Month: January 2024

Sir Brian Horrocks shared a similar background to the leader of his group in Russia, Major Leonard Vining. They were both born in India, but went to boarding school in the United Kingdom. In Vining’s case, he attended Epworth College in North Wales with his elder brothers, Herbert and Arthur. After leaving school, where he excelled at sport and music, he returned home to work with the Indian State Railways. During World War I, he was a captain in the 25^th Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway Volunteer Rifles, an infantry battalion based in Lucknow tasked with guarding strategic points. After the Armistice, he volunteered for the British Railway Mission in Siberia and travelled on the SS Stentor from Glasgow in March 1919, reaching Vladivostok ten weeks later.  By November that year, he was a Major in the Royal Engineers, assigned to command the group in Omsk that was ordered to remain behind to run the Trans-Siberian Railway evacuation of people escaping from the Red Terror.

Vining was an outstanding leader in every respect. He managed not only to save the lives of tens of thousands of refugees, but he also secured the freedom of the British women and children in his care and brought out all his soldiers, alive from Russia in spite of the fearsome perils of frostbite, typhus and torture. Sir Brian Horrocks, who later commanded three Corps and knew something about leadership, provides this testimony about Vining after their departure from Russia: “I turned and shook Vining by the hand. Thanks to him our morale had always been high and discipline in our strangely assorted party had withstood the strain of all these months of captivity. On his shoulders had rested the ultimate responsibility and now he had brought the whole party safely out of the darkness of Bolshevik Russia into the light of the free world again…” So why was he not rewarded by the Government when he returned to England?

There are several contributory factors, but the main reason was the sense of embarrassment felt by the senior commanders who abandoned Vining in Siberia. One of the most damning pieces of evidence that I found was the secret correspondence in the photograph below between the Head of the British military mission and the Head of the British railway mission following the evacuation of the American and Czech railway troops. Between them, they decided to order Vining to remain behind with no means of rescue. It is clear from the telegram that the War Office was aware of this decision and thus complicit in the cover-up.

I am pleased to report that twenty years later, Vining did receive some recognition from the British Government, but this was nothing to do with his exploits in Russia. Early in the Second World War, he was in East Africa as part of the Indian Army contribution. After the Allies defeated Italy in Eritrea, Vining was placed in charge of all the transportation, including clearing the port of Massawa (now Mitsiwa) and reactivating the Eritrean railway and ropeway.  For this work, he was recommended for an OBE, but this was downgraded to an MBE, which was published in the London Gazette in 1942. Sadly, I have not been able to discover where he eventually settled, or whether he had any family, but it would be tremendous if the government was to finally recognise his outstanding humanitarian contribution in Bolshevik Russia.

Sergeant Joseph A Rooney was the most written about prisoner-of-war in the other soldiers’ memoirs and diaries. He is described as fluent in Italian, French and German and a marvel on the piano. Apparently, he was “well-known” as an accomplished musician and performer in the theatrical world of London before the war, but how he ended up as a Royal Engineer in the British Railway Mission at Omsk in November 1919 is anyone’s guess.

There is no doubt that Rooney’s talents were much appreciated after the soldiers were captured at Krasnoyarsk because they had to earn money for food and Joe brought in more than anyone by teaching Italian during the day and playing the piano in the evening.

After the prisoners were deceived at Irkutsk and sent to Moscow, they refused to work for the Bolsheviks and to raise morale, they had a sing-song most evenings. Rooney’s inexhaustible repertoire of music-hall songs were pinpricks of light in the pervasive gloom. Later, in the Ivanovsky gaol, he wrote a play that was performed by the soldiers and earned a thunderous ovation from the political prisoners and the guards alike.

These stories should have provided me with enough leads to discover much more about Rooney’s life after returning from Russia, but sadly I have only found one subsequent reference, when he travelled to Italy with his wife in the 1930s. I have searched many theatre sources including JP Wearing’s authoritative The London Stage: Calendar of Productions, Performances and Personnel for the decades before and after the war, but found no records of his performances. Perhaps someone out there can help?

Joe Rooney is Standing, Fourth from the Left in this Photograph

Herbert Edward Prickett was born in Tottenham, Middlesex on 11 June 1888. His parents were Laura and Harry, who was a Solicitor’s Clerk in London. By the time of the First World War, Bertie had emigrated to New York where he was a telegraph operator, but after the USA entered the war, he joined the Canadian Army and was part of the Expeditionary Brigade that was sent to Vladivostok. When the Canadian Government pulled their troops out, Bertie transferred to the British Army as a Railway Traffic Officer and found himself in Omsk in November 1919, ordered to remain behind to save the British citizens fleeing from the Red Terror.

Bertie was held in high respect by everyone in the group. He was appointed adjutant and as a talented banjo player, helped to maintain morale during the 12 month ordeal. However, his biggest claim to fame was when he saved the life of Teddy the Siberian Puppy, who became the group’s mascot.

After the prisoners returned by ship to England, Bertie had to put Teddy into quarantine in Harwich, so he did not catch the same train to London as the others. However, he did attend the reunion dinner at the Café Royal and signed the back of the HMS Delhi photograph. He spent some time with his family, who had moved to Croyden and then in 1924, he was appointed Engineer Operator In Charge of the new Government Wireless Telegraph Station at King Edward Point, South Georgia. This remote island, which was part of the Falkland Island Dependencies, earned international fame for its association with the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, who was buried there in March 1922.

Bertie Prickett is seated on the right and Teddy is sitting on Leonard Vining’s lap

Unfortunately, the names of those captured with Brian Horrocks at Krasnoyarsk in January 1920, found in the National Archives, does not match the list of the prisoners who returned from Russia that was published in the London newspapers in November that year. This conundrum took me some time to unravel and it was not until I received a letter from the Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum that I traced the background of the last prisoner, who joined Horrocks in the Andronovsky Prison.

Lionel Ricketts Grant was a case maker who attended Linden Road School and went on to work at the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Works and the Stephens Jam Works before joining the Army on 23 February 1916. He was wounded in France, torpedoed in the Mediterranean and served with the 7th Gloucestershire Regiment in Mesopotamia and southern Russia, before ending up in Baku. He is very modest about his adventures between the Armistice and his capture by the Bolsheviks in July 1920, but these matched any of the extraordinary stories I read in World War I memoirs.

His letter to home from the Russian Quarantine Camp at Terijoki, dated 12 November 1920, was the missing jigsaw piece that not only provided vital information about what happened to the prisoners after they left Petrograd, but also corroborated other stories, such as the role of the French Red Cross heroine, Madame Charpentier. After returning home, he married Fanny Rosina Hoyland and they emigrated to Australia on the SS Beltana with their son, Gordon. During the Second World War, he served with the Australian Army.

Lionel Grant is the tall soldier standing second from the left with a Gloucestershire Cap Badge

I am glad that since I wrote about Francis McCullagh in Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners, Wikipedia has published a biography about him, but I am disappointed that no mention is made about his two most important contributions to international affairs.

The first of these was his coverage of the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911. The great newspaper editor WT Stead, who died on the Titanic, described his contribution as “a potent influence on the policy of Great Britain” and wrote: “Francis McCullagh…whose ready pen, whose fearless spirit and whose presence in the firing line has made it possible to make the great public realize the criminality of the plunder-raid on Tripoli.”

His second pivotal role was during his time as a British Army officer in Siberia, for which he was appointed MBE (not mentioned in the Wikipedia article). He had already served in the Royal Irish Fusiliers at Gallipoli and due to his extensive knowledge of eastern Russia, he was sent as part of Churchill’s original team in 1918, as can be seen in the attached secret document. While working for the White Russian government in Omsk, he took charge of propaganda for the Supreme Ruler and worked closely with British Military Intelligence chief, Cecil Cameron, before he was captured with Brian Horrocks in Krasnoyarsk. His extraordinary adventures, torture and escape are told in Chapter 11 of Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners. When McCullagh eventually returned to London, MI6 interviewed him at the Hyde Park Hotel in May 1920 and the unique information he provided heavily influenced Lloyd George’s government in their foreign policy decisions about Russia.

The opening salvo in the annual game of Treasury brinkmanship began today with the Chancellor hinting at Tax Cuts and NATO warning about a Russian invasion. The scaremongering headline that governments are falling behind in their war preparations is designed to pre-empt the “behind-doors” arguments about cuts to the Defence Budget that will need to be made, in order to find the financial headroom for tax cuts. But where is the analysis that led the Head of the NATO Military Committee to liken the current situation to the 1930s when appeasement was at its height?

In 2001, before 9/11, the UK established a concepts and doctrine centre at Shrivenham that was charged with looking thirty years ahead to inform force development and the ten-year procurement of suitable equipment. I was in the original team that moved into the Alanbrooke Centre and used to teach MA students about the process of future-gazing across seven dimensions (Physical, Social, Science and Tech, Economic, Legal, Political and Military). This work was led brilliantly by a civil servant and included input from a huge array of subject matter experts. There was no other government department formally doing this and the results, known as Global Strategic Trends, were used widely in Britain and also fed into many NATO committees. It continues to be routinely updated and even has its own wikipedia page.

As we approach the second anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the latest analysis from the Alanbrooke Centre has led NATO to become even more pessimistic about the future. That is not to say that we have to stock our larders in case there is a Russian invasion of Britain this year, but it does mean that the Ministers charged with our protection must fund a civil-military organisation that prepares the country for the worst case scenario in the next decade.

Russian Threat

The British Army owed a huge debt to the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) that landed at Vladivostok in 1918, but never advanced further than the Maritime State. When the Ottawa government ordered their troops to return home, many individual officers and soldiers chose to transfer to the British Army and serve in Omsk and Ekaterinburg. A huge amount of their equipment was also donated to the remaining Allies and most importantly, the Canadian Mounted Police had to transfer 308 of their beloved horses to the Jaeger Artillery Brigade.

Five of the prisoners-of-war with Brian Horrocks, who attended the Café Royal dinner and signed the back of the photograph in my earlier posting, had Canadian connections. Edward Stephens was born in Bristol, but was working in Canada when the war began, so he joined the CEF, before transferring on 17 May 1919 to the British Army. Twenty year-old Bernard Eyeford was born in Manitoba to an Icelandic family and joined the Canadian Rifles, before receiving a commission in the British Army as a Railway Traffic Officer at the same time as Stephens. Fifty year-old “Uncle Charlie” Fred Walters was born in Birmingham and emigrated with his family to Canada where he worked as a riveter in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan. He joined the Canadian infantry, but transferred to the Royal Engineers in Siberia and after the war, he worked for the Canadian Railroad. Emerson MacMillan was born in Ontario, but was working in Philadelphia when he joined the British Army in 1918 and did not return to Canada after the war. Sapper David Smith, who also signed the photograph, was born in Canada, but his address on the back of the card is listed as Ashford in Kent.

Perhaps the most interesting Canadian did not attend the dinner. Bill Dempster, who was born in York County Ontario and married Eleanor Osbourne in 1911, was awarded a Military Cross for an act of outstanding bravery in Flanders on 26th September 1918. After his release from the Moscow prisons, he returned to Ontario and served in the York Rangers militia while working for the Provincial Police. In 1945, he became quite a celebrity when he was called as a key witness by the Royal Commission investigating political corruption. He spent three days giving evidence and was described unkindly by the Windsor Daily Star as head of the local “gestapo”. This clearly did not upset him too much as he was one of the oldest survivors of the prisoners, reaching the grand age of ninety in 1980.

Two of the Canadian Contingent After Their Capture By The Red Army

Brian Horrocks (A Full Life), Leonard Vining (Held By The Bolsheviks) and Francis McCullough (A Prisoner of the Reds) all published memoirs of their time as prisoners-of war in Russia. Although their recollections provided vital material for my book, they were not as important as the telegrams and diplomatic despatches from the British Consuls and army headquarters that I found in various archives. The one in the photograph below, signed by Charles Wickham (who was in the same house at Harrow as Winston Churchill) provided me with a comprehensive list of the “missing” soldiers in January 1920.

This nominal roll offers three crucial bits of information that led to more discoveries: the soldiers’ ranks, regiments and initials. It also gave me an important policy perspective by differentiating between the “Military Mission” and the “Railway Mission” (there were also medical, logistics and intelligence missions, but these had closed by 1920). As with many military documents, there are mistakes, so the information has to be cross-checked (for example, Horrocks’ initials are BG not RG, Johnston is spelled with an “e” and the list does not include Sapper Smith).

Four soldiers are included who did not share prison time with Horrocks and managed to leave Russia in April: Lieutenant Colonel EA Johnston; Major RE Mills; Captain HCG (or HGO) Smith; and CSM G Campbell. In the Siberian Honours, Eric Archibald Johnston was awarded a CBE and Edgar Ronald Mills earned one of the very few Military Crosses (he was later appointed an OBE for his work in World War II). We know that Johnston worked in Argentina on the Cordoba Central Railway and was also awarded the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun 4th Class, but sadly, I haven’t been able to trace the later lives of Smith and Campbell.

After the Café Royal dinner, the intrepid prisoners scattered around the globe. My next post will focus on the Canadian contingent, including the indominable “Uncle Charlie”, who emigrated from Birmingham with his wife, Emily, to Moosejaw in Saskatchewan.

There is plenty of evidence to show that many American and British soldiers returned from Siberia with Russian wives. I found a record in the National Archives compiled by the British headquarters in Vladivostock, which lists some of the women that qualified through marriage for evacuation by sea passage. Other discoveries from university and regimental archives included the Vancouver newspaper article in the photograph below, which reports that among the 1,226 soldiers brought by the SS Monteagle were 76 Canadians and a Hampshire sergeant who married a Russian woman on board the ship.

In the case of Warrant Officer Emerson MacMillan, who was a prisoner with Brian Horrocks, his betrothed qualified as a nurse in the American Red Cross while he was in training with the Inns of Court OTC. She served in Vladivostok while Emerson was in Omsk, but did not see him because the Red Cross forbade nurses from having any relationships with men while on duty. However, while he was a prisoner-of-war in Moscow, Dallas waited for him in England and when he returned, they married in London.

The MacMillans later lived in the USA, Brazil, Portugal and Switzerland. During World War II, Emerson tracked German agents in Brazil and was awarded an OBE for his work for MI6.

Bob Lillington learned Russian in Omsk and married a local girl named Ludmilla Martinova on 31 August 1919. Bob’s young bride travelled back to Scotland while he was a prisoner of the Bolsheviks and so he did not attend the dinner at the Café Royal because he took a train directly to join his wife in Edinburgh. Eventually, they moved south to Portsmouth where Bob’s father and uncle ran a plumbing business and Bob started work as an accountant at the Royal Dockyard.

I was delighted when his grandson contacted me and described what happened to the family after they settled in Portsmouth. Bob continued to serve in the Hampshire Regiment and was awarded the Territorial Efficiency Medal before the Second World War. Ludmilla was allowed to travel to Lviv in Ukraine to see her mother in 1955. By then, the Lillingtons were living with their sons in Southwood Road, Hayling Island.

Bob was not the only soldier to gain a wife from his time in Siberia as my next post will explain.

The Lillington Plumbing Business in Portsmouth