In the last flight recorded in his log book, Greg ferried another RE8 from Saultain to Abscon. This time it was 2924, and his passenger was Capt. Gordon.
Log Book
Date: 1919 Jan 1st
Machine Type: RE8
RE8: 2924
Observer: Cpt. Gordon
Time: 15 min
Height: 2000
Course/Remarks: Travelling to Abscon
Greg’s Last Flight
This was the last time that Greg took to the air at the controls of an RE8. It was some 9½ months after his first ever flight: an air experience trip in a BE2e on his first day of flying training:
Greg’s total flying hours up to armistice day had been recorded in his log book as follows:
Greg’s log book entries for 1-11 November 1918, with total flying times. Click for larger image.
Since armistice day, Greg had only flown for a further 2 hrs and 20 mins, at least according to the flights in his log book. (I’m still not sure whether he went for joyrides that were unrecorded in his log book.) Although his war flying total was unaffected by this extra time in the air, we can update the other totals as follows:
TOTAL TIME ON RE8s: 193 hrs 5 mins
TOTAL TIME IN AIR: 238 hrs 0 mins
SOLO: 227 hrs 55 mins
With Capt. Gordon at Abscon
So Greg brought Capt. Gordon to Abscon on the first day of the new year. Two days ago he had ferried RE8 2872 from Saultain to Abscon, with only sandbags for company. In this photograph, taken either on or shortly after 1 January 1919, Greg and Capt. Gordon (and Waso the dog) pose in front of 2872:
Greg, Capt. Gordon and Waso the dog in front of RE8 2872 at Abscon, January 1919. (Image retouched to reduce blemish.) Click for larger image. Credit: Greg’s War Collection
Although the photograph is undated, the background shows it to be at Abscon Aerodrome. More particularly, we can pin it down to to the northwest edge of the airfield, on the site of the more recently built housing as shown in the photos of Abscon Aerodrome in the post for 30 December 1918.
La Cité Ouvrière
The reason that it’s possible to be so precise about the location is the characteristic housing in the background. It is an example of une cité ouvrière.
This translates somewhat unsatisfactorily into English as ‘a workers’ city’. But that doesn’t properly get the meaning across. French Wikipedia defines une cité ouvrière (in translation) as a “concerted group of working-class housing, generally single-family”. By way of explanation, it continues:
It is originally an essentially residential area exclusively for workers in a particular factory and their families. It can be accompanied by communal facilities. In most cases, it is provided by the proprietor of the factory.
So in English we would probably say model village – but one in an industrial rather than rural context. British examples that have achieved some fame include Saltaire, Port Sunlight, Bournville and New Lanark, but French instances are probably more numerous even if less well known.
In any event, the housing above the rear part of the RE8’s fuselage in the above photo is part of Abscon’s cité ouvrière, named on the 1:40,000 map sheet 51A as la Cité de la République. It’s still there today, forming a rather more appealing living environment than the modern developments across the road on the airfield site:
La cité ouvrière d’Abscon (la Cité de la République) in 2018, across the road from the former aerodrome. Click for larger image.
And the name of the road that separates la cité ouvrière from the site of Abscon Aerodrome? Appropriately enough, it’s la rue du 11 Novembre.
In a quieter day than yesterday, Greg was down to do a counter-battery patrol. But the weather was dud, as confirmed on a brief test flight with Capt. Gordon (and his dog, Waso). This evening saw the opening under allied auspices of the Nouveau Théâtre Lille with a performance by Leslie Henson’s Gaieties entertainment troupe.
Log Book
Date: 3.11.18
Time Out: 15.20
Rounds Fired – Lewis: -
Rounds Fired – Vickers: -
Bombs: -
Time on RE8s: 187 hrs 15 mins
RE8: 2517
Observer: Cpt. Gordon
War Flying: 0 hrs 10 mins
Height: 500
Course/Remarks: Weather test. C.B.P. Dud.
Weather Test
Aircraft serial no. 2517 was back in service for the test at 3:20pm, thereby demonstrating that it took no more than a day to repair or replace an RE8’s petrol tank.
The weather test flight was mentioned in Capt. Gordon’s letter home to his mother today. In the letter he says kind words about Greg, who he reports wasn’t well*. Is it possible that these emollient words belied some sort of anxiety, following yesterday‘s brave/reckless (delete according to taste) adventure, in which they both could easilyhave died? Perhaps that is to read in too much.
3 November, letter to darlingest Mother from 42 Squadron, RAF, BEF, France
All goes well, but the weather alas has taken a turn for the worse. I am getting on quite well & am less lonely than I was before Waso’s return. I am beginning to get to know some of the people here. Waso went up today for a 10 mins joy ride. She didn’t enjoy it much!
I have moved downstairs in my billet & have got a very nice room. The people are very nice. The old lady thought the stairs were too much for me! & so they moved out themselves, which was extraordinarily good of them.
Leslie Henson (K. will know who he is, he was in Theodore & Co) is giving a show somewhere near here tomorrow evening. I hope to go & see him.
The Day’s Activities
I expect I ought to tell you what I have done today! Not very interesting but still, here goes. This morning I woke about 7.10am & read in bed. ‘A Knight on Wheels’, ‘till about 8am when I lightly leapt up & dressed etc. Breakfast, bacon & fried bread, then down to the aerodrome, pausing en route for the odd word with one or two fellows, on arrival at the aerodrome I found the weather was dud., so I went & looked at the workshops & got the SM (that stands for Sergeant Major) to explain engines & bits of engines. I then went & played about with a Lewis gun. I can’t remember what I did then until lunch time.
After lunch I hung about as I was meant to be flying, but the machine wasn’t ready & the weather was dud. I & Waso & the pilot went up for a test of a few mins. Waso didn’t care much about it. My pilot was a fellow called Gregory, a very nice fellow, about 19 years old. He isn’t very well having a touch of flu. After that I went & tidied up my room & had tea & read a paper, & here I am now writing to the dearest old mater in the world. I fear all this is dull to you.
And to End..
I wonder if Karf could very kindly buy & borrow the things on the attached list & send them out to me soonish. I lost a good bit while I was on leave! I am sending a quid along for expenses. I hope you all are flourishing. I wish often that I was back with you again. I did have a deuc’d fine leave.
The old war will soon be over really. It’s good all these other countries having come out of it. Very best love darlingest. God bless you. This would have been Donald’s birthday. Your v v loving Cedric
[Letter reproduced by kind permission of Keith Gordon, Capt. Gordon’s nephew.]
* Note added on 11 November 2018 at10:30pm: I was rather taken with Rob’s initial suggestion that Greg’s ‘touch of flu’ was actually a hangover resulting from too many snifters (a very Greg word) the previous evening after his harrowing afternoon!
However, Rob subsequently revised his theory on learning that Greg didn’t fly for the next five days: maybe it actually was flu. The post for 21 June 1918 recounted the time when Greg had flu at Rely (‘Merville fever’, he called it then). And from the brief discourse on the epidemiology of Spanish Flu in that post, it can be seen that it had a second wave in early November 1918. So Spanish Flu is a good candidate to explain Capt. Gordon’s reference to Greg being unwell, and why he didn’t fly for the next few days.
Capt. Gordon says that “Leslie Henson…is giving a show somewhere near here tomorrow evening”. In fact, that was to be the second of two performances opening the Nouveau Théâtre Lille, which is now the Opéra de Lille, under Allied auspices. The first was this evening. We don’t know on which night Greg travelled the 5 miles (8 km) from Ascq into Lille to see the show, but he seems to have gone to one of them as the programme is among his papers:
Programme
Programme cover page for the reopening of the Nouveau Théâtre Lille. Click for larger image.Programme middle pages for the reopening of the Nouveau Théâtre Lille. Click for larger image.
This must have been a hot-ticket occasion. In a fascinating article entitled ‘Lille under German Rule‘ on the Remembrance Trails – Northern France website, Claudine Wallart, the Head Curator of Heritage at the Archives Départementales du Nord, tells the story of the theatre during the First World War:
Destroyed in the fire of 1903, Lille theatre (now the Opera) was in the process of being rebuilt when war broke out. The occupiers completed the job and named it the “German Theatre”, opening with much pomp and ceremony at Christmas 1915 in the presence of Crown Prince Rupert of Bavaria and Lille’s governor General Heinrich. Artists from Berlin performed Iphigenia in Tauris by Goethe, a symphonic prelude and Liszt’s Festklange. On subsequent occasions the Ring of the Nibelungen and various light operas were also performed there but, although invited, the civilian population of Lille kept away. The German artists remained at the Opera until the end of September 1918 when they destroyed the sets and stage machinery and left.
In the intervening weeks since the Germans left, repairs had evidently made the theatre ready enough for tonight’s performance. No doubt General Heinrich and the German high command would have been aghast at the cultural plummet from Goethe, Liszt and Wagner to a singalong with Louis J. Seymour and crowd. And equally, no doubt tonight’s audience wouldn’t have given a toss. But how they would have relished William Ewart Noble’s ‘Advice to Another William’!
Leslie Henson’s ‘Gaieties’
The Nouveau Théâtre Lille was not the first venue at which Greg had seen Leslie Henson’s ‘Gaieties’ Army Entertainers. Exactly three months earlier, a few days before the beginning of what would be the Allies’ final offensive, The Gaieties had put on a show for 42 Squadron in the hangar at Rely:
The names mentioned in August are still there. Bert Errol, the ‘noted female impersonator’ had pieces in both halves of the Lille show. (You have to wonder what the ‘camouflage’ was in ‘Camouflage & Cacophony’!) Teddie Holton was there, as of course was Leslie Henson. A little over a month later, The Gaieties were still performing at Lille, as this Imperial War Museum photograph shows:
In what would turn out to be Greg’s last successful shoot of the war, Capt. Cedric Foskett Gordon was Greg’s observer for the first time today. Captain Gordon was one of the senior officers of B Flight, 42 Squadron and was evidently a remarkable character.
Log Book
Date: 1.11.18
Time Out: 13.15
Rounds Fired – Lewis: -
Rounds Fired – Vickers: -
Bombs: -
Time on RE8s: 185 hrs 10 mins
RE8: 2407
Observer: Cpt. Gordon
War Flying: 2 hrs 15 mins
Height: 7000
Course/Remarks: Shoot Portuguese. Successful.
“Shoot Portuguese”
This is nothing to do with shooting Britain’s Portuguese allies, of course. Rather, it is everything to do with observing a shoot involving Portuguese artillery.
For reasons explained in yesterday’s post, no Squadron Record Book entry is available for today:
Because of that, we don’t know much about the shoot. The battery, though, was evidently one of the few remaining Portuguese artillery units. The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps had suffered badly on the first day of the Battle of the Lys, on 9 April 1918. As a result of this, by the end of the war Portugal had only nine artillery pieces left, according to the Passion and Compassion 1914-1918 website. Two of them were heavy howitzers: a British 6″ siege piece, and a similarly sized Franco-Portuguese 15 cm T.R. Schneider-Canet-du-Bocage. Given that Greg’s shoots tended to be with heavy (siege) artillery batteries, it was possibly that it was with these howitzers that he was observing and directing artillery fire today.
What might the target have been? We don’t know. Maybe it was one of the usual suspects: a hostile battery (Greg’s most frequent target), an ammunition dump, trenches, or a strategically important crossroads. Or it might have been something unusual, thrown up by the unprecedented circumstances in these last, heady days of the war. In any event, the target must have been east of the River Scheldt/Escaut, along which the British front line still ran in Greg’s sector. Some miles both to the north and and to the south of Tournai, though, further eastward progress had been made:
The British Front on the morning of 1 November 1918. Adapted from a map accompanying General Haig’s despatches on the final British offensive. Click for larger image. Map credit: IWM/TNA/Great War Digital.
Captain Cedric Foskett Gordon MC, CdG
Greg’s observer today was Captain Gordon. Capt. Gordon was one of the two commanding officers of B Flight of 42 Squadron. He was evidently quite a character.
The following brief distillate of Capt. Gordon’s life comes, with permission, from Matt Ball’s informative Sevenoaks WW1 blog (see main link below or here):
Early Life and Wartime
Cedric Gordon was educated at Lancing College, were he excelled in sports. In 1910, he was commissioned into the North Staffordshire Regiment. He was sent to France on the outbreak of war and was wounded twice. In 1915 he was awarded the Military Cross for leading an attack on a village.
His second injury was the most serious and resulted in his losing a leg. You might be forgiven for thinking that this would be the end of his war service but Cedric joined the Royal Flying Corps and continued his wartime service as an observer and air gunner on the Western Front. He was subsequently awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1917, was mentioned in dispatches four times and awarded the military class of the OBE in 1919.
According to a nephew, quoted in his obituary, Cedric was shot at during one flight with the bullet shattering his wooden leg. On landing, he was said to have found the stray bullet in his pocket and was confined to bed until the camp carpenter had made him a new leg.
Post War
After the war, and having gained his pilot’s licence despite his wooden leg, Cedric was sent to Russia with British forces to aid the White Russians in the Crimea in their fight against the Bolsheviks. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and received the Order of St Ann and the Order of St Stanislas from the Russians. After leaving Russia, he flew in Palestine, where during one flight for reconnaissance work, he was forced to land in the desert and was, according to his obituary ‘picked up by a band of friendly Arabs’.
Cedric later worked for British intelligence in mainland China, before returning to England and taking command of the RAF Bloom Centre. During the Second World War, he was eventually put in charge of the South East Air Training Corps and was also a member of the Home Guard.
Retirement
On his retirement, he returned to Lancing College, where his brother Edward was a Master, to become Bursar. Later in life he became well known in Sevenoaks for his involvement in the local scouting movement.
No doubt it was Capt. Gordon’s unusual circumstances that meant he was one of two officers in B Flight to hold the rank of Captain. The other was Capt. Bill Ledlie (of whom more here).
First Day Back
As it turns out, 1 November 1918 was Capt. Gordon’s first day back at the squadron at Ascq. For part of October he had been on leave in the UK. When he returned, he found that his dog (who rejoiced in the name of Waso) was missing. His own account of the day and the latter part of his journey back is preserved in a letter to his mother. This letter is one of a number kindly made available by Cedric Gordon’s nephew, Keith Gordon. As Matt Ball notes in another post on the Sevenoaks WW1 blog (see below, but also linked here):
What emerges from these letters is a strong sense of a close, spirited family, each with at least one nickname (Cedric’s was ‘beast’ owing to his general strength), and a spirit of adventure embodied by Cedric himself. No doubt some of his insouciance is designed to reassure his worried mother, to whom all of these letters are addressed…
With that as background, here is the text of Cedric Gordon’s letter of 1 November 1918:
All Saints Day (1 November) letter to darlingest Mother from 42 Squadron, RAF, BEF
I have arrived at last.
To go on where I left off. O’Keefe & I went & lunched at an estaminet where we had an excellent fish, some veal & a bottle of red wine, all of which made me far more contented with the world at large. This done, we returned to our vigil at the Town Mayor’s office & at about 3pm our Tender finally arrived. After a long & uneventful journey we arrived at the Squadron about 7pm.
Waso was reported missing, believed to have been stolen by a general belonging to the Corps. This was rather depressing, but the major who commanded 42 Sqn promised to take me round to the Corps with a view to returning my hound. I had dinner with HQ Mess & then went round to my Flight Mess (B Flight) & found them full of good cheer & beer. We had quite an amusing evening. I have got a very nice billet. There are quite a number (at present unknown) of French people living here. They have provided me with a very nice room upstairs & a large bed, sheets etc & a very small basin! The natives speak very bad French & I can’t make a great deal of headway with them, however they are very friendly.
This morning…
…I rose about 7.30am & sorted out my hut, such of it as hasn’t been lost during my absence. I spent the morning playing about with a Lewis gun & this afternoon I went up for a short time. This is an extraordinary safe job & no one gets hurt at it. So don’t you worry, dear old bird.
This evening…
…I went down with Hunter (the OC) to the Corps to interview this General man who had acquired Waso. I looked through the glass door & saw old Waz inside, so softly I opened the door & Waso came bounding out. She was awfully pleased to see me, almost as pleased as I was to see her. After a bit I got hold of the General who was a very nice fellow. He said he found her many miles away & had adopted her. I expect someone had picked her up in a lorry or some vehicle & dropped her off after a bit.
He was very loath to part with her & said he was very fond of her, which is not surprising. However, he gave her up & I promised him a puppy when the next instalment arrives, & we parted friends. Normally people go to bed here about 8.30pm, which is rather dull. They are, on the whole, a very comic crowd, but there are several very nice fellows.
I have missed you…
…most awfully. It is rotten leaving you, however before very long now the war will be over & Waso & I will return to the family. No more news at present. Very fondest love darlingest. Best love to Karf who, together with my old Mother, made my leave absolutely splendid. I hope Am is well. God bless you darlingest.
Photos
Greg had a few photos of Capt. Gordon in his collection. The two of them must have been in touch after the war, as that is evidently when at least a couple of the photos were taken. I’m grateful to Keith Gordon for his help with identifying the locations of the last two.
Captain Cedric Foskett Gordon. Credit: Greg’s War Collection. Click for larger image.Captain Cedric Foskett Gordon. Credit: Greg’s War Collection. Click for larger image.Captain Cedric Foskett Gordon. This was a post-war photograph from the time he was a member of the Mission to South Russia (1919 – 1920). Credit: Greg’s War Collection. Click for larger image.Captain Cedric Foskett Gordon. This was a post-war photograph, taken during his return to UK from South Russia. Credit: Greg’s War Collection. Click for larger image.
A Telling Tale
To get a further flavour of Cedric Gordon’s character, here is a link to Matt Ball’s second post on Cedric Gordon, which contains the text of several more letters. The last of the letters, dated 24 September, is worth reading in particular. It is about a scouting excursion on the ground beyond the lines.
Sevenoaks WW1 
