GHNJ's War diaries

At the bottom of this page you will find links to GHNJ's war diaries.

Transcriber's notes

My brother-in-law, Michael Hume Jackson, has set up this website to provide information to scholars and researchers interested in the 1914-18 War, and we hope that it will be useful.

Some years ago, I promised GHJ’s son, my father-in-law Freddie Jackson, that I would transcribe his father’s war diaries. I managed only a rough draft before Freddie’s death in 1994, but at least he saw that and knew that the project was under way.

I took me until 2012 to feel that I had read correctly as much of the diary as humanly possible, and to check spellings of names and places, abbreviations, etc., as well as scanning in diagrams, photographs, pre-WW1 notes and post-WW1 correspondence, to complete an ‘archive’. It was lucky that, after months of not finding time to continue with the transcription, and returning to the obviously rapidly-written text of the diaries, it took only a few lines to be able to read it fluently again.

Apart from some papers and photographs relevant only to the family, which have been kept privately, the original documents of this archive have been lodged with the Imperial War Museum in London, so that they are available for researchers and other scholars to study, and as proof of the diaries’ contents; I would not like anyone to think that I had produced a work of fiction.

As I transcribed the diaries, I became fascinated not only by the account of the events in which GHJ was involved, but also by the personalities and interests emerging.

Arriving in Gallipoli with the rank of Captain on the General Staff of 13^th Division HQ, at the end of the War he was Lieut. Colonel and Acting Brigadier General with the 87^th Brigade. He was a stickler for organisation and a very keen horseman. His diaries open with concern, during their embarkation on 16/06/1915, for his horses, Maria and Puffles – no longer his own property since, like many others, he had sold them to the Government (at a favourable price to the latter – see entries for 8-11/10/1915) to provide horses for the war effort. It was understood that they would be attached to his regiment and go where he did, but this ‘promise’ later failed. Maria was transferred from 13^th Div to join 10^th Div (an Irish Division) in, probably, Salonika, and GHJ’s efforts to prevent this failed.

Army organisation had earlier been severely lacking in relation to horses when a shipment of 500 horses landed at Mudros Bay on 13/07/1915 (see diary 14/07/1915). GHJ found that no provision had been made to tether, water and feed these horses; he sorted things out, of course, and expressed his exasperation in his diary – not for the last time.

His opinions on the inefficiencies which he witnessed daily, and on the failings of some senior officers, were noted in his diaries. Even the successful withdrawal was almost compromised by the attempt of another officer, Col. Antill, to retain boats for each division rather than filling a boat and shipping it out at once, his notion risking 1680 lives rather than the 560 risked under the original plan (20/12/1915). On 21/01/1916, GHJ’s reflections include the comment that ‘we failed in the Peninsula first to last by bad Genls and bad staff work down to the smallest items.

I mean staff work in Divs was bad, Genls were bad & the show was therefore bad, tho it was already possibly doomed to failure through the fault of the Cabinet ......... good lives, valuable lives wasted & the men responsible commended for it!!!’

The top copy of his diaries was sent back in batches to his sisters at home, and I cannot help wondering if they passed the censors or were redacted, or even lost in transit. We do know that parcels reached his sisters, with various artefacts mentioned in the diaries, because the family has those artefacts, and fortunately the carbon copies in the notebooks survived and the unexpurgated originals are the text published in this website. The only omissions are due to failure of the carbon paper or the occasional illegible word which defied all attempts to read it, and these are marked as such in the transcription.

It was known in his family that the detailed plans for withdrawal from Gallipoli were devised by GHJ – his diary entry of 17/12/1915: ‘they had come back to my scheme’ makes this clear, as do the 28/12/1915 entry and some correspondence. There is no mention in the diaries of how many ‘schemes’ had been considered or what they consisted of, and I have seen the withdrawal plans attributed in some histories to General Brudenell White. Although it is likely that the latter chose this one scheme from among a number submitted for consideration, he did not devise it himself.

This note has concentrated on the Gallipoli section of the diaries rather than the Somme. Probably because I have visited Anzac Cove and the Gallipoli Peninsula, including Lone Pine and other points of engagement, and have seen the terrain in which all this took place in such close proximity to enemy front lines.

In the Somme section of the diaries, there is much of interest on the military engagements, and the post-war correspondence which touches on some of them is enlightening. The aerial photographs of the pitted landscape and demolished homesteads of the region, found amongst his documents, show the devastation wrought on the terrain.

Sections of the website contain lists of pdf documents or maps/photographs, with a description of their contents. It has not been possible to scan the very large maps, which are now held by the Imperial War Museum in London (IWM), but the brief descriptions should indicate if they are sufficiently of further interest to make a visit to the IWM worthwhile.

We have annotated the diary texts as copyright Peter Hume Jackson, and hope that anyone wishing to publish quotations from the texts would contact him for permission to do so, as a courtesy.

Janet Latimer Jackson