Keith Gregson
Snippets of war
The telegram about Joe
My recent article about the usefulness of the British Newspaper Archive (FT April) contained the story of my great-uncle who served as a telegram/telegraph boy just before the First World War – a job undertaken by my father and uncle in the 1930s. During the war, the word ‘dreaded’ could be applied to most telegrams. A knock on the door was often followed by written information concerning a member of the family missing, wounded or killed in action.
During my researches into officers’ records at The National Archives, I came across many such telegrams. In my own family archives, two telegrams have survived. One is a (rare) happy one informing my grandmother’s first husband, Fred Thomas, that he had been invited to Buckingham Palace to pick up a Military Cross awarded for his part in a trench raid near Arras in April 1917. My grandmother nursed him after he was badly wounded later in the same campaign. He died suddenly in the mid-1920s – probably as a result of the wound. The other telegram was sent to the wife of my other grandmother’s brother – Joe Greatorex. He was struck down by a life-threatening kidney disease attributed to the presence of rats in the trenches. The telegram informed her that she was due to receive a visit from an officer with information on Joe’s progress. Luckily he recovered in a war hospital in Northamptonshire and went on to be one of the country’s top gun dog trainers.