Author: Rupert Wieloch

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

After the Café Royal dinner, the prisoners-of-war who returned to London with Brian Horrocks dispersed around the world. Captain “Bim” Neville travelled home to Australia before moving to China with his family. This well-travelled officer had married “Alia” in Petrograd in 1914 and they had a daughter, Alice (6 years old) and son, Ronald (3 years old), when they settled in Shanghai.

During the Second World War, the Neville family was interned in Yangchow (or Yangtzepoo) Civil Assembly Centre Number 3 where Alice had to wear the armband in the photograph below. They left China in 1945, just as Eric Hayes was appointed Head of the British Military Mission, but it is not known whether the two former inmates of the Andronovsky prison had a reunion in Shanghai.

My next post will be about the Hampshire sergeant who married a Russian girl in Omsk before Trotsky captured the White capital.

With Grateful Thanks To The Australian War Memorial

When the locomotive engine pulling the British carriages broke down, the British soldiers arranged for the 24 ladies and unfit men to be transferred to a Polish train, while they set off in sleighs along the track beside the Trans Siberian Railway Line. The Siberian winter of 1919-1920 was particularly cold and the temperature that evening dropped rapidly to below minus 20 degrees Celsius.

Some of the soldiers had purchased felt boots, but unfortunately, Percy James still wore the British issue boots which were about as useful “as a sick headache”, according to the group’s leader, Leonard Vining. When they stopped for the night, Percy had lost the feeling in a foot that had enormous blisters on the toes and heel. Vining, who knew enough about medicine not to be dangerous, applied goose fat to the frost-bitten areas and bought a pair of pymwy (felt boots) for Percy and these probably saved him from succumbing to gangrene.

Percy had transferred from the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry to the 1st/9th Cyclist Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment and in Omsk, he volunteered to help save the British civilians fleeing from the Red Terror. After the war, he was demobilised and returned to his family in Bath, but then married and settled in Bournemouth. I was delighted to be contacted by his family in Canada, who informed me that he helped put out fires during the Blitz in the Second World War and lived to a grand old age surrounded by his grandchildren.

Percy in India in 1918, before deploying to Siberia

Captain Dwyer Augustus Neville was not originally in Brian Horrocks’ group of prisoners. He contracted epidemic typhus during the great retreat from Omsk and was abandoned in a hospital by the accompanying British soldiers. Eventually, he recovered and was sent to join the last British prisoners-of-war in the Andronovsky prison in Moscow. We know that he returned with Horrocks because he is listed in the commander’s diary and the newspaper articles published after they all returned safely to London, even though he was not in the photograph taken at Liverpool Street Station.

Neville was born in Australia on 18th April 1892 and joined the Royal Flying Corps in February 1917. In September 1918, he was on patrol in an SE5A with Number 41 Squadron RAF when he was forced down over the Comines Canal and captured by the German Army. After he was repatriated on 13th December 1918, he volunteered for Siberia and a year later was stuck in the long line of trains trying to reach the safe haven of Vladivostok. 

Dwyer attended the Café Royal dinner and then returned to Australia. Contracting typhus does not appear to have shortened his life as he lived until October 1979 and is buried with his wife at Buderim Cemetery, Queensland.

The other prisoner to succumb to typhus was Sergeant Frank Illingworth, who can be seen in the photograph below. He had transferred from the infantry to the Royal Engineers and joined the British Railway Mission in Omsk. His signature can be clearly seen next to Horrocks’ on the Café Royal card, but I haven’t been able to discover for certain what happened to him in later life.

Typhus wasn’t the only medical problem facing the prisoners and the next post will cover the equally fearsome threat of frostbite.

When Captain Brian Horrocks was laid low with epidemic Typhus in Krasnoyarsk, the prospects looked bleak because the mortality rate was so high and the hospitals were so inadequate. However, Captain Eric “Georgik” Hayes, who had been with Horrocks in Siberia for almost a year was determined to help him survive. He escorted the semi-unconscious invalid to a private infirmary and visited him daily with extra food, often staying the night by his bed, wrapped in a raincoat. Without this aid, Horrocks would not have survived and the history of World War II would have been very different, but what about the man who played such an important part in Horrocks’ survival?

Trying to find out more about his character, a big breakthrough came when I discovered an archive donated by Jeremy Fairbank to the University of Leeds, which contained important material from his time before joining the Army. After attending grammar school in Lincolnshire, he was articled to solicitors before enlisting in the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry at the beginning of the war and eventually commissioning from Sandhurst into the Norfolk Regiment. He was an ideal foil for Horrocks’ exuberance, being more cerebral and measured, but this did not stop him from making the most of his Russian experiences and reaching the rank of Major General. He commanded 3rd Infantry Division in World War II before a stint as the senior British military commander in Nigeria and his final appointment as Head of the British Military Mission to China, where he was involved in the surrender of Japan. Sadly he died following a short illness not long after the end of the war.

Horrocks wasn’t the only prisoner to suffer from epidemic typhus and tomorrow, I will reveal what happened to the other two soldiers who contracted this pernicious disease.

Epidemic Typhus Killed More People in Siberia in 1920 Than Any Other Cause

Attending the commemoration service for Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks KCB KBE DSO MC, and speaking to his three grandchildren and friends who knew him, it is abundantly clear that he remains an iconic military figure and exemplar for aspiring leaders today.

There is much available to read about his stirring later life from his autobiography, public sources and the excellent life story by Philip Warner. Few can match his deeds as Olympic sportsman, war-time general, ceremonial diplomat, author and business director, but perhaps the achievement that makes him unique is his role as a successful television presenter.

He never kept a diary and was known to have thrown away most of his official papers, but during my research, I discovered fascinating correspondence between him and the Royal Marine captain who commanded the Royal Navy’s boats on the River Kama at the time that Horrocks was training White Russians in Ekaterinburg. I also discovered that he would have perished in Russia if it wasn’t for his good friend, Eric Hayes, who nursed him through a life-threatening bout of Typhus in February 1920. Hayes, whose signature is above Horrocks’ in the Café Royal photograph, also became a General in World War II and is my subject tomorrow.

With Edward Fox at Sir Brian Horrocks’ Commemoration

After their ordeal in Russia, the last British Army prisoners-of-war to return from World War I held a reunion dinner at the Café Royal in Piccadilly. Unfortunately, not every member of the group had remained in London, but those that did attend, signed the back of a photograph that had been taken on board HMS Delhi.

The signatures that are in the image below were my starting point for the research that went into Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners. I found it extraordinary what these men achieved in later life, but did not have space in the book to cover this aspect of the story. In January 2024, I will describe what I have discovered from various sources including university archives and verbal testimony, beginning on New Year’s Day with Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks, whose signature in in the bottom left of the photograph.

On Christmas Eve 1919, a dozen British families, who were fleeing from the Red Terror were stuck at Mariansk on the Trans-Siberian Railway Line with Captain Brian Horrocks and a troop of British Army soldiers, who had been ordered to remain behind to organise the evacuation of the White Russian capital, Omsk. The railway was in utter chaos because Admiral Kolchak’s army had been defeated and his government had collapsed, while he was stuck at Krasnoyarsk with the remains of the Imperial Treasury.

That evening, the British soldiers made the most of their situation. There was a babble of noise as 40 people squeezed into one carriage and ate their supper of soup, rice and vodka. A whisky bottle was shared around and they had an impromptu sing-song until 11.30 p.m. with a magnificent rendition of Helen of Troy and Give Me The Moonlight.

The soldiers’ incredible tale of survival through the Siberian winter, capture in Krasnoyarsk, deception in Irkutsk and imprisonment in Moscow is the subject of Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners, with an introduction by Count Nikolai Tolstoy, whose father escaped from Russia in the same ship as one of the British soldiers on this train.

Brian Horrocks and the last British Army Prisoners-of-War in Russia