The Bill and Angela Strong Medal Collection

‘I lay awake in a windy tent in the middle of a vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept for a few days before the shambles. I heard the revelling of the Scotch troops, who are now dead, and who knew they would be dead. I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England; nor can it be seen in any battle. But only in Etaples. It was not of despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s’

Wilfred Owen, in a letter to his mother


An important C.B., Great War C.M.G. group of ten awarded to Brigadier-General A. G. Thomson, Royal Engineers, who was Base Commandant at Etaples at the time of the mutiny: quickly hushed up by the authorities, details of the rebellion only really emerged to a wider audience in the B.B.C. series “The Monocled Mutineer”, the story of Percy Toplis - had not Thomson relented to the latter’s demands, a wider rebellion may well have infected the ranks of the entire Army: arguably, however, to Thomson and his cohorts must fall shared responsibility for running a brutal regime that came to its bloody conclusion in those dark days of September 1917 - in an orgy of destruction, murder and rape by thousands of discontented troops

The Most Honourable Order of the Bath, C.B. (Military) Companion’s breast badge, converted for neck wear, silver-gilt and enamel, in its Garrard & Co. case of issue; The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, C.M.G., Companion’s neck badge, silver-gilt and enamel; Egypt and Sudan 1882-89, dated reverse, 2 clasps, Tel-el-Kebir, Suakin 1885 (Lieut. A. G. Thomson, 17th C[o. R.]E.), partial loss of unit details due to bruising; Queen’s South Africa 1899-1902, 5 clasps, Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Johannesburg, Diamond Hill, Belfast (Lt. Col. A. G. Thomson, R.E.); King’s South Africa 19001-02, 2 clasps, South Africa 1901, South Africa 1902 (Lt. Col. A. G. Thomson, R.E.); 1914 Star (Col. A. G. Thomson, C.B.); British War and Victory Medals, M.I.D. oak leaf (Col. A. G. Thomson); Coronation 1911; Khedive’s Star 1882, official correction to rank on the K.S.A., the Egypt Medal pitted and bruised, nearly very fine, the remainder very fine or better (10) £3000-4000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Bill and Angela Strong Medal Collection.

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C.B. London Gazette 19 June 1911.

C.M.G. London Gazette 14 January 1916.

Andrew Graham Thomson was born in February 1858, the son of Surgeon Major-General Thomson, onetime an Honorary Physician to Queen Victoria and Edward VII.

Commissioned in the Royal Engineers in January 1877, he joined the 17th Company, R.E. at Aldershot and proceeded to Malta in 1880, and thence, in 1882, to Egypt, where he witnessed active service. Initially employed at Alexandria and Ramleh, he was among the first troops to be landed in Ismailia, where he acted as A.D.C. to the C.R.E. before rejoining his Company in time for the battle of Tel-el-Kebir (Medal & clasp). And in the subsequent Suakin operations of 1884, he was present at the actions of Hasheen and the affair at Tamaai and, in support of the Scots Guards, held the furthest advance post on the line to Berber at Tambuk (clasp). He was mentioned in despatches.

Having then been advanced to Captain in January 1888 and to Major in August 1895, Thomson witnessed further active service in South Africa, taking part as a Divisional C.R.E. in operations in the Orange Free State, including the actions at Vet River and Zand River, and in the Transvaal, including the action at Belfast. He was also responsible for the construction of the first blockhouse at Komati Point, but was invalided with malaria in July 1902 (Queen’s Medal & 5 clasps; King’s Medal & 2 clasps). Again mentioned in despatches, he was also given the Brevet of Lieutenant-Colonel.

Confirmed in the latter rank in April 1903 and as a substantive Colonel in April 1908, Thomson was appointed Commandant of the R.M.A. Woolwich in the latter year, in which capacity he was awarded his C.B. and served until 1912, when he was placed on half-pay after attracting the wrath of Lord Roberts, who felt he had been too lenient to his young charges at “The Shop”: an experience that no doubt contributed to the harsher regime he put in place at Etaples.

Base Commandant - Etaples

Recalled on the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, Thomson was quickly embarked for France as Commandant, Lines of Communication, in which capacity he was awarded his C.M.G. and thrice mentioned in despatches (London Gazettes 4 and 9 December 1914 and 1 January 1916 refer), prior to taking up his appointment at Base Camp at Etaples in the temporary rank of Brigadier-General. Of subsequent events no better source may be quoted than The Monocled Mutineer, by William Allison and John Fairley, from which definitive history the following extracts have been taken:

On the brutal regime:

‘Etaples displayed the crucifixion of the British soldier daily in fearful triptych: the perfunctory notes of the ‘Last Post’ sounded like an endless loop of dismal muzak on the brow of the hill; at its foot was the parade of victims lashed by their wrists in Army Field Punishment No. 1; and in the deadening sand and silt of the beach beyond, hundreds, thousands of troops were abused and mauled by instructors whose violence and sadism were to be remembered even after some of the horrors of the battlefields themselves faded from the mind. This was the British Army’s No. 1 training camp. Its regime was so sickeningly brutal that men were to plead to go up the line and face the enemy.’

On executions, as related by Harry Silvester, later the famous dance orchestra leader:

‘The first man I had to help to kill was a private in my own regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a fact which filled me with even greater shame. He was said to have fled in the face of the enemy.

We marched to a quarry outside Etaples at first dawn. The victim was bought out from a shed and led struggling to a chair to which he was bound and a white handkerchief placed over his heart as our target area.

Mortified by the sight of the poor wretch tugging at his bonds, twelve of us, on the order, raised our rifles unsteadily. Some of the men, unable to face their ordeal, had got themselves drunk overnight. They could not have aimed straight if they had tried, and, contrary to popular belief, all twelve guns were loaded. The condemned man had also been plied with whisky during the night, but he had remained sober through fear.

The tears were rolling down my cheeks as he went on attempting to free himself from the ropes attaching him to the chair. I aimed blindly and when the gunsmoke had cleared away we were further horrified to see that, although wounded, the intended victim was still alive. Still blindfolded, he was attempting to make a run for it still strapped to the chair. The blood was running freely from a chest wound. An officer in charge stepped forward to put the finishing touch with a revolver to the poor man’s temple.

He had only once cried out and that was when he shouted the one word ‘mother’. He could not have been very much older than me. We were told later that in fact he had been suffering from shell-shock, a condition not recognised by the army in 1917.

By the time I had taken part in four more such dawn executions, I did not have to feign illness. Like the other executioners. I was screaming in my sleep and physically ill every day. I was put into a hospital and strapped down to the bed to prevent me running away. I was then sent away from Etaples and all its horrors to the Italian Front. The simple business of being twice wounded there was less injurious by far than all the mental scars that Etaples left with me for the rest of my life.

Small wonder that Etaples was to be the scene of a frantic wild uprising – an eruption that was to turn into six days of open mutiny with 100,000 men immobilised in the vital week before the start of the Passchendaele offensive, with thousands of them hunting down police and officers, and infantry and cavalry pulled out of the line to put them down. Etaples also had one unique ingredient to contribute to the poteen of rebellion; besides humiliation and degradation inside the base, there was defiance outside it ... ’

Mutiny - Sunday 7 September 1917

‘When the mutiny came to Etaples, the combination of the Scots and the Australians, the special grievances of the New Zealanders, the oratory of Percy Toplis, the common hatred of the Red Caps and Canaries [instructors], the burgeoning populism, purveyed by papers like John Bull, were together to prove a deadly mix. For six days Brigadier-General Thomson and his staff would stand helplessly by and watch the old order collapse and threaten the fighting ability of the British Army, just as their ally on the Eastern Front, Russia, was about to be levered out of the war for good by revolution ... ’

On Thomson being cast into the River Canche:

‘A group of a hundred mutineers had crashed into the midst of an officers’ meeting and summarily ordered them to their feet ... The mutineers then loaded Commandant Thomson and a dozen officers into two trucks and set off with them down the road to the bridge over the River Canche. The little convoy covered the half-mile from the commandant’s office at a slow pace so as to give the cheering men lining the route a good view of what was going on. On the bridge the two lorries stopped. There was a moment of silence, then the trucks tipped up and slid the top echelon of the British Army’s No. 1 Base over the parapet and into the river - another incident unrecorded in the official diary. By the time Thomson and his senior officers hit the water and were swimming for their lives, the banks of the River Canche were crowded with hundreds of men yelling and hooting derisively ... ’

On destruction and murder:

‘About 1,500 mutineers had succeeded in making it over the railway into the town, leaving a trail of havoc and devastation. When the troops roared in, the French customers in the cafes and estaminets had fled to their homes, and the restaurant owners had closed their doors only to have them smashed down by the invaders.

Those who could not crash their way into the cafes because of the crowds already jammed inside had barrels of beer and wine rolled out to them in the square. Street stall-holders whose business it was to turn out soggy potato chips on paraffin-heated braziers had disappeared along with the entire local population. Behind locked doors they listened in terror to the bedlam in the square.

A mixture of threats and pleas by equally terrified military policemen and Bull Ring instructors had resulted in some of these fugitives being given refuge by householders in streets just off the square. Inside, they huddled in little groups too scared to speak as the rebels rampaged long into the night. In the rue Saint-Pierre the door of one house was smashed down by Australians and Scots who found a military policeman and a Canary hiding under the same bed. Outside the bedroom door, an elderly French fisherman and his wife, dressed in their customary all-black Sunday-night clothes, stood weeping as the fugitives were kicked and battered and left for dead.

When the potato supply ran out back in the square, the braziers were overturned and the paraffin used to set fire to the barrels that had been drained. To these bonfires were added piles of chairs and tables taken from both inside and outside the cafes. The centre of Etaples was a wreck by the time the first officers’ patrol could get there at about 11 p.m. ... ’

On rape:

‘Fifteen rebels made their way to Paris Plage in a stolen lorry, having captured two young W.A.A.Cs en route. The attempts of the girls to scream for help were stifled when the underwear, of which they had been stripped, was stuffed into their mouths. The lorry halted for two hours in the woodlands of Le Touquet where the girls were carried out, forced to the ground and systematically ravaged by men behaving like sexually starved animals.

The girls were left half-naked by the roadside when the mutineers resumed their ride into Paris Plage, yelling that they would be back for more after they had had a drink. But, before that threat could be carried out, a bunch of rebels on foot caught up with the two women who were again forced to submit to a similar ordeal. Bruised, battered and beaten, as well as repeatedly raped, they were rescued early the following morning ... ’

On Thomson’s first confrontation with Percy Toplis:

‘By now Thomson was desperate. He took to the back seat of his long, open staff car on a tour of the areas of the camp that he had never seen before, stopping off wherever mobs of mutineers were gathered to deliver speeches that started off in a blustering manner, but finished in conciliatory fashion when he saw that threats were not going to work.

By 6.30 on the Monday evening, when Thomson ran into the Toplis mob on the river road, the much-shaken, confused general thought that they were on their way to raid the detention camp when in fact they had already been there. He was attempting to close the door of an empty stable. His car had to stop because Toplis and his men were blocking its route. Thomson stood up in the back only to have his opening sentence drowned in a storm of abuse. He got as far as, ‘ How dare you call yourselves soldiers, British soldiers…’ when the mob closed in on his vehicle and started to rock it violently. He was forced to sit down again.

Toplis had dressed for the part. That is to say, this was one of the few occasions when he was actually attired in a private’s uniform and not that of an officer. He held up his hand, signalling for silence from his followers. ‘What a sight it was to see the commanding officer there with tears in his eyes begging of us to let this trouble subside,’ recalls a Lancashire Fusilier, George Souter of Ardwick,‘ and appealing for us to keep up the tradition of the British Army.’

The sight of the ashen-faced general, sitting now in the back seat, encouraged Toplis to climb on the running-board and dictate the terms for ending the mutiny. It was for Toplis, of course, an entirely academic exercise since he had no intention of enduring the Etaples base in any shape or form. He was simply revelling in the revolution. The revolt would end, he told Thomson, only when the town of Etaples was thrown open to the troops, when the Bull Ring had been closed, the Military Police removed and food and general conditions improved. Thomson turned to make his chauffeur drive on, but he was forced to hear out the private’s demands.

He made no reply at that moment, but in the end he would be forced to concede every condition Toplis had laid down. It had been a short, sharp speech and, after he had delivered it, Toplis stepped down from the car and ordered his men to clear the way for it to continue ... ’

On the mutiny reaching crisis point:

‘Wednesday 12 September, was to be crisis day for Thomson, Toplis and the British Army. Three days of determined rebellion had made it impossible to dismiss the uprising as a mere explosion of anger, or the effects of drink, or the New Zealanders giving vent to frustration – all explanations which Thomson had come up with. It was impossible for Haig to countenance an impasse across his main route for reinforcements to the front. The battle for Passchendaele was due to start in eight days. There had to be a showdown ... ’

On Thomson’s final confrontation with Toplis:

‘At three o’clock Thomson, in despair, saw a thousand men brush contemptuously past the pickets and march off to the pleasures of Paris Plage. He decided to make a last personal attempt to turn the tide. Once again he called round his open staff car and drove slowly up towards the mutiny headquarters in the Scots IBD. A meeting was still in progress, but the news of Thomson’s arrival ended it abruptly.

‘All of the Scots crowded round,’ says Jack Musgrove. ‘In fact they were going to pull him out of the car. They wanted guarantees before they would settle the rebellion. They had to keep all the police away, close the Bull Ring, open up the town of Etaples. The general just stood there. And suddenly it was all granted. Just like that.’

Faced with the bitterness and determination of the mutineers, Thomson collapsed. Toplis and his followers had won.

Written Orders were posted round the camp saying that Etaples would be open until 10.00 p.m. All troops would henceforth go straight through to the front without any training at the Bull Ring. The police would not return.

Ironically, Thomson got back to his office to find the message he had hoped for waiting for him – but too late. The 19th Cavalry Hussars were ready to move with machine-guns at an hour’s notice. And the 1st Honourable Artillery Company, with 360 men under Lieutenant-Colonel Cooper, would be arriving at 6.30 p.m. ... ’

Reduced to Colonel and placed on half-pay in January 1918, Thomson’s service record received the following official endorsement: ‘From the Field Marshal: no longer fit to exercise command in the very important position of Base Commandant Etaples and have found it necessary to appoint a younger man to succeed him.’ However, with events at Etaples seemingly under wraps, Thomson was restored to his old rank and sent to Holland to command our P.O.Ws, many of them ex-Royal Naval Division men. Once again, however, his disciplinarian approach appears to have caused some upset, though in fairness the British Minister at The Hague later wrote to thank him for his good work, saying that he had been a great help in bringing about friendly relations between the two countries.

Thomson, who was placed on the Retired List in February 1919, retired to Vevey in Switzerland, where he died in 1926; sold with a quantity of research and a paperback copy of The Monocled Mutineer.