5. Commitment and constraint II: Commander Gerald Holland and the role of inland water transport

The nomenclature that identifies the actions of the First World War in the English language is peppered with references to individual towns – Ypres, Verdun and Amiens among others – and by association with local waterways, such as the Marne, the Somme and the Lys. Their presence indicates that the patch of Europe that became the western front was served by a communications network comprising more than merely roads and railways. The canal and river systems of northern France and Belgium in 1914 were, from a transportation point of view, ‘undoubtedly among the finest in the world’.¹ Across the two nations ran almost ten thousand miles of navigable waterways that – unlike in Britain, where the spread of the railways had severely curtailed the use of canals for the bulk carriage of goods – remained an integral component of the local and regional freight traffic infrastructure. In 1905 the total quantity of freight carried by water in Belgium amounted to 53,345,000 tons, approximately half of the nation’s entire goods and merchandise traffic.² The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought this traffic almost entirely to a standstill. However, the ‘permanent way’ of the canal and river network remained relatively undamaged by the opening campaigns and – in many areas – within the hands of the allies.

This chapter examines the manner in which the BEF exploited waterborne transport during the First World War. As at the port of Boulogne in 1914–15, the development of an inland water transport (IWT) service on the western front demonstrates the British army’s open minded approach towards the input of suitably qualified experts before Sir Eric Geddes’s transportation mission in August 1916. Gerald Holland, the man responsible for establishing an IWT service on the western front, was embedded within the BEF’s command hierarchy from the outset – unlike the SECR’s Francis Dent and Percy Tempest – and provided specialist technical advice to the British army until his death in 1917. Rather than offering guidance at arms-length or overseeing the delivery of a solitary endeavour, Holland was incorporated into the army and given the freedom to devote his energies and expertise to the provision of canal and river freight services in France. His talents were recognized and respected by the army’s most senior administrative officers, and the British commenced upon a multitude of expensive engineering projects (in terms of time, resources and costs) upon the strength of Holland’s advocacy.

However, in addition to illustrating the BEF’s willingness to engage with Britain’s transport experts, the development of Holland’s department in the first half of the war demonstrates the inadequacies of the allies’ response to the conflict’s evolution. Holland’s experiences at GHQ provide evidence both of the limitations of the Franco-British coalition and the deficiencies within the BEF’s extant transportation organization before Geddes’s arrival. The British army’s compartmentalized approach to transport meant that IWT remained an under-exploited resource on the western front in 1915– 16, which had significant implications for the road and rail networks behind the BEF before and during the battle of the Somme. Holland, although part of the army’s command structure, possessed responsibility for solving issues related to only one link in the transport chain. Throughout 1915, and until the great battles of 1916 had devastated the existing infrastructure, there was neither the political will to broaden the scope of civil–military cooperation nor the military imperative to reassess the coalition’s existing administrative structures. Consequently, the allies’ approach during this period was characterized by a fixation on the resolution of short-term, localized, specific transport challenges rather than a consideration of the long-term organizational and infrastructural improvements that underpinned the war effort in France and Belgium.

The establishment of the department of inland water transport

The British army was thoroughly aware of the presence and importance of the French and Belgian waterways prior to the First World War. In a lecture delivered to the Aldershot command in 1908, the then Brigadier-General William Robertson directed his audience’s attention to the fact that – with the ‘aid of canals here and there’ – the Scheldt, Sambre and Meuse rivers were all navigable ‘in their course through Belgium’.³ Five years later the War Office produced a report on the available communications in Belgium, which dedicated almost eighty pages to reconnaissance of the Sambre, the Meuse and the Blaton–Ath Canal.⁴ Yet despite the acknowledged existence of a network of waterways in a potential theatre of operations, the War Office’s studies were not buttressed by the creation of a procedure for the operation of waterborne transport in the event of war.⁵ The possible exploitation of IWT was almost entirely absent from the instructions issued to the IGC upon mobilization.⁶ Whereas the French and British pre-war discussions had created distinct – if in the event unworkable – demarcations of responsibility around the operations of the French railway network, the canal and river systems were overlooked in the arrangements under which the Franco-British coalition entered the war.

There were three reasons for the almost complete omission of waterborne traffic from the BEF’s considerations at the outset of the war. First, the army had not utilized IWT during its most recent large-scale conflict, the South African War of 1899–1902. Coupled with the comparatively insignificant use of canals within peacetime British industry by 1914, the army had consequently become blinded to the potential advantages of an efficiently operated fleet of IWT vessels. Waterborne carriage was briefly touched upon in the lectures delivered to students on the LSE’s course for administrative staff officers, but as John Cowans stated in December 1914: ‘from a transport point of view, and my knowledge is fairly wide in this respect, I am unaware of any [Royal] Engineer officer who has much idea of working inland water transport’.⁷

Second, the limitations of IWT were stark when compared to railway and road transport. Waterborne traffic routes were fixed by nature and the process of altering the flow of rivers or canals took far longer than the equivalent task for a railway line or road. Furthermore, repairs to waterways damaged during operations required a far greater commitment of manpower and resources than were necessary to reconstruct a similar length of railway. The sedate rate of progress of rivercraft also made them unsuitable for supplying an army engaged in a war of manoeuvre – the type of conflict most pre-war strategists predicted would characterize the conflict. Barges were restricted to travel during daylight hours only as they possessed no lights, and had to deal with the negotiation of lock gates, currents, adverse winds and ice that – except for the latter – did not unduly affect rail or road services.⁸ Millicent Peterkin, a nurse who spent much of 1918 aboard an ambulance barge, experienced the impact that poor weather could have upon the operations of IWT during the war. Following a period of leave at the start of the year, Peterkin arrived at No. 10 Stationary Hospital in St Omer on 1 February to await the arrival of her barge from Calais. However, ten days later she was still at St Omer as there had been ‘a great deal of wind for several days’. The barges ‘should have been back three or four days ago … I wish my barge would hurry up, for I badly need a change of clothes!’⁹ Throughout the war’s final year Peterkin’s letters home frequently described the wind as a ‘beastly nuisance’, and catalogued the disruption caused by the weather upon her barge’s ability to complete its journeys to and from Calais.¹⁰

In addition to their susceptibility to inclement weather, canal and river traffic was governed by strict speed limits well below those permitted for trains and mechanical transport. Barges were restricted to a top speed of six kilometres per hour for single vessels and just four-and-a-half kilometres per hour for convoys. In the same way that speed limits for motor transport were carefully managed to protect the condition of both vehicles and the road surface, the restrictions placed on IWT were introduced to ensure that the wash that emanated from the craft did not damage the banks. Consequently, even under perfect conditions a self-propelled barge required two days to traverse the fifty-two miles between Dunkirk and Béthune; a tug with four barges required a further twelve hours to make the same journey.¹¹ Such a stately rate of progress made IWT an unsatisfactory medium for the conveyance of supplies demanded urgently at the front line.

Finally, the use of IWT was largely excluded from the thoughts of British commanders as the opening exchanges of the conflict left a large stretch of the Belgian system and key connections to the French waterways (such as the St Quentin Canal) either within German-held territory or unsafe for navigation until the location of the front line settled.¹² These impediments did not deter Commander Gerald Holland from approaching the War Office in the opening weeks of the war with a conviction that the ‘splendid’ waterways of France could provide a useful supplement to the existing road and rail facilities.¹³ Like Eric Geddes – whose offer to recruit a battalion of skilled railwaymen from among the employees of the North-Eastern Railway was made to the War Office around the same time – Holland’s approach fell victim to the nature of the French and British staffs’ pre-war arrangements, which located responsibility for the provision of all the BEF’s transport requirements with the French. The comparatively low strain placed on the French railways by the ‘contemptibly’ small BEF, combined with the fluidity of the front line and the dearth of navigable waterways in the section of front initially held by the BEF, meant that the formation of an IWT service was not a priority for the army in August 1914. Consequently, Holland’s proposal was declined by the military ‘as it was at that time considered that rail transport, supplemented by adequate road transport, would fully meet the [BEF’s] requirements’ for logistical support.¹⁴

The nature of Holland’s rebuff, unlike that issued to Geddes, did not engender a longstanding animosity between the former and the soldiers at the War Office. As the rank suggested, Commander Holland possessed previous experience with the armed forces. He had served with the Royal Indian Marine between 1880 and 1905, and saw service in Burma, India, and during the South African War. Following his departure from the navy he had entered the employment of the LNWR and, after a brief stint at Fleetwood, in 1907 Holland became the marine superintendent at Holyhead (a role formerly held by Francis Dent’s father, Admiral Charles Bayley Calmady Dent). According to Cowans, who knew Holland personally, he was ‘a most able officer’.¹⁵ Therefore, when the circumstances in France changed, Holland’s proposal was revisited.

Two factors compelled the army to reassess the potential role of IWT on the western front. First, the decision to raise and deploy a large force in France brought with it the requirement to create and maintain lines of communications capable of feeding and equipping that force. Second, the BEF’s relocation to Flanders in October 1914 placed it within proximity of the northern network of waterways (see Figure 5.1). Therefore, by the winter of 1914–15 the exploitation of IWT was far more practicable than it had been when Holland approached the War Office in the summer. On 10 December the loading of barges began at Bergues, with the loaded vessels placed under the command of non-commissioned officers from the ASC for their journeys to Estaires and Béthune.¹⁶ Two days later the DOM at the War Office, Brigadier-General Richard Montagu Stuart-Wortley – correctly identifying that the provision of IWT in France was likely to become a large enough job to require the establishment of a separate department – wrote to Sir William Robertson to recommend Commander Holland, ‘a most energetic and useful officer’, to head the department.¹⁷

Figure 5.1. Map of the northern waterways, France and Belgium.

Source: A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937), p. 173. Map drawn by Cath D’Alton.

In the same month that Geddes experienced his uncomfortable meeting with Lord Kitchener and Cowans at the War Office, the army was open minded enough to recommend an ‘outsider’ to a position of seniority within the BEF’s command structure. Before Christmas, Holland had called upon Stuart-Wortley to discuss matters in France, and on 28 December he was offered a temporary commission in the Royal Engineers. Within forty-eight hours the newly commissioned Lieutenant-Colonel Holland had crossed the Channel to ‘report as to the steps which should be taken to enable the waterways to be utilized for transport work for the British Army’.¹⁸

Holland’s private diary from this period survives, and illustrates the unpromising foundations upon which he had to construct an IWT department within the BEF. On 30 December 1914 he reported for duty at GHQ and was placed under the authority of the director of railways in the QMG’s office.¹⁹ A day after his arrival he interviewed a local tug captain and ascertained that the French custom was for a barge to be operated and lived upon by an entire family.²⁰ Rather than work to orders and provide transport on routes identified and requested by the British, the barge owners preferred to choose their own routes and only carry cargoes between docks they themselves had selected.²¹ A meeting with the French army’s canal expert on 1 January 1915 quickly revealed that this obstinacy was not based on any kind of xenophobic prejudice or nationalist intransigence; the French boating community happened to be just as truculent in the face of French military authority. Holland met with the Belgian canal representative the next day, which meant that within four days of his arrival on the western front he had established what appear to have been friendly and progressive relations with his counterparts in both the French and Belgian armies. However, his conversations with the BEF’s coalition partners had not engendered an agreement for them to provide the British with either the manpower or materials required to create an IWT service behind Sir John’s expanding army. As Holland reflected later, in January 1915 the IWT department in France comprised ‘two officers, no men, one hired tug and 34 barges’.²²

Holland’s diary also documents both the complexity of the task that lay ahead of him and the assistance he received from the army and the British transport industry. Without a pool of reliable local barge operators to call upon, the only alternative open to Holland was the enlistment of personnel from Britain to crew the vessels and provide the technical and administrative support required to maintain an efficient fleet. His diary recorded the names and occupational backgrounds of those chosen to populate the new department. The entries also emphasize the breadth of skills necessary to manage an industrial army. The majority of recruits, such as Horace Pitman, were selected because of their previous associations with waterborne transport. Pitman possessed ten years’ experience as a yachtsman, while Corporal William McKinlay was transferred into the department thanks to his having trained as a surveyor with Lloyd’s before the war. George Tagg, despite being fifty-two years of age, was appointed both for his knowledge of the French and Belgian canal systems and his familial links to the boat-building industry.²³ Others were chosen for less obvious but equally important qualities. E. G. Weston, for example, brought his experience as assistant secretary in the colonial civil service to the provision of clerical support to the newly established department, while the War Office also contributed a cadre of officers. Stuart-Wortley agreed to release Lieutenant Baugh from the directorate of movements and to Colonel Albert Collard’s attachment to Holland’s fledgling outfit.²⁴

Yet like the BEF as a whole, the force’s IWT department was heavily dependent for personnel upon those from outside the pre-war British army. Holland’s own pre-war career, both at sea and on the railways, provided the nucleus around which the BEF’s IWT organization was constructed. His three most senior subordinate officers in France were former Royal Indian Marine officers, while the LNWR contributed numerous labourers and administrative staff keen to serve under their former manager.²⁵ On 13 January a list of fifty men who were willing to enlist from the marine department at Holyhead was compiled; they were medically examined soon after and sent to the Royal Engineers’ training camp at Longmoor for instruction under Major Cyril Luck – one of Holland’s former naval colleagues who had been appointed officer commanding IWT troops.²⁶ Elsewhere, Private R. H. Williams transferred into the department from the 16th (Service) Battalion (Public Schools), Middlesex Regiment – and received a promotion to lieutenant – following an interview with Holland on 20 January. Williams, Holland recorded, possessed previous LNWR locomotive experience and was ‘intelligent looking’.²⁷

Whereas Williams came to Holland’s attention as a result of a direct recommendation from the former’s commanding officer, an ‘active campaign of enlistment’ at various ports across the country accounted for the lightermen, watermen, seamen, engineers and other assorted trades required to ensure the department’s ability to fulfil its duties.²⁸ Brigadier Adrian Hodgkin, who was attached to IWT between December 1915 and August 1916, recorded the assortment of technical skills that were collected upon each barge during the war. A chemical glass manufacturer prior to the war, Hodgkin served on the water purification barge A.174 after being wounded at Ypres in July 1915. Nobody on A.174 matched the maritime experience of Corporal Mapplebeck, the commander of A.412, whom Hodgkin described as ‘a delightful old man, one of the dirtiest looking villains I have ever seen; he talks in the broadest Yorkshire, comes from Hull, and has lived “all us lives” on a boat similar to A.412’.²⁹ Yet most of Hodgkin’s crewmates on A.174 were employed in shipping-related occupations. Corporal Fernandez had worked on the Mersey ferries in peacetime; Sapper A. Arnold was a second mate sailor; Sapper D. Applegate had been a motorboat driver; Sapper Humphreys was a Thames waterman; and Sapper Marsh had been both a Thames waterman and a former stoker in the Royal Navy. In fact, only Hodgkin and Sergeant J. W. McCririck – a ‘general engineer in peacetime’ – possessed no previous experience in the operation of waterborne transport.

The directorate’s headquarters, to which Hodgkin transferred in June 1916, was less reliant upon waterborne experience but still contained a higher proportion of Britain’s transport experts than it did professional soldiers. In addition to the former Lloyd’s surveyor William McKinlay, who by that point had attained the rank of major, two of the ten deputy assistant directors of IWT in mid 1916 had backgrounds in the merchant navy. Another, Captain Daniels, had worked before the war in ship repairs. Three of the remainder were servants of Holland’s immediate pre-war employer, the LNWR.³⁰

Holland’s technical expertise, alongside the skills of the officers who helped him to build the IWT department, were clearly valued highly by those charged with ensuring that the expanding BEF continued to receive ample logistical support. The paper strength of the IWT department when Holland was appointed stood at thirty-six officers and 654 other ranks – although by the end of January 1915 just five of each were actually at work in France – and throughout the army there existed an expectation that IWT would be called upon to undertake ‘an immense amount’ of work ‘sooner or later’.³¹ In acknowledgement that the British army lacked the knowledge base to make the most effective use of the canal and river systems in France, senior British officers on both sides of the Channel favoured the employment of men with comparatively little military experience to positions of significant responsibility over the use of inadequately prepared professional soldiers.

Concurrent with the appointment of officers and the enlistment of other ranks, work in France began in earnest. On the morning of 5 January 1915 road stone from Guernsey was discharged direct to a barge drawn alongside a ship berthed at Calais, and a second vessel was loaded in the same way that afternoon. The following day Holland agreed a price of ninety centimes per ton with a local contractor in Armentières for the vessels’ discharge.³² As the units raised in Britain passed through the training camp at Longmoor and crossed to France, the local labour withdrew and the IWT department gradually came to more closely resemble a recognizable provider of military logistics. By the end of June, Holland’s department had swollen from just two officers and no men to comprise twenty-five officers and 423 other ranks, with plans in place for further expansion. In the same period the BEF’s fleet of craft had provided transportation for 15,926 tons of supplies, 27,241 tons of road metal, and 3,216 tons of miscellaneous supplies (which included bridging materials and coal), while 628 officers and men had been evacuated from the battle zone by ambulance barge – reducing the loads carried by rail and providing the wounded men with a comfortable, if sedate, journey back to the base hospitals.³³ In September, when Holland wrote his first memorandum on the progress of IWT in France, he wrote with evident pride that barges were carrying 1,200 tons every day across the northern waterways and that requisitions for over 156,000 tons to be moved by IWT before the end of the year had been received.³⁴

To fulfil such obligations, a more appropriate fleet of vessels had to be introduced. The pre-war traffic on the northern waterways was predominantly towed by horses, which Holland identified ‘would not cope effectively with the heavy demands which he foresaw would be made for the transport of war material by water’. He recommended the use of tugs capable of hauling conveys of ‘dumb’ barges – which relied upon either a horse or tug for propulsion – and the provision of self-propelled barges capable of operating independently and responding more swiftly to urgent demands from GHQ.³⁵ Orders for the construction of vessels were placed with British firms immediately, and suitable craft already in use in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands were purchased by the War Office and despatched to the front.³⁶ As the department grew in size the craft originally hired from French sources – which in the first instance came complete with their original crews – were purchased outright and manned by military personnel, ‘as it was found that the civilian crews were very unsatisfactory’.³⁷ In just nine months the department expanded from ‘one tug and 34 hired barges’ to control a fleet of over two hundred vessels, with a total carrying capacity in excess of 38,000 tons (see Figure 5.2). The standard barge was capable of carrying about 280 deadweight tons of material.³⁸ Therefore, as Hodgkin noted in his diary, the IWT service quickly acquired the ability to remove a significant volume of traffic from the railways: three barges held the same quantity of material as two trains comprised of fifty ten-ton wagons.³⁹

Figure 5.2. The development of inland water transport resources on the western front, 1915–18.

Source: TNA, WO 158/851, director general of transport: history of inland water transport, Appendix B2: Schedule showing development of inland water transport resources in France month by month, 1915–18.

In addition to his duties with regard to the provision of adequate personnel and the equipment to maintain an effective delivery service, Holland’s department was also made responsible for the repair of vessels and waterways, the operation of inland quays and docks, the regulation of traffic on the water and the establishment and upkeep of a communications network across the entire IWT system.⁴⁰ Telephone communications played a vital role in the IWT department’s operational practices, which drew heavily upon the organizational structures employed by the railways in peace and war. In the same way that the railway transport establishment was formed to oversee the BEF’s use of railways – and to provide a conduit for British requests to be presented to the French rail authorities – responsibility for the management of IWT on the western front was divided into districts.⁴¹ District officers supervised the loading and unloading of vessels within their jurisdiction, maintained contact with the British and French military authorities in the area, ensured the safe passage of craft through their zone and circulated information about the traffic in their district to their colleagues in neighbouring areas. In essence, the IWT department established a system of decentralized responsibility, which devolved the detail of everyday work to the district officers. The existence of these ‘men on the spot’ freed Holland and his senior subordinates at GHQ to concentrate upon the establishment of the principles and procedures required to obtain the highest degree of efficiency from the fleet.

The effective deployment of its fleet was crucial to the department’s success, as the construction of new waterways was practically impossible. To ensure smooth operations, Holland’s department had to coordinate the movements of the BEF’s traffic, the smaller number of craft being used to supply the French and Belgian armies, and the relatively insignificant volume of civilian traffic that continued to ply the waterways.⁴² To keep track of the whereabouts of these craft – particularly once the British IWT presence in France spread beyond the northern waterways – Holland’s department implemented a system of control that had been pioneered in the previous decade by the Midland Railway, which relied heavily upon the presence of a reliable telecommunications network.⁴³ On 2 February 1915, just over a month after he had arrived in France, Holland was issued with twenty-five expert telephone linesmen who undertook all the communications work required to make the IWT department a self-sufficient unit of the BEF. Telephone lines ran across the northern waterways and were later installed along the River Somme as the department’s sphere of operations expanded.⁴⁴ The telephone system provided the link required for district officers to pass vessels from district to district and to update their colleagues on their impending traffic commitments. The detailed information gathered through the system gave district officers advanced warning of likely busy periods, affording them opportunities to source extra labour for deployment at lock gates to reduce transit times.⁴⁵ The locations of all craft were relayed back to GHQ each night and recorded on a diagram board – a principal component of the Midland’s train control system – which gave Holland’s staff a regularly updated, graphic illustration of the fleet’s distribution. Such innovations aided decision making within the department in relation to the redistribution of craft and personnel as circumstances dictated during the conflict.⁴⁶

The growth of the directorate of inland water transport

The IWT department began its work in 1915 on just a small section of the northern waterways, which connected the ports of Dunkirk and Calais with the towns of Armentières and Béthune. However, the limited scope of the department’s initial zone of operations did not limit Holland’s focus. From his arrival on the western front, he adopted a ‘policy of looking well ahead and forecasting the probable requirements of the future … both as regards new demands for transport and new constructional and repair work’ on waterways acquired by the allies in the event of an advance.⁴⁷ As we have seen, such an outlook was not unique within the British military effort. A core component of Sir Percy Girouard’s report into the BEF’s transport organization in October 1914 surrounded the question of ensuring the British possessed a ‘voice’ in the administration of captured transport infrastructure, while a significant proportion of the IGC’s voluminous correspondence over the winter of 1914–15 covered the preparations required to maintain Kitchener’s armies once they arrived in France.⁴⁸ In the summer of 1915 an IWT service began to operate on the River Somme in support of the British divisions stationed in the area, and by the end of the year over 215 miles of navigable waterways behind the western front lay open to British traffic.⁴⁹ By the autumn of the same year, the number of men whose work was coordinated from Holland’s office under the DRT had grown to 830.

The continued growth of the IWT department, and the ambitious plans for further expansion made by its head, were retarded by its subordination to Colonel Twiss. Holland had been placed under Twiss’s authority in December 1914 to mirror the structure of the French army, which regarded canals and railways as ‘one question’ and administered them within the same department.⁵⁰ Therefore, Holland had no direct access to the QMG. He could not personally represent his department’s needs and advocate for a more thorough exploitation of the French and Belgian waterways. Instead, he was forced to ‘express all his views’ through Twiss who – like all of his colleagues within the pre-war British army – ‘had not technical knowledge [or] experience’ of IWT and ‘whose time moreover was fully occupied with matters appertaining to the railway transport problem’.⁵¹ Twiss’s ignorance of the peculiarities of waterborne traffic led to the detachment of Holland’s department from the DRT’s oversight in October 1915. Two weeks later, and just four days after the Dent scheme at the Bassin Loubet had been finally terminated, Holland was gazetted as a temporary colonel at the head of an independent IWT directorate. Instead of working through Colonel Twiss’s office, from 28 October onwards Holland answered directly to the QMG in France, Sir Ronald Maxwell.⁵²

The re-establishment of military command at the port of Boulogne in October 1915 should not overshadow the successful formation and development of an IWT organization heavily influenced by non-military personnel. Far from being gripped by anti-civilian phobia at this point of the war, the continued expansion of IWT in 1915 demonstrates that the BEF’s senior commanders were far more open to the application of civilian expertise than has previously been asserted. Within such an environment, Holland’s contacts, knowledge and attitude were highly sought-after attributes in the expanding British war effort. However, the period following the separation of the command link between IWT and the railways was not one of steady, unbroken expansion. Holland’s experience of directorship in France over the following year exposed two weaknesses: the threshold of the BEF’s freedom of action on the territory of a powerful, sovereign nation; and the perceived limitations of a slow means of transport, which operated outside of the pre-existing, land-based supply hierarchy behind the western front.

There were a number of reasons why Holland pressed for the acquisition and deployment of ‘double, even treble, and possibly still a greater number of vessels’ than the 330 accounted for by his department in September 1915.⁵³ First, the pre-war transport arrangements between the French and British had already begun to unravel, and Holland was quick to identify that responsibility for the maintenance and operation of the waterways could not be divorced from control over the network if the BEF were to gain the maximum possible benefit from IWT. Inter-allied discussions under the umbrella of the railways and canal commission had taken place that summer, and decreed that the British were to undertake the repair, maintenance, and operation of any waterways behind the BEF in the event of an advance.⁵⁴ Colonel Henniker, who represented the British on the commission, did not record the specific outcomes of the discussions on waterborne transport in his account of the commission’s deliberations. However, it is clear from Holland’s diary that he had emphasized the importance of securing British control over the Belgian waterways – should an advance take place – to Henniker long before the commission met.⁵⁵

A second reason provided by Holland for his promotion of an expanded IWT provision was financial. The British incurred a charge for all freight carried by the French railways on the BEF’s behalf, which generated a vast correspondence within the QMG’s offices. In contrast, the French did not request payment for cargo moved in British vessels along the rivers and canals behind the front. Furthermore, Holland observed, the vessels constructed for the BEF’s use during the war represented an investment. At an initial estimate of £138,140 for the construction of barges, cranes, tugs and the provision of stores, the IWT department could not have been developed without a significant material and monetary commitment.⁵⁶ However, the devastation wrought by the conflict upon the European boat-building industry had created what Holland anticipated would be significant post-war demand for the BEF’s fleet. The port of Antwerp alone required six million tons of lighterage per year, while the engagement of French workshops on war-related activities – and the ongoing military recruitment of men from the French labour force – meant that the stock of IWT craft in France was likely to be severely depleted when the fighting ended. Consequently, Holland argued, ‘any vessels we may have will be of great value to replace losses, and will assuredly be bought by those, who then turn their attention to the restoration of commercial business, at prices which will, I confidently expect, recoup a large proportion of our outlay’.⁵⁷

The possibility of recouping some of the costs incurred in the provision of a substantial IWT fleet on the western front was persuasive, but by far the most compelling justification for the sustained expansion of Holland’s directorate lay in conjunction with the difficulties experienced at the docks under the BEF’s control throughout 1915. As demonstrated from the very outset of their employment in France, IWT vessels drawn up alongside ships berthed at the ports eliminated the need for supplies to be landed on the quayside. This arrangement saved the labour needed to move goods from the shore into the storage depots, reduced the demand for space within the confined accommodation immediately surrounding the harbours and did not require locomotives and rolling stock to be deployed to remove supplies from the port area by rail. Goods that were transported several miles inland by water allowed the wagons in circulation in northern France to be worked over shorter distances – an action that ensured individual wagons returned to the depots more frequently and consequently increased the number of journeys each could make to and from the front line. Furthermore, the extra capacity offered by the hulls of IWT craft provided the BEF’s senior supply officers with the option to remove from the railways altogether stores whose demand was stable and predictable. The availability of a waterborne alternative freed up rolling stock to respond to more volatile and unpredictable requests for stocks such as ammunition, whose expenditure could not be accurately predicted in advance – particularly in the event of an enemy attack.⁵⁸ In March 1916 Maxwell noted that approximately 2,000 tons of road ‘stone metal, engineering stores and material, [and] hay and oats’ were among the stores delivered daily by IWT – the majority of it achieved ‘without [the cargo] touching a road or railway’ between the coast and its destination.⁵⁹

As the pressures on the available rolling stock became acute over the winter of 1915–16, and congestion at Calais and Dunkirk threatened both the despatch of trains and the turnaround of ships, GHQ decided to pursue the construction of an IWT depot capable of handling stores removed by barge from the two ports. The project’s principal goal was merely to reduce the BEF’s reliance upon the limited railway facilities around Calais and Dunkirk, and upon the communications that linked the ports to the wider French rail network (see Figure 5.3). A suitable location for the depot, known as Zeneghem, was found at the junction of the Calais Canal and the River Aa. The site was within ‘a summer day’s journey by barge’ of both Calais and Dunkirk, and had the added advantage of offering a separate return route for traffic from the latter. The operation of different inbound and outbound routes meant that congestion at lock gates was minimized, which made fluidity in the network easier to sustain.⁶⁰

However, Holland’s ambitions for the depot grew as the BEF’s expansion continued and the strain on the Channel ports – and British shipping capacity – became consequently greater. Rather than simply alleviate congestion at the docks by permitting the discharge of ships direct to barge, the director of IWT began to envisage the site near St Pierre Brouck as the French hub of a cross-Channel service that could bypass the congested ports entirely. He laid down his views on the subject on 29 April 1916 in response to an enquiry from Sir John Cowans into the practicability of ‘bringing material from England to France … with a view to economising on shipping’. Holland argued that goods could be loaded onto barges in Britain rather than ships, despatched across the Channel, and unloaded at an inland site away from the cramped conditions at the coast. Such a service would help relieve some of the pressure on the limited dock space available to the BEF, free up shipping and reduce the travelling distance for the locomotives and rolling stock that connected the docks and the front line. ‘Provided it was understood that the service could not be looked upon as a daily one, as the barges could only cross as and when weather conditions permitted’, Holland believed the proposal for a cross-Channel service that terminated at Zeneghem was ‘a practical one’.⁶¹

Figure 5.3. Detail of the railway facilities surrounding Calais and Dunkirk.

Source: J. H. F. Le Hénaff and H. Bornecque, Les chemins de fer français et la guerre (Paris, 1922); A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937). Map drawn by Cath D’Alton.

It was also expensive. In addition to the development of Zeneghem as a depot capable of receiving the goods transported by cross-Channel barge, the service required the construction of a suitable departure point for the vessels in southern England. Richborough on the River Stour was chosen to host the British terminus of the cross-Channel service because of ‘its geographical position, relative to the Channel ports and the Continental canal system, the existence of large deposits of sand and gravel, ease of railway access, and the extensive areas available for camps and store yards’. As John Kerr Robertson’s exhaustively detailed paper in the ICE Proceedings demonstrated, the creation of a ‘great military depot … consisting of camps, workshops, power houses, shipyards, wharves with extensive basins, warehouses, store yards, [and] salvage depots’ at Richborough required significant investments of materials, manpower and money.⁶² The construction costs incurred at Richborough amounted to some £433,476, while over one-and-a-half million concrete blocks were manufactured on site for the construction of camps, offices and workshops.⁶³ Despite the existence of competing demands for the finite resources available to the leaders of Britain’s war effort, Holland’s opinion was held in sufficiently high regard both at the War Office and GHQ for work to be commenced at Richborough even before the battle of the Somme had highlighted the deficiencies in the BEF’s transport infrastructure. By early May 1916 Colonel Collard was immersed in the ‘very extensive’ work of placing orders for the construction of craft capable of operating in the English Channel and on the northern waterways, and by September enough progress had been made at Richborough to permit the first barge to be loaded up. The cross-Channel barge service commenced regular operations in December of the same year.⁶⁴

While senior military figures in Britain were quick to respond to the expanding transport requirements of the war, on the other side of the Channel the French authorities took a different approach. In February 1916, the French had made an initial request to GHQ for the British to provide rolling stock to relieve the pressure on the French railways’ own reserves. Yet the advantage for the railway network of Zeneghem’s development as an alternative to rail transport in France did not engender automatic approval from GQG for the British to proceed with construction. Work on the depot did not begin until 25 July 1916, almost a month into the Somme offensive and nearly three months after Collard had begun to source vessels to ply the cross-Channel route. The location of a suitable site and the accumulation of building materials for the depot contributed to the delay, but the chief cause lay in the fractious relationship between Britain and its host. The site near St Pierre Brouck was only, in Holland’s words, ‘eventually agreed upon’ after ‘several proposals’ and numerous meetings between representatives of the French and British armies.⁶⁵ Construction on the first quay, which measured 1,575 feet in length and ultimately contained fifteen berths, was not completed until 14 October 1916.⁶⁶ Only four barges were able to make the crossing during the following month.⁶⁷ Consequently, the cross-Channel barge service was unable to provide any meaningful support to the allies’ major offensives in 1916.

GQG’s insistence that they retained overall control of the decision-making process acted as a significant retardant on the growth of Holland’s directorate. Even before the discussions surrounding the development of Zeneghem had begun, French bureaucracy had served to frustrate the former railwayman’s ambitions for the IWT service. As early as October 1915 Holland had suggested that barges could be loaded direct from ships at Le Havre, to facilitate the discharge of vessels and reduce the growing levels of congestion at the port. The loaded barges could then be sent inland to Rouen via a combination of the River Seine and the Tancarville Canal. Both Maxwell and Clayton approved of Holland’s plan. However, following ‘protracted negotiations’, Holland recorded that the French authorities ‘would not hear of the proposal although it would undoubtedly have done much to relieve the congestion on the railways’.⁶⁸ The relatively dispassionate language of the directorate’s post-war report – written in the glow of victory – claimed that the French authorities had ‘at all times, given courteous, prompt, and ungrudging aid’ to the BEF.⁶⁹ Holland’s contemporaneous remarks provide a stark contrast to the diplomacy of the official document. In a memorandum written on 5 May 1916 Holland noted that ‘all sorts of reasons were put forward by the French against [the Tancarville Canal] project, none of them convincing’.⁷⁰ In his private diary he went even further, defacing the page that recorded the chrysalis of the idea with a note scrawled in red pencil and denoting obvious frustration: ‘Finally French refused permission for any British service’.⁷¹

As with the delays to the cross-Channel service between Richborough and Zeneghem, what British officers perceived to be French obstinacy meant that the military operations on the western front in 1916 did not benefit from the foresight displayed by Holland during the previous eighteen months. Rather than commence in or around October 1915, when Holland first received his superiors’ support for the Tancarville Canal scheme, the French only withdrew their objections to the BEF’s use of the canal on 4 August 1916. The colossal demands of the fighting around Verdun and the Somme had created severe congestion and rolling stock shortages at Le Havre, which finally persuaded the French to sanction a ‘limited inland water transport service’ to receive cargo from ships berthed at the port for onward transport.⁷² The IWT directorate was unable to respond immediately. The barges required to operate the Tancarville Canal route had to be transferred from their locations on the northern waterways and the River Somme via the English Channel, a journey that took thirty-three days to complete. Consequently, IWT did not begin to load goods at Le Havre direct from ship to barge until 22 September 1916 and construction on an inland depot at Soquence (near Rouen) was only completed a month later – almost exactly one year after Holland had made the proposal to utilize the canal.⁷³

Holland was attempting to be proactive, and was planning for the continued expansion of the BEF’s logistical capabilities. At the same time the French authorities appeared to want the British to take on a larger share of the responsibility for the sustenance of their troops, while simultaneously acting to constrain their ability to do so – until the necessities of the military campaign intervened. However, this is a highly Anglo-centric perspective on events, which does not take into account the wider considerations of the allied war effort. Alongside the BEF’s demands, the French authorities in the winter of 1915–16 had to balance the requirements of a much larger French army and the needs of the civilian population upon whose shoulders the French war effort rested. The BEF was not the only institution seeking to make use of IWT as the pressures on the French railway network intensified. The French military authorities began to appreciate the value of their waterways, and attempted to reintroduce pre-war traffic in heavy goods to the rivers and canals as the war intensified. The volume of coal transported on French vessels along the River Seine was almost doubled – increasing from 350,000 to 600,000 tonnes per month – and improvements were made to IWT depots on the Marne, the Moselle and other navigable waterways across the country. With the capacity of the canals limited in the same way as that of the railways and roads, the vessels deployed in support of the BEF had to be integrated with the local traffic rather than imposed upon it.⁷⁴

Furthermore, to lay the blame for the lethargic expansion of IWT in 1915–16 purely at the feet of Britain’s principal ally is unwarranted and creates a deceptive impression of the extent to which transportation’s complexities were appreciated within the BEF prior to the battle of the Somme. There was a clear willingness to engage with and support the development of IWT among senior administrative soldiers such as Maxwell and Cowans. However, such commitment was by no means universal in the British army. In this respect, the decision to sever the command relationship between waterborne transport and the DRT in October 1915 may have reduced the influence Holland and his directorate were able to have over decisions made at army and corps level. As in the pre-war British economy, where the bulk carriage of goods over long distances was dominated by the railways (although coastal shipping also made a significant contribution where available),⁷⁵ the independent IWT directorate was unable to attract a substantial demand for its services.

Individual formations, each desirous of obtaining the resources they believed were necessary to ensure the continued efficiency and security of their own troops, were reluctant to utilize the canals. In the absence of a centralizing authority to collate and coordinate the BEF’s transport demands – and until the sheer volume of goods entering France made the identification of priorities a fundamental requirement for the sustenance of operations on the western front – there was little Holland could do to persuade commanders to embrace the canals and reduce their dependency on the overburdened rail network. Holland’s assistant directors of IWT, along with the various district officers stationed across the waterway system, were responsible for ‘keeping in close touch’ with the units in their area and ensuring that local transport requirements were met.⁷⁶ However, there appears to have been little desire among army, corps and divisional officers to reduce their demands upon the fastest method of transport available – even when the railway network became incapable of answering all of the requests that emanated from the front. Few followed the lead of Major-General Sir John Moore, the director of veterinary services, who approached Holland directly in June 1916 to arrange for the evacuation of sick horses by barge. Following Moore’s enquiry, small open barges with a capacity of approximately seventy tons were drawn together and equipped with gangways for the loading and unloading of animals almost immediately. The first barges for the veterinary service were put into operation on 5 July 1916 – a reaction that highlighted both the IWT directorate’s responsiveness to the army’s needs and the existence of spare capacity within the fleet. By the end of the year a fleet of ten specialist craft had been sourced from the Yorkshire canals to operate the service, and 4,675 horses and mules had been transported away from the front by barge.⁷⁷

The supply of road stone provided a ludicrous counterpoint to the success story of equine evacuation. The carriage of stone by train was suspended at the outset of the battle of the Somme to free up railway capacity for the movement of munitions and other supplies required by the fighting forces.⁷⁸ Further back along the line of communications, shipments of 1,000 tons of stone per day into Dunkirk were maintained throughout July but were ‘suddenly’ reduced to 400 tons per day – without GHQ’s knowledge – the following month.⁷⁹ In the middle of September Major-General Charles Dawkins wrote to Lloyd George to stress that the ‘operations which are now taking place have resulted in greatly increased use of all roads in the Fourth and Reserve Army areas, and the roads on territory taken from the enemy require entirely remaking. The requirements for road metal are increasing daily, and still further demands on a larger scale may be expected at any time’. The latest fortnightly returns illustrated that only 76 per cent of the BEF’s 193,000-ton requirement for road stone had been received. ‘These figures’, Dawkins complained, were ‘both actually and relatively, considerable [sic] worse than any previous figures with which I have been furnished’.⁸⁰ However, despite the BEF’s shortages of a material described by Haig as ‘of vital importance for the conduct of operations’ on the western front, no demands for the carriage of road stone by barge had been made by British commanders. During the same period IWT vessels within Holland’s fleet were being utilized for the conveyance of road stone along the River Somme, but at the request – and for the use – of the French army.⁸¹

The BEF’s failure to thoroughly exploit IWT as part of an integrated transport solution had deleterious effects both on the efficiency of the railways and the capacity of the road network directly behind the front-line troops. The ‘deplorable state of the roads’ in the BEF’s zone of operations soon became the ‘chief source of anxiety’ both for the Fourth Army’s chief engineer and for Colonel Woodroffe, the deputy QMG, who catalogued his concerns in a series of notes written to his superior.⁸² A lack of materials in France was not to blame for the state of the roads behind the BEF. As Woodroffe noted on a visit to the railhead at Belle-Église on 12 August, ‘[t]he stone dump is assuming a really ridiculous size. It is now so high in places that it requires a big lift to get the stone out of the truck onto the dump’. So much stone had accumulated at the railhead that quantities of the material fell back off the dump onto the tracks after they had been unloaded, an occurrence that caused the removal of empty wagons from the railhead to be delayed while the line was cleared – reducing fluidity on the railway network.⁸³ In early August Brigadier Hodgkin passed through the area of the Somme occupied by French troops. On his journey to Froissy to investigate the disappearance of chemicals from one of the filtration units attached to the IWT directorate he travelled through Longueau, Villers-Bretonneux, Lamotte-en-Santerre, Proyart and Chuignolles, and remarked that the roads behind the French troops were ‘kept as smooth as glass … Compare these with the roads in Flanders, in our charge … where there are more shell holes than roads’.⁸⁴

The British approach to road repairs was only one component of the war effort that Hodgkin criticized within his wartime diary. Unlike many of his colleagues within the higher echelons of the IWT directorate, as a pre-war territorial officer Hodgkin was thoroughly conversant with the particular requirements of a military organization. The discipline within the IWT service on the western front did not meet Hodgkin’s expectations, and upon his departure from the directorate in mid August 1916 he reflected that:

Hodgkin singled out the ‘most miscellaneous collection of personages’ that comprised the IWT directorate’s senior team as the chief culprits behind its inefficiency, and claimed that Holland’s organization contained ‘no chain of command and no discipline worth speaking of’. He perceived that the training the men had received at Longmoor prior to their despatch to France, and the minimal supervision that could be applied to men who were constantly circulating around the waterways, had resulted in the IWT directorate suffering an ‘undue proportion of courts martial and other nuisances’.⁸⁶

However, Hodgkin’s observations should be approached with caution. Throughout the portion of his diary dedicated to his time as an IWT officer he recorded his frustrations at not making what he believed to be a valuable contribution to the British war effort. While on board barge A.174 Hodgkin peppered his diary with entries that claimed he had experienced a ‘week of absolute idleness’, that he was ‘still hard at work doing nothing’, and that he had ‘wasted, absolutely – and-without-any-extenuating-circumstances-wasted, five months, and I am sick and tired of it’.⁸⁷ He desired a return to combat duties and had requested a transfer to the Special (Gas) Brigade within two months of having received his assignment with the IWT directorate. His comments demonstrate a common attitude among British officers that ‘combat remained the measure of the soldier’.⁸⁸ Through his contribution to the provision of safe drinking water, Hodgkin possessed a role within the IWT directorate where his scientific background was of direct benefit to the BEF. Yet throughout what he dubbed his ‘six months of unbroken idleness’ aboard A.174 and at IWT headquarters, Hodgkin failed to fully appreciate the work he and his colleagues had undertaken.⁸⁹

Table 5.1. Approximate tonnages of materials carried by inland water transport on the western front, 1915–18.

Source: TNA, WO 158/851, Director general of transport: History of inland water transport, p. 15.

The same lack of appreciation for IWT’s role affected the BEF more widely. For all the unprecedented scale of the demands generated by the fighting on the Somme in 1916, Holland was forced to return barges requisitioned from French civilian sources due to a lack of military material for them to convey.⁹⁰ Regardless of the 309 per cent increase in the tonnage conveyed by IWT in 1916 over the figures from the previous year (see Table 5.1), significant spare capacity existed across the fleet. A total of 73,500 deadweight tons carrying capacity was available to the BEF in October 1916, but Sir Eric Geddes recorded that the maximum quantity conveyed by IWT in a single month was just 69,000 tons. ‘Each deadweight ton’, Geddes observed, ‘was not fully occupied once in the month … A great carrying capacity has been provided and no adequate use found for it’.⁹¹ The man who had been more responsible than anyone else for the provision of that great carrying capacity was Gerald Holland, marine superintendent of the LNWR. However, the task of making the best use of it ultimately fell elsewhere; to Geddes and his successors as DGT, and to Cyril Luck, who replaced Holland as director of IWT in the summer of 1917.

Luck’s promotion did not come about as a result of any deficiency in Holland’s execution of the role of director. Rather, in 1917 the latter became ‘the highest ranking and most decorated railwayman to die in the Great War’.⁹² Holland’s commitment to the war effort was a significant factor in his death. Following the German retirement on the Somme in early 1917, Holland chose to personally survey the devastation wrought on the canal network east of Péronne. He recommended that the section between Frise and Péronne be repaired for traffic immediately, but beyond that point he reported on 31 March that ‘the destruction was so complete as to make the expenditure of labour, material, etc. necessary for its rehabilitation, inadvisable, having regard to the limited use to which this waterway could be put owing to its relation to the Army on its new line’.⁹³ The exertions of a thorough survey in the adverse weather conditions of a notoriously cold spring took a heavy toll on the fifty-six-year-old.⁹⁴ He contracted an illness and returned to England on sick leave the following month, but did not recover. He died at St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex on 26 June 1917 and was buried near his pre-war home at Holyhead. The post-war history of the directorate he created recorded its appreciation of Holland’s influence on IWT in France in glowing terms:

Yet Holland’s influence upon the use of waterborne transport in the British war effort stretched far beyond France, as the sustained growth of Richborough as a home base for the IWT directorate in the second half of the war illustrated.

Every item that did not pass through the Channel ports freed up space on the French coast for cargo ships, and the development of Richborough allowed it to play a vital role in the BEF’s supply operations. By the end of 1916 the ‘mystery port’ in Kent had evolved from a concept into a working dock, and the cross-Channel ferry service championed by Holland had despatched 1,969 tons of goods to France. In the two years that followed ‘a fleet of sixty tugs and 160 craft delivered … 1,400,000 tons, of which 1 million were delivered at inland depots’, from a sprawling complex that employed almost 16,000 people.⁹⁶ As the BEF drove towards victory on the western front in October 1918 the cross-Channel barge service moved 25,000 tons per week.⁹⁷ Stores from Richborough were also sent to the other theatres of war in which British troops were employed, supplied to waterways and docks depots throughout Britain and even used for the construction of aerodromes across southern England.⁹⁸ Furthermore, the port was connected to the SECR’s main line and, from 10 February 1918, to the French rail network thanks to the installation of a train ferry service.

The establishment of the train ferry owed a great deal to civilian expertise. The idea for a cross-Channel train ferry service between Britain and France had been raised prior to the war, but it was given fresh impetus in late 1916 by Follett Holt, the former chief engineer and general manager of the Entre Ríos Railway in Argentina; Brodie Henderson, whose pre-war career in railway, dock and bridge construction spanned Africa and South America; and Alexander Gibb, the Scottish civil engineer responsible for the extension of Alexandra Docks at Newport and the construction of Rosyth naval base in Scotland. Holt had opened a train ferry service across the Paraná River in 1907, and drew upon that experience when he ‘made a strong appeal to the British government to install a system of train ferries’ across the Channel. The ferries allowed a train made up in any part of Britain to be transferred to a railhead in France without the need for transhipment at any point of its journey. ‘In this way, still further relief would be given to the shipping situation; there would be a greater saving of labour at the ports, while the distribution on the other side of the Channel would be much more effective than was possible under the barge system’ due to the relative abundance of railheads when compared to ‘canalheads’.⁹⁹ Instructions to proceed with the construction of train ferry termini at Richborough and Southampton were issued by the War Office on 17 January 1917, and sanction was received by the French authorities for the provision of French termini at Dunkirk, Calais and Dieppe within a month. Gibb was appointed chief engineer of ports construction and oversaw the building work required to prepare the landing facilities in France, while Henderson designed the ‘berths and accessory works’ associated with the termini.¹⁰⁰ The first train ferry arrived in France before the end of 1917, less than twelve months after the scheme had been authorized.¹⁰¹

The train ferry service handled a comparatively modest volume of traffic during the war. Between February and December 1918 just over 200,000 tons were conveyed to France aboard the three vessels constructed to ply the route – a pale shadow of the weekly average of 224,000 tons discharged from vessels at the French ports in May 1917 alone.¹⁰² However, the real value of the train ferry lay in the conveyance of railway materials and large, bulky items such as tanks and siege guns. A total of 164 locomotives and tenders, seventy narrow-gauge locomotives, 7,142 railway wagons, and 658 tanks were despatched to the western front aboard the train ferry.¹⁰³ ‘Originally’, Henniker noted in the official history, ‘tanks were sent across [the Channel] in special vessels, but after the ferry service started they were sent by rail, loaded on the specially-built tank wagons, direct from the testing centres at home to the tank depots in France’ without the need to be loaded and unloaded several times on their journey.¹⁰⁴ Similar advantages accrued in the transportation of the BEF’s heaviest guns, such as the 14-inch railway guns ‘Scene Shifter’ and ‘Bosche Buster’ that weighed almost 300 tons and measured eighty-seven feet each.¹⁰⁵ The latter of these guns made a particularly lethal contribution to the fighting in France. Under the watchful eye of King George V, a shell fired from ‘Bosche Buster’ on 8 August 1918 from a location near Marœuil scored a direct hit on the railway station at Douai some nineteen miles away. A German troop train was destroyed by the shell at a cost of 400 casualties, and the Germans were prevented from making full use of the railway for the remainder of the conflict.¹⁰⁶ Under war conditions such vast weapons could only have been transported overseas by train ferry. Therefore, the transport experts who conceived of, constructed, and operated the service between Britain and France had a deadly impact upon the conduct and character of industrial warfare.

Conclusion

The colossal scale of demands placed upon the BEF’s transportation services as the force’s presence in France and Flanders grew were such that IWT could only ever play a subsidiary role in their fulfilment. The relatively diminutive quantity and capacity of the IWT fleet in France, coupled with the reluctance of the French authorities to permit the establishment of new traffic routes and the position of Holland’s directorate as a scion of the recognized supply chain, constricted IWT’s growth in the year that followed its separation from the directorate of railway transport. The minor role afforded to the development of IWT on the western front in Henniker’s official history has combined with these factors to overshadow the evolution of a small, under-exploited, but effectively managed civil–military partnership at GHQ. He may not have been able to generate demands within the BEF for canal transport that kept pace with the IWT fleet’s growth, but Gerald Holland’s talents for organization and his technical expertise were recognized and respected by the British army’s senior administrative officers. The leaders of Britain’s war effort commenced upon engineering projects that involved considerable commitments of time, money and resources – both human and material – on the strength of Holland’s advocacy.

However, Holland’s proactive approach was insufficient to counteract the constraints caused by deficiencies in the command structure within the BEF’s transport hierarchy. Prior to Sir Eric Geddes’s arrival on the western front the abilities of Britain’s transport experts were, as a consequence of the compartmentalized approach to transportation within the QMG’s department, only applied to the solution of individual problems in solitary links of the supply chain. Throughout 1915 and 1916 there was neither the political desire to further embed civilian specialists in the military hierarchy, nor the operational necessity to conduct a wholesale replacement of the BEF’s administrative foundations. The result was a tendency towards a focus on tinkering with individual transport challenges rather than reconsideration of the infrastructure and systems that underpinned the British and allied war efforts.

The concentration on such localized responsibilities rendered individuals like Holland and Francis Dent unable to negotiate successfully with their French allies, who were attempting to do two things simultaneously: first, to balance demands for further assistance from the British with a desire to retain superiority within the coalition; and second, to prioritize the short-term possibilities of bringing the war to a swift conclusion rather than divert attention towards the development of a coherent long-term strategy for the maintenance of the allied forces on French soil. The effects of the continued lack of a formal alliance structure to guide and govern the expansion of Britain’s contribution to the land war in northern France – carefully omitted from the diplomatic post-war reports submitted by the officers of a victorious BEF – were evident in Holland’s exasperated diary entries during 1916, as his vision for the IWT directorate was subjected to the pressures of coalition warfare. The absence of a coordinated Franco-British consideration of the logistical requirements of a greatly expanded BEF, combined with a continued trend towards decentralization and self-sufficiency within the British force, impaired the development of a fully integrated, centrally directed transportation system on the western front.¹⁰⁷ This pattern endured until the ‘strain imposed by active operations’ highlighted the ‘non-appreciation of the real meaning of the service of transportation’ within the British army.¹⁰⁸ It did so astride the Somme in the summer of 1916, and it precipitated the reorganization of military transportation in France and beyond. The man chosen for this task, which dwarfed that taken on by Gerald Holland in December 1914, was another of Britain’s transport experts. Between August 1916 and May 1917 Sir Eric Geddes, the highest paid railway official in pre-war Britain, made a pivotal contribution to the British empire’s conduct of the First World War.

______________

¹ TNA, WO 95/56, branches and services. Director of inland water transport, memorandum number 1, 19 Sept. 1915, p. 1.

² TNA, WO 158/851, director general of transport: history of inland water transport, p. 2; WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 1, p. 2.

³ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 1/3/2, text of a lecture given by Robertson at Aldershot, Hampshire, on the military geography of western Europe, 1908, p. 14.

⁴ TNA, WO 33/615, report on roads, rivers and billeting in Belgium, volume ii, 1913.

⁵ A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937), p. 174.

⁶ TNA, WO 33/686, instructions for the IGC, Part V, sub-section 5.12.

⁷ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 126; C. W. Gwynn, ‘The administrative course at the London School of Economics’, Royal Engineers Journal, vi (1907), 229–35, at p. 232; LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/43, Cowans to Robertson, 14 Dec. 1914.

⁸ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 174.

⁹ BLSC, Bamji collection/PET, hospital barges in France: correspondence from a nursing sister, with the British Expeditionary Force, during World War I, p. 8.

¹⁰ BLSC, hospital barges in France, pp. 9, 10, 12, 16.

¹¹ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 34; A. C. Fewtrell, ‘The organisation of the transportation services of the British armies on the western front’, Minutes of Proceedings of the Engineering Association of New South Wales, xxxiv (1919), 153–72, at p. 171.

¹² TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 4; Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 173.

¹³ TNA, CAB 45/205, Lieutenant-Colonel G. E. Holland, information dictated by Major Bradbury.

¹⁴ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, information dictated by Major Bradbury.

¹⁵ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/43, Cowans to Robertson, 14 Dec. 1914.

¹⁶ TNA, WO 95/27, QMG war diary, the use of canals for supply purposes, 15 Dec. 1914.

¹⁷ TNA, WO 32/5162, formation and organisation of inland water transport in France and Belgium; establishment and appointments, Stuart-Wortley to Robertson, 12 Dec. 1914.

¹⁸ TNA, WO 32/5162, formation and organisation of IWT, note 6, 19 Dec. 1914; WO 158/851, History of IWT, p. 5.

¹⁹ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entry, 30 Dec. 1914.

²⁰ See IWM, private papers of Brigadier A. E. Hodgkin, Documents.12337, diary entry, 2 May 1916 for a vivid account of the extraction of a civilian barge from difficulties. Hodgkin’s narrative is accompanied by two sketches of the methods by which young children aboard the civilian barges were tethered to the vessel to prevent them from falling into the water. My thanks to Edward Spiers for alerting me to Brigadier Hodgkin’s diary.

²¹ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entry, 31 Dec. 1914.

²² TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 1, pp. 3–4.

²³ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entries, 20 and 23 Jan. 1915.

²⁴ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entries, 9 and 10 Jan. 1915.

²⁵ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 8–9; IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entry, 19 June 1916.

²⁶ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entry, 13 Jan. 1915; WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 9.

²⁷ TNA, WO 32/5162, formation and organisation of IWT, particulars of officers; CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entry, 20 Jan. 1915.

²⁸ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 19.

²⁹ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entry, 24 Apr. 1916.

³⁰ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entry, 19 June 1916.

³¹ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/43, Cowans to Robertson, 14 Dec. 1914; 2/2/44, Robertson to Cowans, 16 Dec. 1914; TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 8.

³² TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entries, 5 and 6 Jan. 1915.

³³ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, IWT Corps, British army France 1915. Summary of organization and development, pp. 6–7.

³⁴ TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 1, p. 9.

³⁵ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 6.

³⁶ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 10, 32.

³⁷ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 32.

³⁸ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 3.

³⁹ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entry, 28 June 1916.

⁴⁰ The complete list of duties devolved upon the IWT department upon its formation are given in TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT, war diary, memorandum 1, p. 4.

⁴¹ TNA, WO 32/5162, formation and organisation of IWT, memorandum – IWT, 4 Jan. 1915, p. 2.

⁴² TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 46.

⁴³ TNA, ZLIB 6/88, Midland Railway train control issued by Midland Rly, 1914, p. 62.

⁴⁴ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entry, 2 Feb. 1915; WO 95/27, QMG war diary, Maxwell to Kitchener, 12 March 1915; WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 61.

⁴⁵ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 45–46.

⁴⁶ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 22; ZLIB 6/88, Midland Railway train control, pp. 17–20.

⁴⁷ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 15.

⁴⁸ See, e.g., TNA, WO 95/27, QMG war diary, Maxwell to Robertson, 1 Nov. 1914.

⁴⁹ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 11–12, 14.

⁵⁰ LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/44, Robertson to Cowans, 16 Dec. 1914.

⁵¹ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 17.

⁵² TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 17–18; WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum number 2, 5 May 1916, p. 2.

⁵³ TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 1, p. 9.

⁵⁴ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 64; Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 94–101.

⁵⁵ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, diary entry, 25 Feb. 1915.

⁵⁶ TNA, WO 32/5162, formation and organization of IWT, Estimate of cost of craft now required for IWT, BEF, 13 Jan. 1915.

⁵⁷ TNA, WO 32/5162, formation and organization of IWT, conference on canal transport, 12 Jan. 1915, pp. 1–2; WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 1, p. 3.

⁵⁸ Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 175–76.

⁵⁹ TNA, WO 107/15, inspector-general of communications, Maxwell to Clayton, 25 March 1916.

⁶⁰ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 47–8; WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum no. 3, Dec. 1916, p. 2.

⁶¹ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 56.

⁶² J. K. Robertson, ‘Richborough military transportation depot’, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, ccx (1920), 156–207, at p. 157.

⁶³ Using 1916 as a base year, the Bank of England’s inflation calculator suggests a total of £35,845,130.77 (at 2017 prices) was spent upon construction at Richborough. See ‘Inflation calculator’, Bank of England <http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inflationtools/calculator/default.aspx> [accessed 23 Oct. 2018]; Robertson, ‘Richborough military transportation depot’, pp. 174–5, 185.

⁶⁴ University of Warwick Modern Records Centre (UWMRC), papers of Sir William Guy Granet, MSS. 191/3/3/51, memorandum to Sir Guy Granet, 19 Oct. 1916, p. 3; Robertson, ‘Richborough military transportation depot’, p. 188; Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 238. The specifications of the cross-Channel barges, designated as ‘&c. barges’, are given in TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 56–7.

⁶⁵ TNA, PRO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 3, p. 1.

⁶⁶ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, Appendix C 1A – Particulars of quays constructed and equipped by the IWT, p. 1.

⁶⁷ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 57.

⁶⁸ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, summary of organization and development, p. 11; WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 52.

⁶⁹ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 16.

⁷⁰ TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 2, p. 1. Sadly, Holland did not elaborate upon the reasons offered to justify the French authorities’ decision.

⁷¹ TNA, CAB 45/205, Holland, summary of organization and development, p. 11.

⁷² TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 3, p. 2.

⁷³ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, Appendix C 1A – Particulars of quays constructed, p. 1.

⁷⁴ J. H. F. Le Hénaff and H. Bornecque, Les chemins de fer français et la guerre (Paris, 1922), pp. 176–7.

⁷⁵ J. Armstrong, ‘The role of coastal shipping in UK transport: an estimate of comparative traffic movements in 1910’, Journal of Transport History, viii (1987), 164–78, at p. 176.

⁷⁶ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, pp. 23–4, 42.

⁷⁷ TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 3, pp. 3–4; WO 107/296, report of British armies, p. 27; WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 37.

⁷⁸ R. U. H. Buckland, ‘Experiences at the Fourth Army headquarters: organization and work of the R.E.’, Royal Engineers Journal, xli (1927), 385–413, at p. 389.

⁷⁹ TNA, WO 95/3970, headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, diary entry, 23 Aug. 1916.

⁸⁰ TNA, WO 95/3970, IGC war diary, Dawkins to Lloyd George, 16 Sept. 1916.

⁸¹ TNA, WO 95/3970, IGC war diary, 23 Aug. 1916; WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum 3, p. 3.

⁸² Buckland, ‘Experiences at the Fourth Army headquarters’, pp. 391–2; IWM, papers of Brigadier-General C. R. Woodroffe, 3/38/1/2, notes and reports (forwarded to QMG), June to Nov. 1916.

⁸³ IWM, Woodroffe papers, diary entry, 19 Aug. 1916.

⁸⁴ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entries, 8 and 9 Aug. 1916.

⁸⁵ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entry, 19 Aug. 1916.

⁸⁶ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entry, 28 June 1916.

⁸⁷ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entries, 6–10 March and 1 May 1916.

⁸⁸ I. M. Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (London, 1998), p. 86.

⁸⁹ IWM, Hodgkin papers, diary entry, 19 June 1916.

⁹⁰ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916, p. 2.

⁹¹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/102, memorandum by Sir Eric Geddes, 26 Nov. 1916, p. 23.

⁹² J. Higgins, Great War Railwaymen: Britain’s Railway Company Workers at War 1914–1918 (London, 2014), p. 237.

⁹³ TNA, WO 95/56, director of IWT war diary, memorandum number 4, 29 Apr. 1917, p. 4.

⁹⁴ A series of recollections from those who experienced the winter and spring of 1916–17 on the western front can be heard at IWM, ‘Winter 1916–17’, IWM Voices of the First World War <http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/podcasts/voices-of-the-first-world-war/podcast-25-winter-1916-17> [accessed 31 Aug. 2017].

⁹⁵ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 21.

⁹⁶ History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), v. 621; H. Best, ‘The Mystery Port’, Richborough (Blackpool, 1929), p. 9.

⁹⁷ S. D’A. Crookshank, ‘Transportation with the B.E.F.’, Royal Engineers Journal, xxxii (1920), 193–208, at p. 197.

⁹⁸ E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., London, 1921), ii. 1107.

⁹⁹ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 1109–10.

¹⁰⁰ A thorough account of the engineering challenges overcome in the development of the train ferry termini is given in F. O. Stanford, ‘The War Department cross-Channel train ferry’, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, ccx (1920), 208–38.

¹⁰¹ Best, ‘The Mystery Port’, pp. 29–30.

¹⁰² Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 1112; Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 238.

¹⁰³ ‘The directorate of inland waterways and docks’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 141–51, at p. 147; D. Chapman-Huston and O. Rutter, General Sir John Cowans, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.: the Quartermaster-General of the Great War (2 vols., London, 1924), ii. 219–20.

¹⁰⁴ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 241.

¹⁰⁵ Best, ‘The Mystery Port’, p. 56; Crookshank, ‘Transportation with the B.E.F.’, pp. 197–8.

¹⁰⁶ C. Hooper, Railways of the Great War (London, 2014), p. 104.

¹⁰⁷ On the encouragement of a decentralized administration within the BEF, see TNA, WO 95/74, director of supplies war diary, diary entry, 20 Dec. 1914; WO 95/27, QMG war diary, French to Kitchener, 18 Jan. 1915; WO 107/15, IGC, general correspondence, Maxwell to Cowans, 18 July 1915; LHCMA, Robertson papers, 2/2/63, Robertson to Cowans, 8 Jan. 1915.

¹⁰⁸ M. G. Taylor, ‘Land transportation in the late war’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal, lxvi (1921), 699–722, at p. 704.