Lest we forget: Captain Noel Chavasse (1884–1917) VC and Bar,MC,RAMC

By 1917, all four sons of the Rt. Rev. Francis Chavasse, the Bishop of Liverpool, and his wife Edith were serving in France. Their stories, and especially that of the second son, Noel, are told in a beautifully written and very moving book by Ann Clayton. ¹

During 1917 the eldest son, Christopher, a padre was awarded the Military Cross. He survived the war and was later to become Bishop of Rochester.

His younger twin, Noel (Figure 1), had already been awarded the Military Cross and then the Victoria Cross in 1916. In 1917, he was awarded a posthumous bar to his VC and even now remains one of only three men ever to have been awarded a second VC. OPEN IN VIEWER

In that same year, the youngest son, Aidan, was listed as ‘missing, presumed dead’ despite the efforts of the third brother, Bernard, a medical officer serving in the same regiment, to retrieve him from no-man’s land. Bernard was himself to be awarded the Military Cross later in 1917.

Mrs Chavasse’s fragile health never recovered from the loss of her youngest son. Every year, for nine years on the anniversary of his death, she dreamed that she heard him calling to her from no-man’s land. On the eve of the 10th anniversary she died. She, at least, had her own faith and that of her husband to help sustain her. Another family in Liverpool at this time consisted of a widow, her daughter and her three sons. After the second son had been killed at the front, the mother committed suicide. After the third son was killed, the daughter was left to grieve alone. Only God can know the extent of that poor girl’s grief.

Noel Chavasse must surely have been one of the most remarkable men of all time. One knows before one starts to read Ann Clayton’s book that his will be a story of the utmost physical bravery; after all the man had a double VC and an MC to his name. But nothing can prepare the reader for the full extent to which this man was willing to risk life and limb for the sake of his wounded comrades. On the day on which he received his fatal wound, he had already been wounded three times but continued to work heroically. A fellow officer recorded how the men in the battalion were saying that Chavasse had actually won the Victoria Cross four times over on that fateful day.

His physical stamina in the heat of battle was superhuman. Like his twin, he had been an athletic Blue at Oxford and an Olympic triallist, but this was a man who could keep working in the most appalling and draining conditions, both physically and mentally, for 36 hours at a stretch with next to no rest and little in the way of food.

Two other things mark out Noel Chavasse as a man in a league of his own. His medical practice in the war was extraordinarily avant-garde, sometimes a year or two ahead of the rapidly changing accepted best practice. But what really separates him from ordinary mortals was not his medical practice, not even his extreme physical bravery, but his apparently limitless compassion for his fellow man, for the wounded man of course, but most particularly, whether wounded or not, for Tommy Atkins, the ‘poor bloody infantry man’ at the bottom of the pile, the bloke who somehow always seemed to draw the shortest of all possible short straws.

He organised a library for the men, not of ‘improving literature’ as some might have done but of what he discovered, by enquiry, that the men really wanted to read. Having established that dry socks helped to prevent trench foot, he tried to ensure that there were always enough socks available for every man to have dry ones. To this end, he urged his sisters to send out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of pairs. He purchased paraffin stoves for the dug-outs, the fuel being provided by a Liverpool business man. Some of the comforts came out of Chavasse’s own pocket as he would use his own money to cash the men’s postal orders and then send the postal orders to his sisters to buy the socks and other items.

The regimental historian recorded how Chavasse

had a genius for picking out those men who were near a breakdown, either in nerve or general health, but not yet so run down as to be hospital cases. Rather than send them into the trenches where their collapse sooner or later was inevitable, he kept them at his aid post as light-duty men, where in comparative comfort they had a chance to rest and recover. They paid their way handsomely. Did a man from the line come in [for treatment of his feet] he found when he put his boots on again that they had been dried and cleaned for him in the meantime. Did he come in from a night’s digging, wearied to exhaustion, he found one of the Doctor’s invalids in charge of a cocoa urn and got a hot drink that put new life in him …

Chavasse was never afraid to upset the higher echelons if he thought that by doing so he might benefit one or more of his men. On one occasion a man from another unit presented with a wound which Chavasse recognised from the powder burns and other features as having been self-inflicted. When challenged, the man confessed, admitting that his nerves were gone. Self-inflicted wounds could attract severe penalties, even the death penalty, for what was seen as cowardice in the face of the enemy. Chavasse cut away the telltale signs before dressing the wound and sending him back down the line for further treatment; but somehow the story came out and Chavasse found himself in ‘a spot of bother’. His bravery awards probably saved him from more than just some ‘bother’.

By the summer of 1917, Chavasse was engaged to his first cousin Gladys Chavasse and hoped to marry her on his next home leave. Gladys, however, had other ideas. She had already lost a brother, another doctor, in the war and was not going to brook any delay in changing her name from Miss Chavasse to Mrs Chavasse. Unbeknown to Noel, she had obtained a special licence to allow them to marry in France. But it was not to be. Only a day or two before she was due to travel, news came through of what were to prove to be his fatal wounds.

Gladys had been working as a volunteer in a Church Army canteen. She did so again in the Second World War, being evacuated from Dunkirk and later, as a civilian, was mentioned in dispatches for ‘gallantry and distinguished services’ at the battle of Monte Cassino. What a pair they would have made!

In his final hours, too weak to write to her himself, Noel asked the ward sister to write a letter to ‘my girl’. ‘Give her my love’ he said ‘and tell her that Duty called, and called me to obey.’

It was surely no earthly Voice that had been calling Noel Chavasse to obey.