Bitterness of Shropshire man who fought on front

Wounded in action, he returned home to Shropshire to rebuild his life. And such was his disillusionment at the way the authorities treated him, he was to throw his medals away in disgust.

His son, George Evans, of Wellington, turned 91 in June. He was called up and fought as a soldier in a different war.

"He would have agreed with Harry Patch who summed up war in three words - war is stupid," said George, who in later life joined the Quakers and was the driving force behind the creation of a peace garden in Wellington.

Rather unusually, George's mother, Mabel Fail before marriage, also had a direct experience of warfare in the Great War, when the ship on which she was returning to Britain was torpedoed and she and other passengers had to take to the lifeboats and were adrift for days.

Eric John Evans was born at Ivy House Farm, Weston-under-Redcastle, in 1892, and was apprenticed at Bromley's in Wellington as an agricultural engineer in 1914.

A sportsman, he played for Wellington Half Holiday football team, which was mostly apprentices who played on Wednesdays.

"In 1914, inspired by Your Country Needs You and all that, he decided to join the Shropshire Yeomanry. He took his own horse called Tom, rode it up to Prees Heath and joined up, taking the King's shilling," said George.

"They then sent his contingent to The Curragh in Ireland, outside Dublin, the place for horses. He used to illustrate for me the way they used to drill with their sabres. They would stand with their knees apart and point, parry, and slash right, slash left, and you make sure you don't cut your horse's head off.

"His favourite tale was about when the Sergeant Major had a lot of raw recruits. The horses were trained but the men weren't so they got them in a circle on a parade ground and the men were nervously holding their horses and he shouted Mount! They would scramble on the horse somehow or other. He would say Walk March. The horse knew what to do and walk forward in a circle. Then he would say Canter and the horses would. He would say Gallop and the horses knew what to do. They were hanging on desperately. Then he would shout Charge! The horses would go at a tremendous speed and then he would shout Halt. And then the horses halted, but the men didn't necessarily. Several of them would be lying on the floor and the Sergeant Major would then march over to some poor fellow lying on the floor and say: 'Who told you to dismount?'

"From The Curragh they took them to what father called Eggwiped (Egypt) where they were going to charge the Turks. It was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. Then high command decided they weren't going to charge the Turks. They dismounted them all. I suppose they eventually butchered the horses and ate them. I don't know what happened to Tom. It may have been that Tom was not really big enough to be a cavalry horse. My dad had had him for years.

"They were dismounted and transferred to the King's Silly Little Idiots, otherwise known as the KSLI, (King's Shropshire Light Infantry) which they hated. That's how my father's unit used to talk about the KSLI. They didn't think much to foot soldiers anyway. That's what they had to be.

"They moved them all to France and then moved them forward into the trenches. One of his favourite tales about that was that they took over some trenches from the Portuguese Army because the Portuguese had decided they didn't like fighting so they were going home, which I think is probably the most intelligent part of the story. He was about to jump into a trench. As he was looking down to see where his feet were going to land he saw a pipe, as in tobacco pipe. He parted his feet so he wouldn't land on it, picked it up and looked at it, and very carefully cleaned it up and found it had a maker's name on the side of it - Pelican and Snelson, Shrewsbury. What that was doing in the Portuguese trenches in France, I really don't know.

"He apparently smoked it for quite some time and even took it back to Pelican and Snelson in Shrewsbury, who were fascinated by the story.

"They moved them forwards. When they got to Wipers (Ypres) they were in some trenches there which weren't very far away from the German trenches. They went into an attack, this would be in 1917. My father, who by then was a Corporal, was leading his men over the top. He got part way across No Man's Land when he was shot in the left hand. His left hand was at the time holding a hand grenade. The pin was out. Fortunately he had the sense to throw the hand grenade in the general direction of the Germans and got down on the floor so it didn't blow him up.

"His left thumb was bleeding very heavily. He took his field dressing and wrapped it around his left thumb to stop the bleeding. He got up and was promptly shot in the left leg. He thought there was a sniper somewhere. He then crawled to a shell hole to get out of the fire. He found a dead body in it - I think two or three dead bodies in this shell hole where people had crawled in to die. He took the field dressing of one of them and wrapped it around his leg, which had puttees on anyway, and was there all night. He had been hit straight through the shin bone.

"Eventually the stretcherbearers got to him and took him back so he had got a 'Blighty'. He was taken back to England.

"I think it was Cambridge they took him to. The leg was tended to by some particularly enthusiastic and clever young surgeon who surprisingly didn't cut it off because that was the standard treatment for a leg wound. He thought he could save it and in fact he did.

"The thumb was dealt with by some idiot who patched it up and said you will be all right when the nail grows. Actually it didn't have the bit with the nail on.

"He was not sent back to the front. He didn't get a pension and didn't get any help from the Army. He was told to just get on with it. He was so disgusted with his treatment that he threw his medals away. I don't know when. I think it was soon afterwards.

"When he spoke about the war he was very scathing about the way the idiot generals ran things. He subscribed to the idea that they were lions led by donkeys and was very scathing about the great war to end all wars.

"When his left foot came down it went plonk. We always knew his footsteps. He couldn't walk very far without stopping and resting. He did manage to wander around the field later on with a shotgun. Nobody wanted to employ wounded soldiers if they could help it. He found it very difficult to get work.

"He had all sorts of jobs. First he set up a furniture shop in High Street, Wellington, which failed, mainly because of the slump. Then he went off to be a chicken farmer. That didn't pay very well. He was also selling things around the place like petrol lamps in the countryside. One of the things he was selling was paint. In 1939 the Ironbridge 'A' Power Station was camouflage painted. He sold them the paint. That meant he got a better car. He became a milk recorder in World War Two. He used to go round farms, a scheme where the amount and the quantity of the milk from farms was guaranteed and regularly tested. He did that.

"Very soon after the outbreak of the last world war there was a meeting at Wrockwardine when it was decided to have an LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) group. At this general meeting he was elected the leader of the group. He was platoon leader. When it became the Home Guard he became a First Lieutenant. This was Wrockwardine, Admaston, and that part of Wellington that abuts it, like Dothill. It was 4 Platoon of Wellington Company, Home Guard.

"He regarded it as a matter of defending his country against the enemy. We had a general family joke that No 4 Wellington Home Guard fought the most successful military campaign ever because they secured all their objectives and there were no casualties, either to themselves or to the enemy. We used to say that Hitler wouldn't come here because he has heard of Wellington Home Guard.

"The family was living at this time at Orleton Cottage, the cottage by the cricket pitch.

"I rather liked my father. Like me he quite enjoyed baiting authorities and so on. He was on the PCC in Wrockwardine.

"My mother, Mabel Alice Hall Fail, known as Mabel Fail, from Wellington, was torpedoed in 1917. That was a bad year for the Evanses. She was in Jamaica making dresses for the people in the governor's residence in Kingston. She heard her mother was dying, was very ill. She took the next ship back, which was a Fyffes banana boat. She had sailed there in 1914. When her boyfriend, my dad, joined the Army she went off to Jamaica. On the way back in mid Atlantic they were just having dinner when the submarine torpedoed the ship, she said.

"Discipline apparently was absolutely spot on. There weren't very many passengers. They all got into the lifeboats first, the crew got into the life boats second, and the captain got into the lifeboat last. All were successfully launched and they rowed quickly away from the ship, which sank.

"The submarine came up to look and decided that they weren't military personnel and therefore he didn't machinegun them as he would have done otherwise.

"They headed off in the direction of Ireland. It was a pretty rough situation. They were picked up by what they called a Q boat which as far as I can gather sailed from Anglesey. It was a merchant ship with hidden guns looking for U boats. They landed in Bantry Bay where everybody was very kind to them. She was there in just her dinner gown. I don't know how long she had been in the lifeboat but it was quite a long time - days, but not weeks."