Express & Star

1915. A Hero of Loos

Reeling from the disaster at Gallipoli and with no decisive advances on the Western Front, French Marshal Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre offered a solution with a campaign in Artois to force the Germans back.

Published

In September 1915, the British began their attack. They advanced across flat and open fields, fortified by German machine guns and suffered devastating losses.

They captured the town of Loos but it came at great cost. A shortage of shells, troops suffering fatigue and the wind blowing chlorine gas back into British trenches, all made for a difficult campaign.

The Battle of Loos cost 50,000 British men their lives.

The war turned men and boys, each of whom had so many stories to tell, into cold statistics.

Here, we revisit the story of one Wolverhampton-born hero of Loos, who had studied at Cumbria's Sedbergh School before being sent off to fight for his country.

These are their blue remembered hills. The slopes rise high above Sedbergh, peaks lost in the boiling mists of an autumn squall. In the valley is Sedbergh School, a grim old grey-stone pile. Along the dripping road leading to it, thin figures in singlets and shorts are cross-country racing, hair rain-plastered on their foreheads. This is a place where, since 1525, boys have been turned into men on a diet of fresh air, exercise and muscular Christianity, and sent to do their nation's bidding. The school's Latin motto says it all: Dura Virum Nutrix – 'A stern nurse of men'. One hundred years ago, three Black Country brothers were sent to stern Sedbergh and became stars of the school.

Their father was John Perks Shaw, a wealthy hardware merchant in Wolverhampton. The 1901 Census shows that by the age of 51, Shaw had made his money and retired, living in some style with his wife Eliza at West Bank, a huge house in Richmond Road. They had three sons; Hamilton born in 1879, Malcolm born in 1888 and Leslie born two years later. Hamilton was first to enter Sedbergh, excelling in school sports in the 1890s. After school he went on to play rugby for England in the 1906/07 season.

By that time, the two younger brothers were at Sedbergh for a couple of years of finishing after a spell at Wolverhampton Grammar School. The Black Country lads loved it. The school records tell: 'The fells for 10 miles round know well the strenuous performances of this hardy trio.'

Elspeth Griffiths, the school archivist, lovingly turns the pages of the record. It tells how Leslie entered in September 1905. By Christmas he was third in the class, by the next summer he was top. Military training was an obligation. A scrapbook photo shows tall young Leslie as part of an award-winning drill squad. It was the age of Empire. These public-school boys were disciplined and fiercely patriotic. But they were not robots. They rebelliously carved their names in any exposed woodwork, and accepted the inevitable caning with good grace. One of Leslie Shaw's contemporaries, Leslie Duckworth, fed up with the local church bells, famously took a rifle and shot both hands off the clock.

"He'll have to be expelled," declared the headmaster.

"But it's Bisley next week," protested the house master, horrified at losing such a crackshot before the famous rifle competition.

"Very well," conceded the head. "A good beating will suffice."

When war came a few years later, nothing could keep men like this from the fray. They volunteered in their thousands, and perished in droves. The slaughter of England's elite was cruel. Of the 62 boys who left Sedbergh in the year 1911 alone, 20 were killed in the war.

The school's memorial cloisters bear the names of 453 who perished in the First and Second World Wars. L. G. Shaw is among them. He was one of those fine young Edwardian gentlemen whose only fear in the summer of 1914 was that the Great War would be over before they got to the front. Training as an officer would have wasted precious time. So he signed up as a humble squaddie, Private 9390 Shaw of the South Staffordshire Regiment. He would have stood out. In 1914 the public-school classes were on average five inches taller than working-class lads from the inner cities. "Too tall for my trench," one Old Sedberghian wrote to his school.

On August 30, 1915 Leslie Gardner Shaw was commissioned as an officer in the South Staffords' 5th Battalion. Six weeks later he was dead. The 25-year-old officer fell with hundreds of North and South Staffords men in the infamous October 13 attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt, a German strongpoint, during the Battle of Loos. It was the Black Country's bloodiest day of the Great War.

The British artillery hardly damaged the German trenches. As soon as the barrage stopped, German machine-guns swept the British parapets. The men knew they had to climb out of the trenches into this murderous hail. According to reports, not one flinched. Sedbergh's book of military honours records that a former pupil met Lieutenant Shaw shortly before his death and noted 'his utter disregard for either personal safety or comfort, so long as our cause was progressing satisfactorily. On October 13, in the afternoon, when leading his platoon against the Hohenzollern Redoubt he was shot through the head by machine-gun fire'.

Leslie Shaw's body, like thousands of others, was never found. His two brothers also served in the war. Malcolm was wounded in 1917 but survived. Hamilton came home unscathed. Their grief-stricken parents paid for a stained-glass window in memory of their youngest son at Wombourne United Reformed Church.

On Remembrance Sunday 2005 the restored cloisters at Sedbergh School were rededicated to the memory of the old boys who never came home. Among the far-off fells he loved, a Black Country hero was remembered again.

Interview from October 2005

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