at all – you will like it: or you will not: but it is, I’m told, like me – so there.’

Judging by what Anthony wrote on the reverse some time later, it was these photographs and words that decided him to make Valerie his own. It did not matter that they had not seen each other for more than 18 months and had spent such relatively little time together beforehand. ‘Darling I love you so much – I love the silly hat you’re wearing and I love all your expressions – and well, I’ve always loved every little bit of you, since, I believe, possibly since the pyramids were built or perhaps a couple of years before. Anthony Husband’

Anthony’s letter of proposal was penned on 22 May 1944 when, as second-in-command of the 1st/4th Hampshire Regiment, he was in Palestine at a Battle Training School.

‘Hallo! I suppose you don’t know where I am, do you? Well I’m sitting on the balcony of a pretty big, but badly run hotel writing to you with hotel ink… The wide tree-lined avenue below is thronged. There are also taxi-cabs and horses and soldiers and so forth. The sun is building up for a hot noon. Valerie, shall we become engaged in a sort of distant way so that we are sort of linked together until we next meet? How would that suit you? This is not, as I said in my last epistle, the cry of the male buff alo from the lonely swamps of Mantrah River, as I am in the middle of civilisation with all sorts of feminine attractions…
I desire to talk nonsense to you and help you to construct that baby which I think is a very, very good idea indeed. If you do go abroad, which will probably be France, please be careful... I mean don’t try to earn a VC or anything like that. I am going to search for something you might like. I’m not awfully good at picking out things from the amazing mass of junk off ered by the shops in this city. Anyway my income is carefully restricted by the Govmt. meanies.
“If I were a God I would endow you with a star
And set bright youth forever in your limbs.
I am but dust
But no god loves as loves this poor frail dust” Which is R Aldington at random. All my love and things. Anthony’
Above: Valerie as a dispatch rider. Below: Anthony Ryshworth-Hill and Valerie Erksine Howe, married, in 1946

Anthony had chosen his moment well to propose. Valerie’s response was ecstatic.

‘Anthony... Yes, Anthony – shall we? I believe I would like it that way too. Somehow, to have put it into so many actual words startled me not a little. For a long, long time now I have compared people I’ve met and talked to with you and I’ve decided within myself about a sweet indefi niteness with you more or less there – here, there and all the time – perhaps till the end of all things but when your letter came yesterday morning I was late and in an instant hurry because I was detailed to drive Major X and he didn’t want to be delayed, and there was your letter and come-wind-come-weather the whole war could pause for me to read it… I’m so frightened yet so terribly happy. Do you want to announce this to the world, or what? I suppose one should, but if you want me to do it offi cially you’d better tell me exactly how to put it.

Hullo – do you feel any different? No – I don’t either, I feel just exactly – just exactly – well now – well – I say, darling, it’s a bit too crowded in here, shall we go down to the river and find a punt “To paradise for the sugar and onions And we will drift home in the twilight The trout will be rising...”

Oh Anthony!’

Anthony campaigned the remainder of 1944 in Italy, impatiently awaiting the time he could marry Valerie. In January 1945 his battalion, which as a temporary lieutenant-colonel he now commanded, was sent to Greece. At the end of the following month he was granted home leave and hurried back for his wedding, only to discover that Valerie was in an isolation hospital with measles. It fell to him to make all the arrangements and they were married on 2 March; their honeymoon was two nights in a hotel in Bournemouth. Anthony returned to active service, and only when he was appointed commandant of the British Army’s mountain warfare school at Mallnitz in Austria in 1946 was Valerie able to join him. He continued in the army until 1964, and Valerie accompanied him on his postings to places as far apart as Ghana and Turkey. After his death in 1984, Valerie remarried, but she and her new husband lost everything they owned as ‘names’ on the Lloyds insurance market in the late 1980s.

Fortunately Valerie’s erstwhile fiancé, who had evidently carried something of a torch for her during the 50 years since their engagement was broken off , gave Valerie and her husband the use of a 13th-century friary, and it was here that Valerie lived until her own death in 2003.

Edited extract from Wives And Sweethearts, by Alastair Massie and Frances Parton, published by Simon & Schuster, priced £12.99.