WW2 100 – 23 January 1945 – A tragic accident in Burma: Captain Gerald Arthur Richards (1909-45), Royal Army Medical Corps
Continued from 21 January 1945
FLIGHT SERGEANT RENNIE ARTHUR LOADER (1915-45)
Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve
(RAFVR), 518 Squadron
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2021/04/ww2-75-21-january-1945-forecasting-for.html
Like a number of war dead whose names are not listed on Budleigh’s War Memorial, Gerald Arthur Richards is mentioned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) as having a link with the town through his wife Kirstine.
It was difficult to confirm that link, but there were enough intriguing aspects to Gerald’s story to raise questions that I wanted to see answered. Further research led to more East Devon links – to Honiton, Exmouth and further afield. In a very roundabout way I finally made contact with his daughter Louanne, to whom I am grateful for providing information about the family, not least some family photos like the one above.
Gerry, as he was known to family and friends, was the first medic that I’d met in my research into Budleigh’s WW2 war dead, attached as he was according to his CWGC record to a Royal Artillery unit in the Far East.
For me, with a father-in-law who had served as an RAF doctor during WW2 in North Africa, there were many unanswered questions. Gerry and he must have seen the terrible effects of war at close hand. How had they coped, so young and newly qualified from medical school? My father-in-law never wanted to speak about his experiences.
Gerry's mother, born as Ethel Ruth Chaffers-Welsh (1878-1936). I am grateful to Exmouth researcher Carol Fogg for locating this fine image
According to the CWGC, Gerry was the son of Walter Guyon Richards and Ethel Ruth Richards, and came from a family with a strong medical background. Both his father, and his grandfather, Frederick William Richards, were doctors. Gerry was one of four boys who all served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during WW2. The second eldest, Colonel Phillip John Richards (Pip), was awarded the DSO for the part he played in the 1943 Salerno landing in Italy, later being appointed Commanding Officer of the British Military Medical Service in Berlin in 1951, and then becoming Commanding Officer of the General Hospital in Malta. The youngest, Arthur Guyon (Guy) became Medical Officer to the Gordon Highlanders, part of the 51st Highland Division, later taking part in the Normandy landings and the Reichwald Offensive of early 1945.
A quick Google search told me that Gerry's father had a special interest in what would be described as alternative medicine: Dr Walter Guyon Richards MRCS, LRCP was the author of a book first published in 1934 with the intriguing title The Chain of Life: An account of the use of radiations from the human body in the diagnosis of disease. An advertisement for a copy of the first edition described it as concerning the author's study of Abrams' work on radiesthesia, and his own modifications of the Abrams method.
I learnt that radiesthesia, a word of Latin origin meaning sensitivity to radiation, is held by many people to be a useful science, its power being manifested in an area such as dowsing or water-divining.
Many people are sceptical about this kind of science. ‘Radiesthesia describes an ability to detect radiation emitted by a person, animal, object or geographical feature,’ is the definition on Wikipedia, followed by the statement: ‘There is no scientific evidence of the existence of this pseudoscientific or occult phenomena.’
Dr Walter Guyon’s four sons,
as they went through their medical training became progressively sceptical
about their father’s interest in homeopathy and radiesthesia.
According to Guy, the
youngest son, they greatly enjoyed their father’s stories but wished that what
he was saying was scientifically ‘true’.
Although they knew their father helped heal many hundreds of sick
patients with his methods, it was at odds with the rigour of the allopathic
discipline that they were following.
Dr Albert Abrams Image credit: Wikipedia
And the American physician Albert Abrams, of the ‘Abrams method’ mentioned above, was a controversial figure who was known for claiming to be able to cure almost any disease; shortly after his death in 1924 many of his claims and conclusions were apparently shown to be intentionally deceptive or false.
Walter Guyon Richards, born in India on 16 July 1869, was a near contemporary of Albert Abrams. As Major Richards he served in the Indian Medical Service, a military medical service in British India, which also had some civilian functions.
Fort St George, in the city formerly known as Madras. It was the first British fortress in India, and also housed the city’s first British hospital in the 17th century. Image credit: L.vivian.richard; Wikipedia
Following his marriage to Ethel Ruth his career took him to
Madras – now known as Chennai – and his granddaughter Louanne believes that it
was during his time in India that he became interested in alternative medical
systems such as homeopathy that have often been viewed with scepticism in the
West although practised for centuries elsewhere.
Dowsing itself, as a type of divination employed in attempts to locate a range of materials underground ranging from water to gemstones has a long history, and Dr Guyon Richards had a keen interest in finding clean water supplies while in India. Louanne herself is a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Above: Gerry's baptism certificate, dated 20 December 1907, tells us that his parents were living in Nungambakkam, described as one of the upper-class European residential districts of Madras in the early 20th century. The area was known for housing civil servants and influential members of the city administration. Image credit: Carol Fogg
Gerry was born in Madras on 27 October 1907. He spent his childhood in India, like many Budleigh residents from the past, including artists Joyce Dennys and Cecil Elgee and Fairlynch Museum co-founder Priscilla Hull, to name but a few.
Major Richards retired from the Army in January 1916, and by 1918, when their youngest boy Arthur Guyon (Guy) was born the parents had returned from India. They settled in the Sussex town of Burgess Hill, living at Tower House on Silverdale Road, seemingly a fine building with far reaching views to the South Downs, but since demolished in 1967 and replaced in 1972 by a large apartment block.
Like
his two elder brothers Walter Frederick (Wally) and Philip John (Pip), Gerry
attended Brighton College, a public school some ten miles from his home, and I
am grateful to the College Archivist James Harrison for kindly providing
details of Gerry’s time there. The College Register records his arrival in
January 1922, when he joined Hampden House, a day
house, rather than boarding, at that time.
The Valete entry for Gerald Arthur Richards. From the January 1926 Brighton
College Magazine. Image courtesy of Brighton College Archives
The Valete entry shows that he became a
House Prefect at Hampden, and was a Sergeant in the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC),
achieving a Certificate A. It also notes that on leaving the College he went
into residence at the Royal Military Academy (RMA) Woolwich.
View of the former Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, SE London, UK. Image credit: Kleon3; Wikipedia
Gerry had intended to
train as an Army Engineer Officer at Woolwich, but changed track and became an assistant teacher in several
private prep schools. However, he was progressively becoming more
socialist and inevitably fell out with more than one school principal!
According to his youngest
brother and tendencies gleaned from an astrology chart drawn up many years
later, Gerry by
nature, was sensitive and
intense and he could be uncompromising especially if thwarted by authoritarian
conformity and injustices. Kirstine
always said that he was never able to engage in small talk, he would rather plunge
straight into more meaningful topics.
His integrity and conscientiousness no doubt led him to becoming a
doctor.
St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, (better known as Barts), looking towards Farringdon. Image credit: pandrcutts; Wikipedia
When he eventually followed the family trend he enrolled as a medical student at St Bartholomew’s, probably in 1934 aged 27. Being a mature student, he managed to complete his studies in four and half years instead of the usual six. At Barts he was a student activist, energetically working on projects and ultimately acquiring a football field at Chiselhurst, Kent, for the students.
A selection of Honiton pottery, from an exhibition of the Honiton Pottery Collectors’ Society
It was while he was studying medicine that he met the woman who would become his wife. Kirstine Richards, née Rasmussen, was born in Edinburgh to a Danish father, Christian Rasmussen, and Hilda Hill-Jones, on 14 March 1912. She attended Edinburgh School of Art for one year, until her father died and the fees could no longer be paid. Life with her eccentric mother became intolerable. Fortunately an aunt came to the rescue and Kirstine moved to Devon, where she worked as a poorly paid designer at the Honiton Pottery.
Monkton House, Honiton: The Highland
Fling from a postcard of the time, and as the building appears today, reincarnated as The Boston
Tea Party. Image credit: http://www.brian-coffee-spot.com
Subsequently she opened a café in
Monkton House at 53, on Honiton’s High Street. Called the ‘Highland Fling’, it
served excellent coffee and homemade cakes, making it very popular, especially, as Louanne told me, with medical students from London.
It was here that she met Gerry in 1936. Two years later, in October 1938, they
were married in the Parish of Honiton, and in due course had two children, Nicholas and Louanne.
Badge of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Image
credit: PhpYyaenh; Wikipedia
Following the outbreak of war in September 1939, Gerry joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), as did his three brothers, a sector which would see a dramatic expansion. The British Medical Association was used by the War Office for recruitment of medical staff in the services. By the end of the war, the strength of the Army’s medical services had doubled, from just over 9,000 in 1939 to nearly 18,000 in 1945.
Gerry, left,
Gerry was recruited on an Emergency Commission basis,
for the duration of the war and was given the Service Number 133377.
His appointment as a Medical Officer from 25 May 1940, with the rank of Lieutenant, was announced in the London Gazette of 16 July that year; his promotion to Captain came on 25 May 1941.
This fine drawing of Gerry in 1941 is signed by Juliet Somers, better known as the distinguished portrait painter Juliet Pannett MBE. Born in Hove in 1911, she studied at Brighton Art School and was producing drawings of people from Sussex for the county's newspapers by the age of 18. She went on to enjoy a career spanning 80 years in which she painted HM Queen Elizabeth II twice and had an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Prime Ministers painted by her included Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher
But where did Gerry serve before going to Burma? Louanne mentioned a posting to Ware, Hertfordshire. There were 122 British General Hospitals during WW2, and thanks to the website www.scarletfinders.co.uk one can see that the locations of the medical unit listed as 38 British General Hospital may give some indication of Gerry’s wartime service, if indeed RAMC personnel were linked to such units during WW2. 38 British General Hospital was based at Hoddesdon and Hatfield House, Hertfordshire from December 1940 to February 1942 before being sent overseas, first to Iraq from February 1942 for two months, and then to various locations in India. By November 1944 it was at Imphal, near the border of Burma. Imphal is where Gerry died and he is buried at the Imphal War Cemetery.
I do not have access to Gerry’s service record, a document which might usefully confirm where he had been posted prior to his service in the Far East, although it seems that such documents rarely hold as much information as people think. Archivists point out that they are paper records which follow the career of the individual and in most cases make no reference to engagements or theatres of operation. But in many cases they can be invaluable for researchers.
There seems to be a rather bureaucratic procedure to obtain them. An expert on the wwwtalk.com forum tells me that the process is taking about a year as demand has grown during the Covid 19 lockdown and the number of staff available to deal with enquiries has diminished.
Currently a fee of £30 is payable for each record when an application is made via the www.gov.uk website. I cannot see why access to service records for the CWGC-registered war dead should not be totally free.
A copy for each service person could be viewed via the CWGC website, in the same way that the website shows documents giving details of the headstones and war dead graves. Maybe this should be an aim for the authorities in the UK as we approach the centenary of WW2 in 2039, when so many more communities may wish to honour their war dead as individuals.
Thanks to the CWGC we do at least know in which theatre of war Gerry was serving in January 1945.
A 25-pounder field gun of 36th Division in
action in Burma, 1944. Image credit: Imperial War Museums
He was attached to the Royal Artillery. The following
letter, his
last before he died from an accidental gunshot wound, indicates that he was
attached to the 18th Field Regiment. According to veteran Rex Wait,
in an account published by the Burma Campaign Society, the Regiment was
equipped with Sherman tanks armed with American 105mm howitzers and crossed the
River Chindwin at Kalewa, 160 miles south of Imphal, on Christmas Eve 1944.
[Letter written while on active service in
Burma, dated 16 November 1944]
From: Captain Gerald Arthur Richards RAMC, 18th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, South East Asia Command.
To: Captain Arthur Guyon Richards RAMC, 5/7 Gordon Highlanders, British Land Army.
Dear AG,
I have just read a most interesting letter of yours that Kirstine sent me. Tough luck catching a packet, but still it might have been worse. [Guy had been wounded during the Normandy Landings]. If I could get one like that to get me back to Blighty I’d be delighted, but one wants one leg and a foot in the grave to do that, so I’d rather not.
I’ve just written to PJ [Capt. Pip Richards was in Salerno] saying we would like more beer and he’s written back saying they don’t get more than 2 bottles a month and can’t drink the local wine, which I reckon is exaggerating. We certainly can’t drink the local toddy, but Italian wine would go like a bomb here, as anyone who has drunk some of this Indian brew thinks any other alcoholic drink is wonderful, though sometimes its pretty good.
I expect you’re still having a tough time and we may finish before you, which will save you coming out to help us after all, which is the sort of experience you must miss at all costs. Most people here are quite mad and you soon accept it and become mildly mad yourself, after having for the last year all the lunacy around you. No doubt you would be interested in the diseases; what with malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery, sores, infective hepatitis, hot weather foot, heat exhaustion, heat stroke etc. You Flit yourself, anoint yourself with mosquito cream, put on a beehive mosquito helmet, and take Mepacrine. Scan yourself for scrub typhus, scan your trousers, socks and shirts and creep under your mosquito net.
Why worry about little things like Japs, not to mention TAB, TT vaccination every 2 years, anti cholera and occasional anti plague. Anyway after years of wrangling by the medical authorities about Topees or no Topees [Sun helmets], not going out in the sun etc, everyone has found to their great satisfaction that the best dress for heat, is no dress at all, just like the locals who have done it for years, not surprisingly.
Very happy Christmas and give my love to Liz and family.
Cheerio Gerry.
Doctors treat a wounded soldier of the 81st West African Division in an improvised operating theatre in the Kaladan Valley, Burma, 1944. The troops of the 81st West African Division were fighting in thick jungle, with supply and evacuation only possible by air and improvised surgical facilities. Image credit: Imperial War Museums K 7403
He may have had to treat casualties in less than ideal conditions, as seen in the above photo. But as a Medical Officer in India and Burma, he would have been responsible for caring for patients with a wide range of ailments, quite apart from those wounded in conflict.
British troops fighting the Japanese faced a formidable enemy but had also to deal with the menace of deadly and unfamiliar tropical diseases. According to the Imperial War Museums, in 1943, for every soldier evacuated due to battle wounds, 120 soldiers were evacuated due to sickness.
Image credit: Imperial War Museums © IWM (Art.IWM PST 15913)
This 1943 poster by graphic artist Ashton was designed for use by the Royal Air Force in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). It warns airmen against trusting in unofficial remedies or protections against malaria.
Diseases included dysentery, skin conditions and typhus, but mosquito-borne malaria was the most serious problem, as General Sir Archibald Wavell stated in 1943. ‘We must be prepared to meet malaria by training as strict and earnest as that against enemy troops,’ he warned. ‘We must be as practised in our weapons against it as we are with a rifle.’
The circumstances of Gerry’s death in an accidental shooting are particularly tragic. I learnt from Louanne that he had been sitting talking to a friend who was cleaning a gun when the weapon went off, wounding Gerry in the stomach.
The CWGC record gives the date of Gerry’s death as 23 January. The above extract from the Casualty Report, kindly sent to me by a member of the WW2Talk internet forum, notes that he had been reported as ‘dangerously ill’ as early as 17 January. At the time of the accident Gerry was the only doctor in charge of his platoon and no other doctor was available.
Clearly he needed treatment for serious injuries. Evacuation of wounded soldiers by air was at an early stage in the Burma campaign due to the lack of suitable landing strips. Transporting casualties in need of advanced medical care through mountainous country where there were few roads was no easy task. It took two days for Gerry to be carried on a stretcher to the nearest hospital at Imphal, and it is worth recording that the journey may well have been impossible without the help of the local tribes.
Naga Labour Corps (NLC) members from Manipur
dressed for a war dance near Arras, 20 October 1917. Image credit: Lieutenant John Warwick Brooke;
Imperial War Museums Catalogue number Q 7243
For centuries the peoples of the Naga hills in the India-Burma area, known for their history as fierce headhunters, had been isolated from outside cultures, and in many cases had strongly resisted British occupation during the late 19th century.
But by the time of WW1, Naga soldiers were contributing to the war effort in Europe, and in WW2 their descendants remained loyal to the British and fought to halt the advance of Japanese forces.
A Naga warrior from Nagaland, India during the Hornbill Festival in Nagaland, 4 December 2016. Image credit: Pralaylahiry; Wikipedia
They were invaluable as guides and porters, wrote
John Colvin in his 1994 history of the Battle of Kohima Not Ordinary Men:
‘Without Nagas’ help in the evacuation of the wounded British and the Indian
troops up and down the sodden hills, the death rate among the Allied battalions
would have been much higher.’
It seems from information in documents like the above, published by the CWGC, that Gerry would have been carried to the Casualty Clearing Station at Yazagyo-Inbaung.
Sadly his injuries proved fatal. He was initially buried at the Inbaung Military Cemetery before his body was re-interred at Imphal.
Imphal War Cemetery, India. Image credit:
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Gerry’s grave is one of 1,600 Commonwealth burials
of WW2 in the Imphal War Cemetery. There were originally some 950 burials here,
but after hostilities had ceased, the Army Graves Service brought in graves
from two smaller cemeteries in Imphal and from isolated positions in the
surrounding region such as at Inbaung.
Even now, years after the event, reading about the circumstances of the fatal accident is shocking, taking place as it did in a setting far removed from the brutality of conflict. Guy Richards, who had been wounded during the Normandy landings, heard the news of his brother’s death while in the midst of full battle in a forest at the start of the Reichswald Offensive, the final bloody push of the Allies into Germany. Also known as Operation Veritable, it was described by General Eisenhower as ‘one of the fiercest and most violent campaigns of the war, a bitter struggle for endurance between the Allies and the Germans.’ Canadian soldiers would later refer to one of the roads fought over in the campaign as ‘Slaughterhouse Hill’.
The name of Gerry’s friend who was responsible for the accident is not recorded, but I hate to think of the distress he must have felt. Kirstine received a heartfelt letter from this young man’s mother, saying that of her three sons he was the one who was always the most responsible.
Writing about the men from Budleigh whose lives were cut short by WW2 I thought often of the families that they left behind. The war widows, worldwide... How many, I wondered. WW1 killed 9.7 million soldiers: it seems that one third of those had died, leaving widows. For WW2, the number of military deaths was 24 million. 8 million war widows? Can that be right?
In Britain, some remarried, as I discovered from researching Budleigh families. Others, it seems, were not just widowed but suffered financial hardship. Addressing the House of Commons on 18 December 1975 the MP Sir Rodney Graham Page complained that British WW2 widows were receiving a pension that was one-third of the pension paid to their counterparts in Germany.
They were, as the title of this 2011 book put it, War’s
Forgotten Women, ‘largely ignored by the government and the majority of the
population,’ in the words of authors Maureen Shaw and Helen D. Millgate. ‘The
treatment of these war widows was shameful and continued right up to 1989.’
Gerry’s widow Kirstine, did not remarry. If she had done, and changed her name, I might not have discovered her story. But googling her name from the CWGC record led me to a summary of the book that she’d written, with the title The Seagull Hotel. At last, familiar territory: the publisher’s summary mentioned places like Exmouth and Honiton... but also Burma and Imphal, where Gerry according to military records was buried in 1945. It was a stroke of luck in my research, which led me to the whole sad story of how he had lost his life, when I contacted his daughter Louanne via publisher Bob Fowke.
The Seagull Hotel, published by YouCaxton in 2017
The Seagull Hotel had been edited by Louanne and her brother Nick. It was based on the manuscript that their mother had written years before her death in 1989 and which she had never managed to get published.
Kirstine’s story in The Seagull Hotel deserves telling, taking a local turn as it does, from Burma to East Devon, but this time in Exmouth rather than in Honiton.
The book was published in 2017, with launch events at Exmouth’s Glenorchy Church, and, later in the year, at The Boston Tea Party in Honiton.
It was well received, especially by locals. ‘A wonderful book,’ commented one reader on Exmouth’s Past and Present Facebook site. ‘I’ve not been able to put it down. Think “The Durrells” but set in Exmouth with a fascinating raft of staff and locals as one lone woman battles the odds in what was then a truly “man's” world.’
Kirstine Richards and her children Nicholas and
Louanne
Without any extended family support, and with scant prospects of earning a living, as the book’s summary puts it, Kirstine teamed up with another war widow, her friend Gerdy Ramsay. Both had two young children to support.
When a previously army-occupied derelict building in Morton Crescent on Exmouth’s sea front became available the pair set about transforming it into The Seagull Hotel, a family hotel renowned for its excellent cuisine.
The summary continues: ‘In 1959 Kirstine moved on from being a hotelier to becoming the case worker at the newly formed Agnostic Adoption Society, which was later to become the Independent Adoption Society. On retirement, she went to live near her cousin in the South of France, where she rented a small house; paying for her keep by hosting summer guests. A secondary breast cancer made her decide to move back to England, where she found an apartment at Queen Alexandra’s Court in Wimbledon; an attractive establishment for the widows of officers who had served in the forces. Kirstine died at St. Raphael’s hospice in London on 25 February 1989.’
And the link to our town? ‘I believe my mother had a relative living in Budleigh Salterton,’ Louanne told me. ‘This is the nearest I can get to the Budleigh connection.’
The next post is for
You can read about him at https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2023/12/ww2-75-14-april-1945-pow-killed-by.html
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