4. Commitment and constraint I: the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway and the port of Boulogne

Britain’s commitment to the First World War increased substantially during 1915. On the western front alone the BEF more than trebled in size. Between January and October over 650,000 men were added to the ration strength in France and Flanders, as the BEF rapidly grew into ‘a force outside the bounds of British tradition and experience’. To maintain the growing requirements for food, fodder, munitions, equipment and raw materials generated by the BEF – alongside the supply of Britain’s forces operating on the fringes of Europe and beyond – the British army and state ‘needed a sound, coherent support infrastructure’.¹ Yet in the historiography of the British war experience of 1915 – dominated by the dismal failure of the Gallipoli campaign, General Charles Townshend’s retreat to Kut Al Amara, the inconclusive results of the BEF’s operations at Neuve Chapelle and Loos and the ongoing transformation of Kitchener’s volunteers into the citizen army that fought the battle of the Somme – the administrative achievement that ensured Britain’s vast manpower and resource commitments were not accompanied by starvation has been eclipsed. The dominant narrative centres upon shortages and insufficiency, the so-called shells scandal that underlined the soldiers’ inability to prosecute the war effort and engendered the establishment of the Ministry of Munitions. In the words of its first minister, David Lloyd George, the ‘war lords’ were ‘surly, suspicious, and hostile’ towards the new ministry – a by-product of the ‘ingrained distrust, misunderstanding and contempt of all businessmen … which was traditionally prevalent in the Services’.²

This chapter builds upon the previous, and demonstrates how the British army actively sought out and engaged with civilian specialists during this year of rapid growth. It was aware of the potential benefits to be gained from the application of civilian knowledge to the challenges of the modern battlefield, and attempted to use non-military skills to improve the efficiency of the working methods employed upon its lines of communications. However, as Spencer Jones argued, in 1915 the BEF ‘was thrust into a style of warfare for which it was conceptually and materially ill-prepared’.³ The British army – and the nation as a whole – had yet to comprehend the magnitude of the war in which it had become embedded by 1915, and failed to appreciate the scale and character of the commitment that would ultimately be required to successfully prosecute it. ‘The stationary character of the warfare of the first two years’, the QMG’s post-war report stated, ‘placed no undue strain upon the QMG’s branch’ to maintain communications between the coast and the front.⁴ The quantities of material demanded by front line commanders had not yet attained sufficient scale to severely tax the transportation system behind the growing BEF. Consequently, the early experiments in the application of Britain’s transport experts to the logistical challenges of the First World War were governed by localized responses to short-term issues rather than a clear understanding of the Franco-British coalition’s long-term priorities.

The wartime contribution of Francis Dent, general manager of the SECR, exemplifies the British approach to transportation during 1915. Dent’s experience of the railway industry and his pre-war working relationship with the army made him an exceptionally useful figure, a man upon whom the government and military could rely to provide specialist technical guidance and leadership on a range of organizational problems. As this chapter illustrates, his personal war effort was diverse in subject and global in scope. Yet Dent’s influence over the BEF’s transportation operations in France was restricted by three factors: a British army that had not accepted that its governing structures were ill-suited to the type of conflict that emerged from the stalemate of 1914; a French army and state unwilling to relinquish command over the foreign forces engaged on its soil; and his own insufficient understanding of the scale and complexities inherent in modern military logistics. Taken together, these constraints severely curtailed the influence that a man of Francis Dent’s undoubted abilities was able to have over the direction and character of the war prior to the battle of the Somme.

Creating capacity at the Bassin Loubet

The port space available on the French Channel coast played a fundamental role in determining the upper limits of the British force that could be deployed on the western front during the First World War. The size and composition of modern armies – made up of millions of men and horses with constant demands for food and fodder, and supported by complex machinery dependent upon manufactured spare parts and a steady supply of raw materials – demanded that the belligerents provided their forces with reliable connections between centres of industrial production and the theatres of military operations. In simple terms, the amount of port space that could be occupied and worked efficiently by the allies had a direct correlation to the scale of war effort that the Franco-British coalition could sustain between 1914 and 1918. The BEF was not the only body reliant upon the Channel ports, a factor that added a layer of inter-allied interest in the use of the space. Both the French and Belgian armies drew supplies from the northern French coast, and the demand for imports was exacerbated by the loss of much of France’s industrial heartland to the Germans at the outset of the war. The territory relinquished by the retiring allied forces left the French increasingly dependent upon Britain for deliveries of coal, as the area responsible for approximately three-quarters of France’s coal and coke production was directly affected by the German advance.⁵ Vast quantities of the fuel were necessary for the heating of homes, the powering of factories and the operation of the railways between the coast and the front line. By November 1914 a ‘coal famine’ had begun to emerge in France.⁶

Deliberations over the use of Dunkirk illustrate the reality of the Franco-British relationship after the outbreak of war and the constraints placed upon the BEF by its hosts. As early as December 1914 the British requested access to Dunkirk, both to shorten the BEF’s lines of communications and to assist with the supply of the troops expected to arrive in 1915. The IGC, Ronald Maxwell, projected – based upon the requirements of a British force that comprised thirty infantry divisions and six cavalry divisions – that the BEF needed sufficient port space to deal with the supplies necessary to feed and equip 706,200 men and 244,200 horses. He was confident that a total of 350,000 men and 120,000 horses could be fed through the southern ports of Le Havre and Rouen, designated as group ‘A’. However, it was impossible for him to calculate the capacity of group ‘B’ – Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk – until a detailed reconnaissance of Calais and Dunkirk had taken place. Maxwell had assembled a committee of British officers to undertake the investigation, but felt it expedient to request the company of a French officer. He wrote to the QMG Sir William Robertson on 1 December that ‘it would be of great assistance to the officers to have some idea of what may be expected to be the attitude of [GQG] in connection with the details of this subject’.⁷ The response was unequivocal. Joffre refused to authorize the mission, telling Robertson that he preferred to await developments on other fronts before discussing the allocation of port space behind the western front.⁸ Consequently, the BEF did not gain access to Calais until April 1915 while Dunkirk’s principal contribution to the British war effort was as a seaplane rather than supply base.

Dunkirk was a ‘sore point’ in inter-allied relations throughout 1915 and beyond, which consistently reinforced the French authorities’ primacy in the Franco-British coalition. In January 1915 Maxwell reiterated the importance of the port to the successful development of a mass army in France, but was offered facilities at Cherbourg instead. Joffre rebuffed Kitchener’s request for ten British ships to be accommodated at Dunkirk two months later with a claim that the port was part of the French front line ‘and any British installation would interfere with its defence’. Maxwell made a further demand for port space at Dunkirk prior to the battle of the Somme, warning the French that ‘imports of ammunition for the battle could not be processed in sufficiently large amounts’ unless the British were provided with more berths by their hosts. Once again Joffre held firm, and instructed the British to manage better their existing resources – a refrain commonly repeated in inter-allied discussions before November 1918.⁹

Alongside French reluctance to relinquish berths, the space available for the BEF’s imports was further limited both by the volume of traffic leaving continental Europe and the extent of the German occupation of Belgium. As the storm clouds gathered and burst in early August 1914 thousands of British and American tourists, together with ‘a certain number of well-to-do Belgians’, had travelled across the Channel from Ostend and Antwerp. As the front line swept ever farther across Belgian soil, thousands of desperate refugees descended on the ports in search of passage to England on the Great Eastern Railway’s ferries. The link between the Belgian ports and Britain did not last for long. The final allied craft, which included three vessels owned by the SECR, departed Ostend on 14 October – five days after the multinational force sent to defend Antwerp had evacuated the city. While a ‘fairly constant stream’ of Belgians travelled to Britain from the neutral Netherlands over the course of the war, the only route available to those driven west in the upheaval of 1914–15 was via Calais. Consequently, that port was rendered inaccessible to BEF supply ships for the entirety of the war’s first winter by the incessant stream of human traffic seeking passage to England.¹⁰

The quantity of refugees, the higher-than-anticipated number of casualties that required evacuation to hospitals in Britain and the pace of the German advance combined to dislocate the pre-war arrangements agreed by the French and British authorities. The BEF’s original intention had been to abandon the port of Boulogne – alongside Rouen and Le Havre one of the three ports utilized for the disembarkation of troops and supplies during the concentration period – on the sixteenth day of mobilization. Yet orders for the evacuation of Boulogne were not issued until 10 p.m. on 25 August, and only then as a precaution ‘owing to the rapid advance of the enemy’. By 2 a.m. on the 27th, despite a ‘continuous downpour of rain’, all the stores save for small quantities of hay and wood had been loaded onto vessels and removed from the port.¹¹ After the German advance had been halted and their troops thrown into a retreat of their own following the battle of the Marne, Boulogne was reinstated as a port of entry for allied supplies on 14 October. Sir Percy Girouard visited the port during his investigation of the BEF’s transport organization the following week, and ‘thoroughly [examined] its capacity as an army base’.¹² His report succinctly concluded that the port was ‘in a somewhat disorganised condition’.¹³ The director of supplies’ post-war report was more vivid: it described Boulogne’s north quay as comprising ‘one chaotic heap of coal, manure, discarded engineering fittings, and material originally intended for the completion of the harbour’ upon the BEF’s re-entry to the port.¹⁴

Over the following weeks the situation at Boulogne and the BEF’s other base ports deteriorated. The docks possessed insufficient cranes to cope with the task of unloading military supplies for the growing force, and lacked covered accommodation under which to shelter items such as hay and oats from the deteriorating weather.¹⁵ Major Moore of the ASC complained to the base commandant at Rouen in late November that only one crane had been available for the unloading of two vessels, a situation that made it ‘necessary to man handle a lot of cargo, which in these times of pressure is an absolute waste of labour’.¹⁶ Land for the expansion of sidings, the erection of storage accommodation and the construction of additional harbour space was available at Boulogne, and – acting under the assumption that the BEF’s residence at the port was likely to be far longer than that envisaged before the war – Maxwell had a scheme for extension work at the Bassin Loubet (one of two docking basins at the port) prepared and submitted to GHQ. Attached to the plan was a letter, in which Maxwell described the proposed works as ‘urgent’ and ‘vital’ to the BEF’s ability to develop Boulogne as an effective base.¹⁷

However urgent and vital, such projects were inevitably going to be time-consuming, expensive and reliant upon the skilled and unskilled labour of thousands of workers. As the French army had suffered colossal losses in the war’s opening encounters – almost one million French soldiers became casualties before the end of 1914 – the coalition’s senior partner was in no position to provide the manpower necessary to bring large-scale engineering projects into being. Yet while GQG granted the British permission to construct additional railway sidings at the Bassin Loubet to improve Boulogne’s capacity as a port, the BEF also lacked sufficient spare manpower to carry out the work.¹⁸ The onset of winter had begun to take its toll on the transport network behind the front line, and a few days earlier the BEF’s senior engineer had written to Lord Kitchener to complain about the paucity of men available to complete the extensive repairs required on the French road network.¹⁹ Both Kitchener and Sir John French were reluctant to ‘despatch [a] gang of navvies’ from Britain to repair the French roads, but the former was happy to allow the REC to identify a suitable authority to undertake the engineering works at Boulogne.²⁰

Percy Tempest, the SECR’s chief engineer, was particularly suited for the role. Tempest had been a major in the ERSC since March 1902, was well regarded within the railway industry for having upgraded the SECR’s outdated network, and was thoroughly acquainted with the French railways. In the opening months of the conflict Tempest had acted as an agent for the Chemins de Fer du Nord and Belgian State railways. In this role he had overseen the purchase and inspection of railway materials destined for the reconstruction of lines destroyed by the Germans. The allies’ failure to liberate much of the conquered territory meant that such work was pursued in vain, but the emergence of the Bassin Loubet construction project provided Tempest with an opportunity to directly improve the transport infrastructure that supported the coalition’s military efforts. He accepted the REC’s offer to direct the work and ‘started at once on the necessary plans and preparations’.²¹

Between December 1914 and September 1916 – when the work was finally completed – the SECR provided all the tools, materials, labour and supervisory staff required for the construction of sidings, loading platforms, roads and railways, storehouses and workshops at Boulogne. The scheme initially involved the removal, via a specially constructed light railway, of 34,000 cubic yards of soil to a dumping ground three-quarters of a mile along the coast. Then, before the sidings and roads could be laid, an extensive drainage system comprising almost three miles of pipe and 143 manholes, gullies and grids was installed. Even so, the nature of the soil caused extreme difficulties during the construction of the Bassin Loubet’s 56,774 square yards of new storage space, 1,317 yards of roads and 17,644 yards of new and replacement sidings. A 700-foot-long retaining wall was also erected by the labourers, nine-tenths of whom were sent from England specifically to work on the project.²²

Tempest’s input considerably increased Boulogne’s value to the BEF as a base. Between November 1914 and October 1916, the month before the work had begun and the month after it had been completed, the tonnage despatched by rail per month from Boulogne rose from 12,357 tons to 57,590 – an increase of 366 per cent (see Figure 4.1). The number of trucks used within the port underwent a correspondingly large increase during the same period, from 1,737 to 7,918. In the following spring the material handled through Boulogne reached a wartime peak of 70,506 tons, for which 9,202 trucks were required. From April 1917 onwards, Boulogne was responsible for issuing the rations to a monthly average of over half a million men per day, except in March 1918 when the number dipped to 483,000 in the wake of the German spring offensive. The ‘temporary’ port – expected to be a component of the British war effort for just sixteen days in August 1914 – remained a crucial link in the army’s supply chain for the duration of the war. Between 14 October 1914 and December 1918 the port handled 2,366,919 tons.

Figure 4.1. Monthly tonnage record and average daily issue of men’s rations from the port of Boulogne, 1914–18.

Note: The sharp decrease in Boulogne’s output in January 1917 was caused by the accidental stranding of the SS Araby in the mouth of the port on 23 December 1916. The port was closed for twenty-seven days while the craft was salvaged, and only reopened in full on 18 January 1917.
Source: TNA, WO 158/2, director of supplies: British armies in France and Flanders pt. I, pp. 151–2.

Through its improvement of the facilities available for the storage and movement of goods in the Bassin Loubet, the SECR played a significant role in permitting the BEF’s colossal expansion after 1914. However, the company’s contribution to events at Boulogne was not restricted to the provision of labour, materials and construction expertise. In mid December 1914 Tempest was joined at the port by the SECR’s general manager, Francis Dent. Alongside submitting Tempest’s estimates for the costs and duration of the projected works in the Bassin Loubet, Dent observed to the director of supplies that the cramped space and risks of exposure at Boulogne were likely to cause heavy losses to the BEF’s stocks of oats and forage in the near future.²³ Rather than being dismissed out of hand by an intransigent and obstinate military command, the suggestion Dent went on to make on 11 December led to the conduct of a civil–military experiment at Boulogne that ran for much of the following year.

As with every other area of the French transport network, the pre-war agreement between the allied authorities made no provision for the British to acquire administrative responsibilities at the ports after the outbreak of war.²⁴ In his report of October 1914, Girouard emphasized that an ‘arrangement with the French Government whereby they will allow us to organise bases, allocated to our use, in our own way and with our own men’ was ‘essential’.²⁵ The SECR’s peacetime operation of the Folkestone– Boulogne ferry service meant that the company had offices and staff attached to the French port, and the company’s employees at Boulogne had already been placed at the army’s disposal before Tempest and Dent arrived in France. However, as ‘full use’ had not been made of the civilian manpower by the military authorities, the DRT suggested in November 1914 that the SECR might take over supervisory responsibilities within the Bassin Loubet with an ‘adjoint’ from the army as a liaison.²⁶

The BEF was clearly receptive to the idea of securing civilian assistance, as Colonel Twiss’s suggestion was by no means an isolated example within the force’s administrative echelon. A month earlier the director of supplies, Major-General Frederick Clayton, had raised the possibility of deploying civilians on the BEF’s lines of communications. He argued that the army could benefit from the experience of moving goods around Britain and across the world in a timely fashion that employees of the railway companies and large department stores possessed. Clayton had served on the advisory board of the LSE’s ‘Mackindergarten’ course before the war, and was fully aware of the applicability of civilian methods to military requirements. He believed that suitably talented men could be used in ‘essentially the same roles in France as they had filled with their civilian firms in Britain’, thereby releasing trained soldiers for duties on the front line.²⁷ So when Francis Dent offered to ‘study the situation on the spot’ at Boulogne for a fortnight with a view to improving efficiency in the Bassin Loubet, Clayton gratefully accepted the proposal.

The application of civilian expertise: the Dent scheme

The so-called Dent scheme has garnered little attention in previous accounts of the BEF’s logistical organization.²⁸ This is not merely a historiographical omission. Such was the perceived inconsequence of the scheme that the directorate of supplies, Dent’s first point of contact within the army with regards to the Bassin Loubet, made no reference to either the individual or the experiment in its post-war report.²⁹ Ian M. Brown, despite noting that the experiment ‘had [both] the potential to radically alter the way in which the BEF operated [the] port’ and to rework the balance between civilian and military labour behind the lines, offered sparse coverage of events at the Bassin Loubet in 1915 in his published work.³⁰ The official history provided an even briefer assessment. Henniker’s conclusion that ‘it was [considered] inadvisable’ to entrust the work of operating the port to ‘civilian management and labour’ has been unquestioningly reproduced in subsequent texts.³¹ Yet the implementation of the Dent scheme at the Bassin Loubet merits reconsideration, as it underlines the character of the assistance that Britain’s transport experts could provide to the BEF in the first half of the war and the constraints applied to that support by factors present on either side of the Franco-British divide.

Francis Dent’s pre-war career, like that of his SECR colleague Percy Tempest, made him a suitable candidate for the task of solving the problems he identified at Boulogne. Born in 1866, Dent had begun his career in the railway industry at the age of seventeen. By August 1914 he had risen from a junior role in the general manager’s office of the LNWR, through appointments in the goods traffic departments of the LNWR and SECR, to the position of general manager of the latter in 1911. The SECR’s network covered the Channel ports at Folkestone and Dover as well as the prominent military sites of Woolwich and Chatham. Therefore, the company was an integral component of the British railways’ preparations for war, and acted as the secretary railway to the army’s eastern command in the development of the WF scheme. Unsurprisingly, given the line’s importance to the mobilization process, Dent both obtained a commission into the ERSC upon his appointment as general manager of the SECR and was appointed a member of the REC upon its formation in November 1912.

In addition to his direct contact with the military, Dent was also able to bring previous experience to bear upon the task at Boulogne – where restricted space made the employment of more efficient working practices the only immediately available solution to the BEF’s problems. In 1901 he had been appointed as goods traffic superintendent for the LNWR’s Metropolitan district. At that time the company was faced by increasing congestion at Broad Street Station. Situated at the heart of the financial district, Broad Street was the third busiest station in turn-of-the-century London – the destination for thousands of commuters entering the capital each morning and a vital freight hub linking the Thames dockyards with industrial Birmingham. The LNWR’s board feared that a significant expansion to the station was required in order to help it cope with the increased volume of traffic expected to pass through Broad Street in the future, a costly venture in such a heavily built-up urban environment. However, through a reorganization of working methods in the station, the establishment of a bonus payment system and his ‘personal tact and influence’, Dent accelerated the turnaround of goods within Broad Street to such an extent that ‘the scheme for the enlargement of the station … was abandoned’.³² By August 1914 Francis Dent was a highly experienced professional manager with an established talent for the promotion of efficient working methods and a track record of success.

Furthermore, by the time he arrived at the Bassin Loubet in December, Dent had already made numerous contributions to the nascent British war effort. His service in the conflict’s opening months encapsulates the uncoordinated nature of Britain’s response to the multitude of challenges thrown up by its increasing involvement in the war, and indicates the transferability – from civilian to military applications – of the skills possessed by those who managed the nation’s largest transport enterprises. In late July he was called to London to oversee the SECR’s share of the armed forces’ mobilization procedure alongside his colleagues on the REC, before he turned his attentions to the provision of ambulance trains for the wounded soldiers who required evacuation from the theatre of combat. The volume of casualties in the early weeks of the war, particularly among the troops of the French army engaged in the battle of the Frontiers, rapidly outstripped the capacity of the ambulance trains available for service on the western front. The War Office requested that the REC despatch an ambulance train to France for the BEF’s use at the end of September 1914. Prior to its shipment Dent accompanied the LNWR’s carriage superintendent and the Great Eastern Railway’s chief mechanical engineer on a visit to France, where they discussed the technical requirements for ambulance trains with representatives of the Chemins de Fer du Nord. The group ascertained that no insurmountable obstructions existed between the rails and loading gauges used in France and Britain, and the LNWR immediately began work on an ambulance train for use on the French railways. Just three weeks after the REC had received the War Office’s request vehicles were on their way to the western front.³³

By December, when the casualties of First Ypres had been added to the lists of the wounded, further demands for bespoke vehicles to serve on the western front had been forwarded to the REC by the War Office. In response, and in acknowledgement that periodic requests for ambulance vehicles were likely to recur in the future, Dent took the chair of the REC’s ambulance trains for the continent sub-committee. The sub-committee brought together representatives both of the railway industry and the army. From the former, Dent was accompanied by William Forbes, general manager of the LBSCR, and representatives of the engineering departments of twelve of Britain’s largest railway companies. From the latter, to ensure the suitability of the trains from both technical and medical points of view, the sub-committee received the input of professional soldiers from the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and the military railway authorities from France and Britain. In fact, the ambulance trains for the continent sub-committee provided the reason for Dent’s visit to Boulogne in December 1914. He attended a meeting at the port with Major Burke of the RAMC, at which they discussed the type of train best suited to wartime conditions and conferred with representatives of the Red Cross on financial and medical matters.³⁴ The result of this ‘complete coordination’ was the standardized ambulance train, which evolved under Dent’s direction and combined the ‘wisdom of experience’ possessed by the various stakeholders invested in the production of effective and useful carriages over the course of the conflict.³⁵

Further to his concern for the comfort of wounded soldiers, Dent participated in two other prominent REC sub-committees from October 1914 onwards. In the first he was responsible for the recruitment of officers and men for what became the ROD; in the second, he took charge of a sub-committee established to identify and organize the Belgian railwaymen who had found refuge in Britain since the start of the war. The Belgian railways refugee sub-committee comprised representatives of four other British railway companies, Major Leggett of the war refugees committee and a senior figure from the Belgian State Railways. As Edwin Pratt noted, ‘it was a matter of military as well as of economic importance’ that the Belgian railway experts ‘should be readily available whenever the need for them arose, either during the course of the war or afterwards’. However, the Belgian railwaymen, ‘in common with the other refugees [had] been allocated where suitable hospitality was available, so that while some found themselves in seaside resorts or country villages where no railway work could be provided for them, others were traced as far away as Tipperary or the North of Scotland’. The sub-committee dealt with 3,681 Belgian railwaymen during the war, 2,801 of whom lived in Great Britain and Ireland as refugees. They found employment in Britain for 1,755 of them, either on the British railways or – for those such as clerks and stationmasters who lacked suitable language skills – in the munitions factories.³⁶

Dent set his existing commitments aside over Christmas 1914 to spend time at Boulogne observing operations. In a letter to Sir John Cowans he stated that:

To ensure that proper use was made of Boulogne, Dent proposed that the SECR should be given responsibility for the operation of all areas of the port reserved for the BEF’s use – replacing the existing system whereby the naval staff discharged vessels onto the quayside and the army looked after the onward transport or storage of the goods.³⁸ His offer entailed the railway company taking over the ‘work of discharging ships, stacking supplies and loading trains, [and] providing all the personnel’ for these tasks in place of the BEF’s current reliance on an ever-dwindling supply of French labourers.³⁹ There was, Dent wrote, ‘nothing in the way of checking or loading that would not be easy enough for a railway checker to perform’ at the Bassin Loubet.⁴⁰ The object of the basin in peacetime was ‘to ensure quick transit between steamer and train. The hangars were laid out with a view to easy checking and customs examination’, and in many cases were supplied during the war by the same railway steamers that operated the routes in peacetime. Therefore, the task of discharging ships quickly, loading trains for the front and stacking supplies for later despatch was almost identical to the work undertaken at the railway ports under the SECR’s control. In fact, Dent claimed, ‘the military supplies business [was] simpler than ordinary trade practices’ as most of the BEF’s supplies arrived in bulk and did not require lengthy customs examinations upon arrival in France.⁴¹

Dent believed that a number of factors combined to retard the efficiency of operations at Boulogne in late 1914. Alongside the ‘want of railway accommodation for internal movement’ and the ‘rough and unfinished state of parts of the yard’ that Tempest’s construction work was set to remedy, Dent considered the mixture of French, Belgian and British labour at the port, the import of huge reserves of forage before there was suitable covered accommodation available and the presence of en-cas mobile trains as the predominant causes of delay at Boulogne. His proposed solution to these issues involved on the one hand the separation of the various nationalities of labour at the port – the British assigned responsibility for the stacking of goods and other duties in the sheds, while the French and Belgians merely handled them – and on the other hand the establishment of a system whereby the majority of supplies were transferred direct from ship to rail upon arrival in France. Items required at the front urgently could be sent forward immediately, while those not considered to be priorities could be shifted to storage sites away from the docks. This would ensure that the quayside remained free of obstructions that complicated, and inevitably slowed down, the discharge of arriving ships. Dent claimed that if these problems could be rectified the Bassin Loubet was capable of handling over 5,000 tons per day.⁴² (The true capacity of the Bassin Loubet, in Dent’s opinion, was 7,000 tons per day. The lower estimate given in his memorandum reflected the nature of the labour available for work in the port, which consisted principally of ‘boys and men not of military age’.)

With the BEF’s projected demands for food alone set to reach 4,400 tons per day once the first troops of Kitchener’s armies arrived on the western front, Dent’s estimates were understandably appealing to the officers tasked with keeping the BEF fed and equipped.⁴³ However, Clayton was sceptical that Dent’s projected figures could be achieved at Boulogne and had reservations over the practicability of the railwayman’s proposed quick transit scheme. A central tenet of Dent’s plan to maximize throughput at the Bassin Loubet involved loading cargo in Britain so that ‘each ship should have approximately sufficient of everything to make the greater part of one or more supply trains’. Under such an arrangement, the trains for the front line could be made up directly from the quayside – with any surplus stocks on each ship or perishable items that had to be regularly turned over placed in systematized stores. The benefit of the proposal lay in the fact that it would involve comparatively less double-handling than the extant system in which ships were unloaded, the goods moved from the quayside for storage elsewhere in the harbour and then loaded onto rail at a later date.⁴⁴

Dent’s quick transit system was ideal in terms of operational efficiency, but unfeasible as a solution for the requirements of an industrial army with a multitude of demands. Clayton’s response to Dent’s memorandum illustrated the civilian’s under appreciation of the difficulties faced by the military authorities between 1914 and 1918.⁴⁵ In response to Dent’s criticism that forage had been imported into France before sufficient accommodation was available for it, the director of supplies pointed out sardonically that ‘this I am afraid is one of the necessities of war; the Germans would not wait until we had everything in readiness’.⁴⁶ Yet the German army was not the only factor that had made Clayton’s life difficult. The sustenance of the BEF’s troops and machines depended upon a range of commodities – to prevent the risk of contamination, items such as petrol and lubricating oils were not transported on the same vessels as food. Nor was the food consumed by the BEF entirely despatched from Britain. Meat was taken from cold storage ships berthed at Boulogne, while bread was baked in vast quantities at bakeries near the port and transported to the railway by lorry. The volumes of the other items in the soldiers’ diet were ‘trifling’ in comparison to these two staple foodstuffs. Therefore, neither of the integral components of the troops’ daily rations were going to be on board the ships that were central to Dent’s concept. In addition, the type of food sent forward was frequently altered: ‘We change from fresh meat to preserved and then to meat and vegetable rations; change bacon for butter and give the soldier as much variety as possible’, Clayton noted. In short, the director of supplies summarized that it was impossible to ‘pack a train for any formation straight from the ship except as regards hay and oats’.

Yet despite his detailed criticisms of Dent’s proposals, Clayton was sufficiently amenable to the idea of greater civilian involvement in the war effort – at this stage of the conflict at least – to encourage further discussion of the scheme. As he recognized at the end of his reply to the SECR’s general manager, ‘after all, we are all out for the same object – the good of the country and to end the war as speedily as possible, so if you can help in this the Army will be grateful to you’.⁴⁷ Both Clayton and Robertson saw the potential benefits of transferring responsibility for the operation of Boulogne to the SECR. Consequently, a committee was formed to amend and improve Dent’s outline – the membership of which illustrates the scale of the organization required to supply a modern army in the field. Officers from the directorate of supplies (Clayton took the chair), the directorate of works and the directorate of ordnance services joined the principal naval transport officer in the committee’s deliberations.⁴⁸ Both the naval and military elements saw an ‘advantage’ in the centralization of responsibility at Boulogne, and indicated their willingness to accept the SECR’s offer subject to approval from GHQ, the War Office and – as the BEF’s hosts and partner – the French authorities. Even Dent’s subsequent downward revision of the Bassin Loubet’s capacity from 5,000 tons per day to 3,536 tons per day did not alter the committee’s resolve.⁴⁹ Fred West, the goods superintendent of the SECR’s London district, was instructed to ‘ascertain the system of work of the various departments and to discuss various points with the officers in charge’ following the committee’s first meeting.⁵⁰

West’s report was a combination of observations on the existing situation at Boulogne and recommendations to help the BEF ‘obtain the maximum amount of efficiency and economy’ in the future.⁵¹ His comments were circulated ahead of the second meeting of Clayton’s committee, at which Dent played a key role. The civilian fielded questions from the military and naval officers, and elaborated upon his vision of the SECR’s position within the new organization.⁵² The members unanimously agreed that the navy, due to their ignorance of the landside procedures for the removal of goods from the quayside, should cede responsibility for the work of discharging ships to the port’s ‘single authority’.⁵³

Multiple factors combined to recommend the SECR as a suitable organization to take on the duties of the ‘single authority’ at the Bassin Loubet. The company already had experience in the operation of railway ports, a working understanding of the port of Boulogne and a pre-existing working relationship with the Chemins de Fer du Nord. In addition, the company had a strong presence at the port – both in terms of the men placed at the army’s disposal during the autumn and those connected with Tempest’s engineering works – and Dent had demonstrated an evident willingness to participate in the experiment.⁵⁴ A request for permission to change the procedure at the port was duly despatched to the War Office in early February, but despite persistent appeals from Clayton ratification from London was inexorably slow to arrive. The SECR was finally authorized to take over operations within the Bassin Loubet on 17 March – a delay that effectively put the new system into stasis for six weeks, after which further time was required for Dent to ‘collect his own staff’ for work in the port, for those men to ‘observe the routine working of a [military] port’ and for arrangements to be finalized between the SECR and the French rail authorities.⁵⁵ Following discussions between Dent, the SECR and representatives of the commission regulatrice, the British railway company was eventually authorized to take over ‘all the work of shunting, marshalling and the making up of trains in the Bassin Loubet’ from 25 April 1915.⁵⁶

The delays that postponed the company’s takeover of operations at Boulogne meant that the SECR inherited a port that had experienced increasing congestion during the spring. The demands for material to support the offensive at Neuve Chapelle in March overloaded the Channel ports’ capacity, as the War Office had responded to the unprecedented scale of the fighting by despatching vessels in the direction of the battlefield as swiftly as possible. Ships were arriving in France without sufficient intervals to allow for one ship to be unloaded and cleared from the quay before the next arrived. As highlighted in a post-war article by the shipping expert Charles Ernest Fayle, the significant advantage in maritime carrying capacity available to the allies was of little value if that capacity was inefficiently utilized:

Ships in port awaiting discharge, or delayed due to inefficiencies in the discharging process, could not quickly return to their port of origin to acquire their next cargo.

Poor communications between the ports of origin and those on the French coast hampered operations at the Bassin Loubet. The staff at Boulogne, both before and after the SECR took over, were frequently left with incomplete information as to the contents of incoming ships. On 13 March the SS Juno set out for the port behind an advanced notification from Britain that informed operators at Boulogne only that the ship contained ‘general cargo’.⁵⁸ With limited crane facilities available it was imperative that the port authorities received detailed prior notice of the composition of each ship’s contents, so that they could be directed to the berth best suited to their discharge immediately upon arrival. Without such information, Clayton warned, the supply services could not guarantee that supplies required urgently at the front could be processed through the port in a timely fashion.⁵⁹ To alleviate the communications difficulties between the Bassin Loubet and Britain, Dent recommended that a bespoke telephone connection be installed to link Boulogne with the SECR’s offices in London, Dover, Folkestone, Calais and Dunkirk. Precise information as to the contents of each ship could be received by telephone prior to the vessel’s arrival, allowing staff to direct it to the most suitable berth and arrange for any specialist equipment to be provided to the stevedores responsible for its discharge.⁶⁰

The responses to Dent’s suggestion illustrate the limitations of the Franco-British coalition. The War Office in London raised no objections to a scheme with an obvious benefit to the BEF’s supply operations behind the western front. However, although the BEF had been granted ‘every latitude’ for the improvement of local facilities within the zones populated by its fighting forces during the war, projects that included the installation of more permanent equipment also had to be signed off by the French authorities.⁶¹ The provision of telephone facilities for the SECR’s use was, somewhat unsurprisingly, clearly far from the top of GQG’s list of priorities. By the end of October 1915 Clayton had received no decision on the request. He had believed all along that the French were ‘unlikely’ to accede to Dent’s wish but – following an appeal to ‘badger’ Joffre’s staff – a further enquiry was made, which generated a firm refusal from the French in early November.⁶² The potential benefits of the telephone line for the prosecution of the allied war effort were acknowledged by the French authorities. However, the French government realized that the system’s installation would have conferred significant competitive advantages to the SECR after the war. Combined with a perception among French authorities at the port that a ‘custom’ of unauthorized telephone use had ‘grown up’ in the SECR’s offices at Boulogne over the course of 1915, the BEF’s hosts asserted that the existing telephone facilities – if used properly – were adequate for British requirements.⁶³

The disagreement between the French authorities and Britain’s civilian specialists may appear superficial, but the ‘telephones incident’ underscores the instability of Franco-British relations during the First World War. Throughout the conflict French and British authorities were involved in a complex web of negotiations, to which were added the voices of Belgians, Italians, Americans and other allies as the war progressed. Political and military leaders discussed and sought conciliation in conference rooms across Europe, yet the post-war economic and strategic concerns of the coalition’s individual components provided an underlying context that militated against absolute cooperation. Even the provision of a unified command in the person of General Ferdinand Foch in the latter months of the war did not eradicate the preponderance of national interests and underlying suspicions. A Franco-British disagreement over who should provide the manpower and materials required for the repair of Dunkirk continued until the armistice came into force. Both the British army and the Admiralty acknowledged privately that the port was a more suitable candidate for improvement than any of the others that served the BEF in October 1918, but the then QMG Travers Clarke was unable to ignore misgivings that the French wanted to see Dunkirk repaired for commercial reasons. Clarke stated baldly in the immediate aftermath of the conflict that ‘unless absolutely demanded by the interests of victory, it was no part of our military or national duty to enlarge or modernize the equipment of foreign ports for after-the-war trade’.⁶⁴

The war aims of France and Britain in western Europe – despite both ostensibly seeking the defeat of Germany – were in many respects profoundly different. These disparities, coupled with the changing nature of the two nations’ comparative contributions, required French and British leaders to engage in constant discussion and compromise to preserve the delicate coalition. The fact that a formal contract between the two countries did not exist, and the absence of any organ for collective decision-making within the coalition, helped reinforce the primacy of national considerations over inter-allied requirements throughout 1915. The Dent scheme was implemented at Boulogne during a period in which the relative strength of the French in terms of land power – and the BEF’s dependence upon the French transport network as a conduit for the output of the munitions factories across the Channel – acted as powerful bargaining chips in Franco-British negotiations. Within the tense atmosphere of an allied war effort that continued to achieve relatively little on the western front, the installation of a telephone system to improve throughput at the Bassin Loubet was not deemed sufficiently important to override French considerations of their post-war industrial strategy. Yet it was far from the sole reason why the Dent scheme was abandoned before the year of the Somme had even begun.

The growing complexity of Britain’s war machine meant that Francis Dent became increasingly detached from events at Boulogne after April 1915. The proliferating demands for men of recognized managerial ability were such that Dent’s commitments to the REC were already substantial by the time the SECR became responsible for operations at the Bassin Loubet. He continued to oversee the identification and deployment of displaced employees of the Belgian State Railways as part of the Belgian railways refugee sub-committee, maintained his central role in the ambulance trains for the continent sub-committee and became immersed in the recruitment of personnel for the ROD – Dent’s portion of the work of the railway recruitment sub-committee – which took on fresh importance just as the Dent scheme finally got underway.

Dent’s duties in relation to the new division in April 1915 were significant. He dealt ‘with the multitudinous questions which arose in regard to the methods of enlistment, rates of pay, [and the] nature of duties’ for recruits, and personally interviewed all applicants for commissions. He was, according to Pratt, ‘accustomed to “father” the division’s early recruits, and took great care to provide for their needs’.⁶⁵ Yet his most important contribution to the ROD’s development lay in the selection of Cecil Paget as the division’s commanding officer. In an atypical career that had taken in both engineering and traffic management positions at the Midland Railway before the war, Paget had gained a reputation as a ‘brilliant organiser and administrator’.⁶⁶ Alongside his ‘precise knowledge of the French language’ – critical in a role that demanded constant liaison with the BEF’s hosts – his rounded knowledge of locomotive engineering and traffic operations made him a perfect candidate to lead a division with mechanical and operational responsibilities. Colonel L. S. Simpson, the ROD’s chief mechanical engineer, spent most of 1915 interviewing Belgian and French railway and military personnel alongside Paget, and observed that his chief

Paget retained command of the ROD throughout the war, a clear indication of his suitability for a role in which he ‘acted as the equivalent of a superintendent of the line in conjunction with the French railway officers’. Sir Sam Fay wrote approvingly after the war that he ‘could have been graded a general if he had so wished’, such was the army’s appreciation of Paget’s contribution on the western front. However, ‘he was more intent upon his duties than upon advance in military rank’.⁶⁸

The ROD’s first contribution to operations in France took place in the Bassin Loubet, where it became responsible for marshalling the supply trains made up at the port in June 1915. As the number of ROD units in France increased the division became responsible for more marshalling yards and depot sidings, before on 1 November the French authorities transferred operations on the Hazebrouck–Ypres line to the British.⁶⁹ Before the ROD took over the Hazebrouck–Ypres service, Simpson and his troops acquired responsibility for the repair of engines earmarked both for the division and the BEF’s construction troops. A temporary workshop was established in a sugar factory near Calais for the overhaul of thirty-five Belgian locomotives, which were ‘in a terrible state owing to their not having been touched since they were rescued from Belgium’ the previous summer. However, once again the requirements of the French economy superseded the convenience of the British army in France. As early as mid August 1915 Simpson was ‘obliged to find some other place where the repairing of engines could go on’ as the premises they had occupied were required for sugar production. The British mechanics removed their tools and equipment to a temporary site in an ancient chalk pit between Calais and Boulogne, before they finally moved into a permanent locomotive repair shop at Audruicq in December.⁷⁰

The provision of ambulance trains for use at home and abroad competed with the ROD for Dent’s attentions in the spring and summer of 1915. Alongside his duties as chairman of the ambulance trains for the continent sub-committee of the REC, Dent acted as a conduit for communications between the predominantly civilian sub-committee in London and the ambulance train advisory committee in France – which comprised British and French military railway authorities and RAMC officers. Dent’s role was crucial as it facilitated the standardization of equipment on both sides of the Channel, a process that reduced both costs and production times for new vehicles.⁷¹ By the end of the conflict the British railway companies had provided thirty ambulance trains for the British army’s use, consisting of 518 carriages and all of the spare parts and materials necessary for their maintenance. As well as serving on the western front, British-built ambulance trains were sent to Salonika and Egypt and provided transport for the evacuation of casualties along the Mediterranean line of communications. In addition, following consultation between the REC and the American military authorities in the summer of 1917 – at which Dent was present – the British railway companies had constructed nineteen ambulance trains (comprising 304 vehicles) for the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and had a further twenty-nine in varying states of readiness when the armistice came into effect.⁷²

Within the maelstrom of work on the REC’s behalf, Dent continued to be the general manager of a critically important railway line in the south-east of England – one that experienced its own significant challenges as the war continued. As noted above, the SECR connected London to the two shortest ferry routes between Britain and Europe, and in peacetime it principally operated as a passenger line for commuters into the capital and tourists to the coast and continent. However, the character of the SECR’s traffic changed radically once Britain’s productive capacity was geared towards the war effort. By the summer of 1915 passenger traffic – excluding troop movements – no longer predominated, and the SECR’s system had to be adapted as quickly as possible to carry a heavy goods traffic ‘for which they had never been designed and were, at first, not fully prepared to meet’.⁷³ In July 1915 the SECR’s London district handled 56 per cent more wagons than it had twelve months earlier (see Table 4.1), even though the company’s workforce had been diminished by the enlistment of 2,689 employees to the colours. The patriotic sacrifice of the railway’s servants left Dent and his management team facing a significantly increased workload with a workforce some 12 per cent smaller than it had been when the war began.⁷⁴

Table 4.1. Wagon turnover for the London district of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway, 1914–18.

Source: E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War; Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., 1921), ii. 1078.

The army’s decision to exploit Folkestone more thoroughly presented the SECR with further traffic to deal with from April 1915 onwards. As a locally produced chronicle of the town’s experience of the war recorded:

The Folkestone–Boulogne service became the principal route for British personnel both on their way home from the front on leave and on their return journey. There is some disagreement over the accuracy of Yelverton’s and Carlile’s figures for the number of men and women who passed through Folkestone during the war, which provides a caveat to the authors’ claim that the SECR handled ‘3,416 motor cars; 192,468 tons of the Company’s traffic; nearly 91,000 tons of Government stores; 11,641 tons of material for Red Cross societies; 383,098 mails and parcel post; and 63,985 tons for Expeditionary Force Canteens; making a total tonnage, outwards and inwards, of 742,188’ tons between August 1914 and February 1919.⁷⁶

Regardless of the exact figures, the quantity of traffic that passed over the SECR’s lines was far beyond anything carried before 1914. Under such arduous circumstances Dent felt unable to oversee the day-to-day operations of the Bassin Loubet, and he handed over control of the dock to the superintendent of the SECR’s northern district, Francis Flood-Page. Flood-Page was clearly a capable official – he received the Military Cross in 1916 – but he lacked both the experience and the authority of the company’s general manager. Flood-Page’s name, unlike Dent’s in late 1914 and early 1915 – is conspicuous by its absence from the war diaries of the BEF’s senior supply officers in the second half of 1915. His influence did not reach beyond the confines of the Bassin Loubet, and his presence did not command the same degree of attention among the military authorities as that of Dent – a pre-war senior executive of a large company, a lieutenant-colonel in the ERSC and a member of the REC from its establishment.

The effects of the war’s evolution into a battle of material were rapidly felt at the Bassin Loubet. By 3 May – a week after the SECR had taken over as the single authority at the port – the director of supplies, Colonel Carter, recorded that ‘considerable progress’ had been made in the arrangement of storage accommodation within the area.⁷⁷ However, within a fortnight the congestion at Boulogne reached the point at which Carter felt compelled to authorize the stacking of stores ‘in the open’.⁷⁸ Sustained calls for ammunition from the front the following month forced GHQ to shift additional labour to Boulogne, to ensure that the shells required by the artillery were discharged and sent forward as a priority.⁷⁹ The ASC were called upon to transfer men from Calais to deal with the potentially hazardous and specialist task of handling explosives, while officers stationed at Boulogne for training purposes ahead of assignments elsewhere found themselves pressed into temporary action to help clear backlogs within the port. Eric de Normann, destined for Salonika, was one such officer. He wrote to his mother that he was relieved to be involved in the ‘very interesting’ work of unloading munitions, and saw it as a diversion from the parades and drills that had hitherto dominated his wartime experience.⁸⁰ De Normann had a grandstand seat over the summer, during which he observed a ‘very heavy traffic in the port’. ‘Everything’, he wrote, was ‘being accumulated for der Tag’ at Boulogne.⁸¹

The additional support failed to remedy the mounting congestion, and by the end of August Carter had lost patience with what he dubbed the ‘so-called Dent scheme’s’ inability to meet the standards promised by the transport expert the previous winter.⁸² Following an inspection of the port and discussions with Clayton about the difficulties that had been experienced since the adoption of the Dent scheme at Boulogne, Carter ordered the ‘old method’ of working at the Bassin Loubet to be adopted for a fortnight’s trial on 1 September.⁸³ The ASC regained responsibility for the removal of stores from the quayside and the personnel of the SECR were retained purely for the discharge of arriving ships – to act as civilian labour under military direction. After the two weeks had elapsed, officers from the departments that had initially authorized the Dent scheme’s implementation adjudged the trial to have been ‘an unqualified success’. They reported that ships had been offloaded and dealt with more quickly than had been the case under the SECR’s management, even though the average daily tonnage handled through the port remained far below the targets set by the IGC.⁸⁴ However, while the army representatives wished to make the organization trialled during September a permanent fixture at Boulogne, the navy demurred. Instead, a report that proposed a reversion to the system in place before April 1915 was forwarded to the committee for its consideration.⁸⁵ Clayton requested that nothing be done to ‘disturb the existing arrangement’, but the War Office was forced to concede that it was illogical to resist the navy’s demand to regain authority over the labour employed to discharge ships now that the army once again controlled the onshore workforce.⁸⁶

When placed within the wider context of the BEF’s supply operations in 1915, the navy’s argument was particularly compelling. Only at Boulogne had the ‘single authority’ experiment deviated from the procedures to which the navy sought a return. By reverting to the working practices familiar to the soldiers, sailors and labourers at each of the other ports that contributed to the BEF’s subsistence – which happened on 24 October 1915, when the SECR surrendered responsibility for the unloading of ships in the Bassin Loubet – operations were standardized across the Channel ports for the remainder of the war.⁸⁷ Just six months after it had begun, the civil–military experiment set in motion by Francis Dent the previous December was modified to restore the managerial authority of the navy and army at the port.

The reassertion of military control at Boulogne, and the official history’s later emphasis on the ‘inadvisability’ of entrusting such work to ‘civilian management and labour’, implies that the civilian operators at Boulogne had proven uniquely incapable of dealing with the growing strain of servicing the needs of Britain’s expanding continental commitment. However, Boulogne was not alone in experiencing difficulties during 1915. Congestion at ports both in France and Britain became pronounced in the first full year of the conflict, as the allies attempted to respond to the traffic changes engendered by the war’s outbreak. The provision of adequate labour to deal with the BEF’s increasing traffic requirements – whether from civilian or military sources – was a constant source of correspondence between London and GHQ during 1915, as the latter received an incessant stream of departmental demands for men to offload ships, shift road stone, build defences and myriad other unspectacular but necessary duties.⁸⁸ The virtual closure to international traffic of the ports on the east coast of England, and the continued use of Southampton as a military port, shifted a colossal amount of traffic onto the port of Liverpool. By 11 January 1915 there were forty-four steamers waiting to berth, and by the start of March several vessels containing perishable goods had been unable to discharge their cargoes for over a month. The formation of the Liverpool Dock Battalion by the War Office in March 1915 – a military unit under military law – did not alleviate the problem. As Starling and Lee recorded, by June an average of sixty vessels per day were recorded as awaiting berths on the Mersey.⁸⁹

The SECR’s tenure as the Bassin Loubet’s ‘single authority’ was comparatively brief, but its withdrawal did not spell the end of civil–military cooperation at the port; the ROD’s civilians in uniform retained command over the railway operations within the ‘small and inconvenient marshalling yard’ at the Bassin Loubet following the termination of the experiment.⁹⁰ Nor did it diminish the opportunities for Francis Dent, the architect of the scheme, to make direct contributions to the supply operations of the wartime British army. Following his appointment as DGT, Sir Eric Geddes chose Dent to lead an investigation into the organization of railways in Egypt and Salonika, which provided the former with a thorough understanding of the EEF’s and BSF’s resource requirements for 1917. Dent left Marseille for Cairo on 31 October 1916 where, after discussions with the EEF’s senior command, he visited the Alexandria docks and drew upon his experience at Boulogne to recommend improved wagon-loading methods at the port.⁹¹ He then spent much of November at Salonika before returning to Cairo to produce a comprehensive report on the railway situation in Egypt with Sir George Macauley.⁹²

Dent ensured that the eastern theatres were placed on a solid transport footing ahead of 1917, and that precious railway equipment was not distributed inefficiently. Unsurprisingly, given Macauley’s knowledge of the country and expertise as a railway engineer, Dent was able to report to London that the line east towards Palestine from Qantara had been well constructed and was capable of supplying a force twice the size of that being readied for the advance. In addition, ‘the rolling stock position was not acute, and, provided greater use was made of water rather than rail communication in Egypt itself, the State Railway rolling stock might be considered sufficient for the time being. It would, however, be necessary later to supply additional stock’ if the EEF’s advance crept further into Ottoman territory.⁹³

The absence of an equivalent to Macauley within the BSF made the Salonika portion of Dent’s investigation more complicated. Following his arrival at Salonika he inspected operations at that port and then viewed the construction of a light railway between Stavros and Tasli.⁹⁴ Ahead of his arrival at Stavros Dent had forewarned Sir Guy Granet, the director-general of military railways (DGMR) at the War Office, to expect an order for ‘5 locomotives and 140 wagons, 20 miles of flat-bottomed rails not less than 80 lbs and new sleepers’. ‘It is of greatest importance’, Dent continued, ‘for [the] Army here to know if you can supply standard gauge material as suggested above instead of the 40 miles of narrow gauge and 18 locos ordered already and probable dates of shipment in either alternative. Latter information is key to situation’.⁹⁵ The standard gauge material was never despatched. Dent’s confirmation that the port at Stavros was unsuitable for the unloading of standard gauge equipment – combined with the lack of material immediately available from British or Egyptian sources; the fact that necessity for the railway to be completed before the summer months made construction impracticable; General Milne’s preference for the ‘rapidity’ of narrow-gauge laying; and the eventual movement of the British forces westward to Doiran – meant that the locomotives, wagons, rails, sleepers and shipping capacity required to transport them to the Mediterranean could be deployed more effectively elsewhere.⁹⁶

Conclusion

Geddes’s decision to entrust Dent with the leadership of the transportation mission to Egypt and Salonika, alongside his multiple ongoing commitments to the REC’s work, underlines the high regard within which the SECR’s general manager’s technical skills were held by civilian and military authorities during the First World War. Dent’s wartime service was not curtailed by the perceived failure of the civil–military experiment at Boulogne in 1915. Instead, he was awarded a knighthood in January 1916 in recognition of his ongoing service to the nation at war, and was unanimously elected by his peers to the chairmanship of the Railway Clearing House general managers’ conference in July 1917.⁹⁷ Nor were the acknowledgements of Dent’s expertise restricted to Britain. In 1917 he was despatched to the United States to provide the American military authorities with advice on the use of ambulance trains ahead of their own troops’ introduction to the fighting on the western front. Yet it was from the French that Dent received the most fulsome praise. The French government awarded the British railway manager a Légion d’Honneur in the summer of 1915, and he was issued with a replica of the award at a special gathering of French and British dignitaries that August.⁹⁸ However, his wartime contribution was eclipsed in the railway industry’s post-war records of the conflict. Dent – unlike his contemporaries Sir Sam Fay, Sir Guy Granet, Sir Guy Calthrop and Sir Eric Geddes among others – was not highlighted for praise within the pages of the Railway Gazette’s 1920 special issue on wartime transportation or Edwin Pratt’s exhaustive account of British railways in the First World War.⁹⁹

He and his colleagues at the SECR may have proven unable to match the ambitious projections he had made in the winter of 1914, but they embodied the approach of Britain’s transport experts to the challenges of the First World War. Dent and Percy Tempest made themselves available to the service of the nation from the very outset of the conflict – having already been active participants in Britain’s pre-war preparations – and made demonstrably important contributions to the establishment of a supply chain capable of sustaining the expanding BEF.

However, Dent’s exertions at Boulogne also exemplify the weaknesses of the coalition’s approach to the unprecedented growth of the British contribution to the war’s principal theatre of operations. The single port experiment at Boulogne was essentially nothing more than ‘tinkering’ with a thread in a large and complex web, one with a multitude of potential weaknesses that lay dormant until the colossal demands of 1916 exposed the structural frailties in the BEF’s transport infrastructure. The relative paucity of the demands made upon it in 1915 – before the French and British war economies had achieved maximum output – meant that transportation facilities had not yet replaced production shortages as the constraining factor on allied operations on the western front. Under such circumstances, the SECR’s failure to reach the throughput levels estimated to be possible at the Bassin Loubet – which were partly a consequence of French protectionism in addition to Dent’s overambitious projections – overshadowed the long-term improvements to the dock’s capacity that were overseen by Percy Tempest and his team. Through the construction of new facilities within the port, the SECR played a vital role in facilitating the thorough exploitation of the Bassin Loubet in the second half of the war. Elsewhere in the BEF, another civil–military collaboration initiated in the war’s opening winter produced similar results. However, in the same month that the SECR was removed from managerial responsibilities at the Bassin Loubet, those in charge of the department of IWT experienced a very different fate.

______________

¹ I. M. Brown, ‘Growing pains: supplying the British Expeditionary Force, 1914–1915’, in Battles Near and Far: a Century of Operational Deployment, ed. P. Dennis and J. Grey (Canberra, 2004), pp. 33–47, at p. 35.

² D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London, 1938), i. 83, 144.

³ S. Jones, ‘“To make war as we must, and not as we should like”: the British army and the problem of the western front, 1915’, in Courage Without Glory: the British Army on the Western Front 1915, ed. S. Jones (Solihull, 2015), pp. 31–55, at p. 31.

⁴ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 1.

⁵ J. Lawrence, ‘The transition to war in 1914’, in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, ed. J. Winter and J. Robert (2 vols., Cambridge, 1997), i. 135–63, at p. 152.

⁶ TNA, WO 95/3951, headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, Cowper to Marrable, 27 Nov. 1914.

⁷ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Maxwell to Robertson, 1 Dec. 1914.

⁸ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Robertson to Maxwell, 3 Dec. 1914.

⁹ E. Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 34–5, 244–5.

¹⁰ E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., London, 1921), i. 228–33.

¹¹ TNA, WO 158/2, director of supplies: British armies in France and Flanders pt. I. 147–8.

¹² TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, Girouard to Cowans, 24 Oct. 1914.

¹³ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, p. 13.

¹⁴ TNA, WO 158/2, director of supplies I, p. 147.

¹⁵ TNA, WO 95/74, branches and services: director of supplies, diary entries, 9 and 13 Dec. 1914.

¹⁶ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Moore to Marrable, 25 Nov. 1914.

¹⁷ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Maxwell to Robertson, 30 Nov. 1914.

¹⁸ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Robertson to Kitchener, 28 Nov. 1914.

¹⁹ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Kitchener to French, 27 Nov. 1914.

²⁰ TNA, WO 95/3951, IGC war diary, Kitchener to French, 27 Nov. 1914; French to Kitchener, 27 Nov. 1914.

²¹ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 634.

²² The spoil from the initial excavations was used to form the foundations for a third group of sidings and an ammunition dump later in the war. See ‘Special war services by the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway’, Railway Magazine, May 1920, p. 347.

²³ TNA, WO 95/74, director of supplies war diary, diary entry, 11 Dec. 1914.

²⁴ M. G. Taylor, ‘Land transportation in the late war’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal, lxvi (1921), 699–722, at pp. 700–1.

²⁵ TNA, WO 32/5144, Girouard report, p. 13.

²⁶ TNA, WO 95/64, DRT war diary, Twiss to Murray, 12 Nov. 1914.

²⁷ I. M. Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (London, 1998), p. 87.

²⁸ C. Phillips, ‘Early experiments in civil–military cooperation: the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway and the port of Boulogne, 1914–15’, War & Society, xxxiv (2015), 90–104 represents the only extended piece of research on the SECR’s operations at Boulogne.

²⁹ TNA, WO 158/2–3, Director of supplies: British armies in France and Flanders pts. I and II.

³⁰ Brown, British Logistics, pp. 88–9; I. M. Brown, ‘Growing pains’, pp. 46–7.

³¹ A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937), pp. 91–2; J. Starling and I. Lee, No Labour, No Battle: Military Labour during the First World War (Stroud, 2009), p. 80.

³² ‘Retirement of Sir Francis Dent, general manager, South-Eastern and Chatham Railway’, Railway Magazine, Apr. 1920, p. 253. That a review of Dent’s professional career dedicated considerable space to the Broad Street reorganization demonstrates the significance attached to the project within the railway industry.

³³ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 201–3.

³⁴ TNA, WO 158/11, ambulance trains: sub-committee; minutes, Burke to Barefoot, 12 Dec. 1914.

³⁵ On the work of the ambulance trains for the continent sub-committee, see Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 201–8.

³⁶ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 239–42.

³⁷ TNA, WO 95/3952, headquarters branches and services, inspector general, Dent to Cowans, 31 Dec. 1914.

³⁸ TNA, WO 95/3953, headquarters branches and services, inspector general, Proceedings of second meeting of committee on Mr Dent’s scheme held at Boulogne, 15 Feb. 1915; Brown, British Logistics, p. 88.

³⁹ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Dent to Clayton, 28 Dec. 1914; Clayton to Dent, 30 Dec. 1914; diary entry, 13 Jan. 1915.

⁴⁰ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Dent to Clayton, 28 Dec. 1914.

⁴¹ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Boulogne – memorandum by F. H. Dent, 28 Dec. 1914.

⁴² TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Boulogne – memorandum. The term en-cas mobile refers to a group of wagons ‘kept permanently under load ready for immediate despatch’ in the event of an emergency. See Henniker, History of the Great War, p. xxxi.

⁴³ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, diary entry, 16 Jan. 1915.

⁴⁴ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Boulogne – memorandum.

⁴⁵ Dent was by no means alone in considering the suitability of direct loading. As Brown demonstrated, in Jan. 1915 correspondence on the subject passed between the IGC in France and the QMG at the War Office. See Brown, British Logistics, p. 82.

⁴⁶ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Clayton to Dent, 30 Dec. 1914. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in this passage are taken from this source.

⁴⁷ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Clayton to Dent, 30 Dec. 1914.

⁴⁸ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Robertson to Maxwell, 9 Jan. 1915.

⁴⁹ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, diary entry 29 Jan. 1915; WO 95/64 DRT war diary, French to Kitchener, 23 Feb. 1915.

⁵⁰ TNA, WO 95/3952, IGC war diary, Commandant, Boulogne base to Clayton, 27 Jan. 1915. Clayton had taken over as IGC the day before this letter was written, in the administrative reshuffle that accompanied Sir William Robertson’s appointment as CIGS. Lieutenant-General Ronald Maxwell vacated the role of IGC and became the new QMG in France, while Clayton’s post as director of supplies was handed to Colonel E. E. Carter – a graduate of the LSE’s ‘Mackindergarten’.

⁵¹ TNA, WO 95/3953, IGC war diary, Bassin Loubet – Boulogne, Mr West’s report, 13 Feb. 1915.

⁵² TNA, WO 95/3953, IGC war diary, Proceedings of second meeting.

⁵³ TNA, WO 95/3953, IGC war diary, Clayton to Shortland, 16 Feb. 1915.

⁵⁴ TNA, WO 95/3953, IGC war diary, Clayton to Maxwell, 16 Feb. 1915; Clayton to Maxwell, 20 Feb. 1915; WO 95/75, Branches and services: Director of supplies, diary entries, 24 and 26 Feb. 1915.

⁵⁵ TNA, WO 95/3953, IGC war diary, diary entries, 5 and 27 Feb. 1915; WO 95/3954 Headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, diary entries, 8 and 17 March 1915.

⁵⁶ TNA, WO 95/3954, IGC war diary, Clayton to Maxwell, 21 March 1915; WO 95/27, QMG war diary, diary entry, 12 Apr. 1915; WO 95/3955, Headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, diary entry, 20 Apr. 1915; WO 95/58, Branches and services: Director of ordnance services, diary entry, 19 Apr. 1915.

⁵⁷ C. Ernest Fayle, ‘Carrying-power in war’, Royal United Services Institution Journal, lxix (1924), 527–41, at p. 531.

⁵⁸ TNA, MT 23/353/1, naval transport officer, Boulogne. As to his advance notification of general nature of stores on transports, Hamilton to Shortland, 15 March 1915.

⁵⁹ TNA, WO 95/3954, IGC war diary, diary entry, 23 March 1915.

⁶⁰ TNA, WO 95/3954, IGC war diary, diary entries, 12 and 23 March 1915.

⁶¹ TNA, WO 95/3953, IGC war diary, diary entry, 27 Feb. 1915.

⁶² TNA, WO 95/3955, IGC war diary, diary entry, 7 Apr. 1915; WO 95/3961, Headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, diary entry, 31 Oct. 1915; WO 95/3962, Headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, diary entry, 8 Nov. 1915.

⁶³ TNA, WO 95/3962, IGC war diary, 8 Nov. 1915.

⁶⁴ TNA, WO 95/40, branches and services: quarter-master general, minutes of conference held in the QMG’s office on the subject of the use of the ports of Havre, Rouen and Dunkirk, 7 Oct. 1918; explanatory review, Nov. 1918, p. 14.

⁶⁵ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 615, 617.

⁶⁶ E. G. Barnes, The Midland Main Line, 1875–1922 (London, 1969), p. 224.

⁶⁷ L. S. Simpson, ‘Railway operating in France’, Journal of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers, xii (1922), 697–728, at p. 701.

⁶⁸ S. Fay, The War Office at War (London, 1937), p. 91.

⁶⁹ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 168; History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), v. 594.

⁷⁰ Simpson, ‘Railway operating in France’, pp. 699–700; Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 168–9.

⁷¹ See, e.g., the agendas for meetings of the ambulance train advisory committee in February, June and August 1915. Each meeting discussed agenda items supplied to the committee by Dent on behalf of the ambulance trains for the continent sub-committee in London. TNA, WO 158/9, ambulance trains: advisory committee meeting; general correspondence, Agenda for ambulance train committee on Saturday 13 Feb. 1915 at 5:30 p.m.; Agenda for meeting of advisory committee on ambulance trains to be held at Boulogne at 10 a.m., on Sunday 6 June 1915; Agenda for meeting of advisory committee on ambulance trains to be held at Abbeville on 18 Aug. at 5:30 p.m., 1915.

⁷² Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 206–7; TNA, WO 158/11, Ambulance trains, Minutes of meeting held at 35 Parliament Street, Westminster, at 2:45 p.m. on Monday 18 Nov. 1915, pp. 1–2.

⁷³ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 1075.

⁷⁴ TNA, ZPER 7/103, records of railway interests, pp. 80–1.

⁷⁵ B. J. D. Yelverton and J. C. Carlile, ‘The cross-Channel service’, in Folkestone during the War: a Record of the Town’s Life and Work, ed. J. C. Carlile (Folkestone, 1920), pp. 186–98, at p. 195.

⁷⁶ Yelverton and Carlile, ‘The cross-Channel service’, p. 197. On the variety of figures recorded for passenger traffic through Folkestone during the war, see C. Fair, ‘The Folkestone harbour station canteen and the visitors’ books’, Step Short: Remembering the Soldiers of the Great War, 2008 <http://www.kentfallen.com/PDF%20REPORTS/FOLKESTONE%20HARBOUR%20STATION.pdf> [accessed 6 Sept. 2016].

⁷⁷ TNA, WO 95/75, director of supplies war diary, diary entry, 3 May 1915.

⁷⁸ TNA, WO 95/75, director of supplies war diary, diary entry, 14 May 1915.

⁷⁹ TNA, WO 95/3957, headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, diary entry, 15 June 1915.

⁸⁰ IWM, Private papers of Sir Eric de Normann, 72/72/1, de Normann to his mother, 3, 5 and 10 Sept. 1915.

⁸¹ IWM, De Normann papers, 72/72/1, de Normann to his mother, 5 Sept. 1915.

⁸² TNA, WO 95/75, director of supplies war diary, diary entry, 25 Aug. 1915.

⁸³ TNA, WO 95/75, director of supplies war diary, diary entry, 1 Sept. 1915.

⁸⁴ TNA, WO 95/3960, headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, diary entry, 18 Sept. 1915; WO 95/3961, IGC war diary, diary entry, 12 Oct. 1915.

⁸⁵ The report itself does not appear to have survived. However, its contents can be deduced from TNA, MT 23/443/4, naval transport work overseas. Report of proceedings of principal naval transport officer, 3 Oct. 1915.

⁸⁶ TNA, WO 95/3961, IGC war diary, diary entries, 12 and 26 Oct. 1915.

⁸⁷ TNA, WO 95/3961, IGC war diary, Thomson to Macgregor, 24 Oct. 1915; Clayton to Macgregor, 25 Oct. 1915.

⁸⁸ Starling and Lee, No Labour, No Battle, pp. 77–86.

⁸⁹ Starling and Lee, No Labour, No Battle, pp. 34–6.

⁹⁰ TNA, WO 95/3963, headquarters branches and services. Inspector general, British lines of communication in 1915, p. 2; Simpson, ‘Railway operating in France’, p. 700.

⁹¹ TNA, WO 95/4389, branches and services: Director of railway transport, diary entries, 7–9 and 12 Nov., 2 Dec. 1916.

⁹² TNA, PRO 95/4389, DRT war diary, diary entries, 16–27 Dec. 1916.

⁹³ ‘The Palestine campaign’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 119–28, at p. 119.

⁹⁴ TNA, WO 95/4784, branches and services: director of railways, diary entries, 17–18 and 28 Nov. 1916.

⁹⁵ TNA, WO 95/4764, branches and services: Adjutant and quarter-master general, Dent to Granet, 27 Nov. 1916.

⁹⁶ LHCMA, Milne papers, BSF: summary of information, 15 Nov. to 8 Dec. 1916; TNA, WO 95/4389, DRT war diary, diary entry, 13 Dec. 1916; ‘Railways and the Salonica campaign’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 110–18, at p. 114.

⁹⁷ ‘Ministerial changes’, The Times, 26 July 1917, p. 8.

⁹⁸ ‘General news section’, Railway Gazette, 3 Sept. 1915, p. 233.

⁹⁹ ‘British railways and the war’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, p. 7; Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i, pp. ix–xiii.