The Western Front Association: furthering interest in the Great War 1914-18 | explore | learn | share

One of the most striking aspects of the study of the Western Front in the Great War is the mind numbing anonymity of it all. British infantrymen and their officers would disembark in France, or Belgium, as a thousand strong battalion and within a few months, weeks, or even days, many of them would be wounded or dead, often with an unmarked grave. Within days, from England, another draft would appear - 500 replacements for a single battalion was by no means unusual - and the whole cycle would start again, and often, again and again.

Of course, the high-ranking officer, the soldier renowned through valour, the coward and the dead were all acknowledged in their way. But in addition to these celebrities and casualties of war, there arose certain personalities who through sheer charisma forced themselves into notice amongst the cast of anonymous millions. One such was Major Sir John (Jack) Norton-Griffiths.

Those who have read the article British 'clay-kickers' and 'moles' on the Western Front, which appears on this website, will already have made an acquaintance en passant with John Norton-Griffiths (JN-G). Below, is a brief summary of the military career on the Western Front of this extraordinary British Army officer, with short digressions and background details as necessary.

• JN-G first became involved with the British Army in 1887, when, as a boy of 16, he literally ran away from his Victorian middle-class public school to be a trooper with the Royal Horse Guards.
• After less than one year of Army life another adventure beckoned; a friend bought him out of the Army in order to seek their joint prospects in South Africa as sponsored sheep farmers.
• From 1888 to 1900 JN-G lived and worked in South Africa.

Quickly forsaking his destiny as a sheep farmer, he tried to earn his fortune in gold mining under the auspices of the likes of the gold- and diamond-magnates Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato and Solly Joel. Thus employed, JN-G seriously set his mind to learning the art of tunnelling and mining in the gold mines of the Johannesburg Rand, and quickly became a mine manager. In 1896, JN-G was arrested as being connected with the ill-starred Jameson Raid on the Transvaal that was organised by the Cecil Rhodes' Pioneers, and ordered to leave the country.

Of course, he did not leave Southern Africa, he just moved next door to Mashonaland (now part of Zimbabwe), where he signed on as a sergeant in the Honey Scouts - a sort of local commando. In 1897, he was commissioned as Lieutenant and became a Justice of the Peace, whilst still holding a gold claim in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Then, in early 1899, he received a telegram from home that his father had died. He felt obliged to return to England.

Having done his filial duty, JN-G returned to Rhodesia, but on the 11th October 1899, the conflict that was to be called the Boer War erupted. JN-G looked around for a job suited to his talents. In February 1900, spurning an offer of the command of a squadron of Brabant's Horse, he became the Captain and Adjutant to the Commander in Chief of the British Forces in South Africa, the famous Field-Marshal Lord Frederick Sleigh Roberts of Kandahar and Waterford. This effectively made JN-G Field-Marshal Roberts' personal bodyguard.

At the successful conclusion of that bloody war, in November 1900, Roberts and JN- G returned to Great Britain by their separate ways.

• In 1902, JN-G resumed his interrupted career in tunnelling and mining. After getting married, and purchasing in the United States second-hand machinery on behalf of a investor, he took it to the Ivory Coast on the Western Coast of Africa in search of 'placer (alluvial) gold'. In 1904, the job done, he evaded the quarantine restrictions of a yellow fever epidemic and returned to Great Britain via Ghana.
• JN-G's next adventure was a huge step forward in engineering terms. He undertook the management of a seriously troubled construction project for the Bengula Railway, in what is now Mozambique. By July 1906, he had successfully built the contracted 100 miles of railway track. It was internationally acclaimed as a triumph of British engineering.
• In 1908, JN-G formed the Canadian Construction Company. Between 1908 and 1913 the company built many of the prominent buildings in Vancouver, Canada, and carried out several tunnelling, drainage and sewer projects in London, Manchester and elsewhere. JN-G's knowledge of these specialised underground contracts was increasing in quantum leaps. Other contracts included piers, jetties and part of the London Underground network.
• In 1910, JN-G was elected the Conservative and Unionist Member of Parliament for Wednesbury in the West Midlands of England. This opened new doors of influence that were to prove critical in the wartime years ahead.
• Next on the agenda was the 400 miles Arica to La Paz railway project in Chile, South America. On 10th August 1910 the arduous work was begun, and was finished a year later on 11th August 1911.
• The first big professional mistake that JN-G made was his underestimation of the technical problems associated with a big waterworks project at Baku, in Central Asia. Eventually his company was dismissed from the project.

Projects in Australia also came to naught, and were a big personal financial loss - over ?1 million, ?15,000,000 in today's money.

• Foreseeing the advent of a European War as early as 1908, JN-G was on hand on the 31st July 1914 - four days before Great Britain declared war on Germany - putting an advertisement in the Pall Mall Gazette. This called for those with whom he had served the British in Southern Africa to be ready to serve with him again. After some wrangling with the Secretary of State, Field-Marshal Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener of Khartoum, the formation of the Second King Edward's Horse (2nd KEH) was authorised on the 24th August 1914. JN-G was appointed Second-in-command and made a Major.

Meanwhile, the civil contracting went on and included many contracts for the British Navy and Army.

• By early 1915, the cavalry scene on the Western Front had become a bit stalemated. It was made clear that the 2nd KEH could only go to war quickly if they would fight on foot. This they rather surprisingly decided to do, and, on the 15th May 1915, found themselves in the British trenches in Flanders, Belgium. They participated in the Battle of Festuburg in which the majority of the 2nd KEH became casualties. The survivors continued to serve in Flanders for the duration of the war.
• Having survived his baptism of fire on the Western Front, and gained a Distinguished Service Order (DSO), JN-G concerned himself with how the already evident stalemate of trench warfare might be broken. He felt his specialised clay-tunnelling technology might offer a solution. Being JN-G, he went directly to see Lord Kitchener. He told Kitchener that, in all probability, the Germans were already busy digging tunnels under the British trench defences in Flanders to place high explosive mines under them and blow them and their defenders to Kingdom Come. JN-G wanted to employ his own gangs of excavators - the so-called 'clay-kickers' - to beat the Germans at their game. Kitchener & Co. were unimpressed.
• An unforeseen circumstance saved the day. On the 20th September 1914, as foretold by JN-G, the Germans, using tunnelling techniques and mines, blew up a half mile length of the trenches of the Indian Sirhind Brigade (Punjabis) killing, maiming or disorienting many of them. The Germans then just walked into the devastated trenches virtually unopposed. They repeated their success at St. Eloi, some miles north, on the 3rd of February and again, on the 10th, at almost the same location. On these occasions it was the 3rd East Yorkshire Regiment and the 11th Hussars/16th Lancers who were the targets.
• Whilst the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, (C-in-C, BEF), General Sir John Denton Pinkstone French vacillated, and the inexperienced and ill-equipped Royal Engineers did their best to emulate the Germans' success at mining, JN-G received the long awaited summons from Lord Kitchener. He was ready. For the second time, JN-G did a graphic description of his 'clay-kickers' digging technique. Lying down on the carpet, he demonstrated how the 'clay-kickers' lay on an inclined board and with both feet kicked at a spade to excavate, inch by inch, the heavy clay. And so, eventually excavated a small tunnel which could be enlarged by other tunnellers - 'moles' - to make an adequate space for movement to and fro, for placing mines.

Kitchener's response was immediate. He authorised the enlistment into the Army, or transfer within it, of 100,000 former 'clay-kickers' and 'moles' (in this later category he included English, Welsh and Scottish coal miners and Cornish tin miners) to form Specialist Tunnelling Companies. JN-G was instructed to leave for France that night.

• JN-G's contact in France was the Engineer-in-Chief of the BEF, Brigadier-General Henry Fowke. In traditional top brass fashion, 'the mining idea' had to be discussed by the Staff. This they did and acquiesced, subject to a final nod from the C-in-C, BEF, General French. Knowing that General French had rather more important things (at least to General French) to worry about, JN-G took the initiative and again placed an advertisement in a British newspaper; this time asking for 'clay-kicker' volunteers from his own civil engineering company. Two hundred volunteers were soon processed by the Army and in two days were in France. The imagined, and real, problems of discipline and management were soon swept away by the now ever-increasing need for urgency of action. Nine Royal Engineer Tunnelling Companies (250 men) were authorised as was, more contentiously, higher pay for the most skilled tunnellers.
• In order to attract the best available men who could do the job and see it through, pay had been arbitrarily set at six shillings and sixpence per day; three times that of a Royal Engineer sapper, and six and half times that of a infantry private.
  
• Soon the first recruits were on their way to the Ypres front in Flanders, Belgium. If anywhere needed some new technology to break the trench stalemate, the war devastated area in and around the Ypres Salient was certainly it.The first two features to be tackled were the already infamous Hill 60 (i.e. 60m or 200ft above sea level), and part of the Messines Ridge at St. Eloi. Hill 60 was not really a hill at all, but the spoil from a railway cutting. It had a commanding view of all the surrounding countryside. As with most of the military important high ground on the Western Front, the Germans had it firmly in their grasp. Number 173 Tunnelling Company was given the task of blowing up Hill 60, and No. 171, St. Eloi. JN-G's 'plan' already included other German fortified sites all along the Messines Ridge from Hooge to St. Eloi.
• As in all matters terrestrial in Flanders, it was the water-table level which determined where the digging would, and could, begin. First vertical shafts about 5 or 6m (16 -20 feet) deep were dug. By March 1915, horizontal tunnels were being excavated at all three sites, M1 to M3.
• Once the horizontal shafts were established, they were worked 24 hours a day with three, eight-hour shifts. Progress was about three metres (10 feet) of clay face per day.
• By pure serendipity, the tunnel at St. Eloi was abandoned due to water problems just before the Germans exploded a mine of their own. Work concentrated apace on Hill 60 to get the British mine in place before the Germans could explode theirs' there too.
• All the while, JN-G maintained a whirlwind schedule, driving between the Army HQ and the actual and potential sites in his official Rolls Royce, encouraging, urging and, when necessary, bullying and cajoling all the participants. It was all very much of a 'off his own bat' operation and, of course, not everyone was happy to go along with it. JN-G needed all his considerable charm and powers of persuasion.
• By the 10th April 1915, the three Hill 60 tunnels - M1 to M3 - were completed and it was time to charge, or mine, them with the multiple 100lbs bags of high explosive used to create the required 20m crater.
• At 7.05am on the 17th April, the three detonator plungers were simultaneously activated, creating a huge explosion with the debris fallout in excess of100m in radius.

It subsequently emerged that the Germans were within 48 hours of exploding their own mines at Hill 60. Everyone was well aware that, at least at this stage of the war, the Germans were determined tunnellers and expert with the camouflet; a small chamber, with a counter-mine, excavated to sabotage the British mine tunnels.

• Unfortunately, the British, in what initially came to be the usual pattern, had not elaborated their follow-up attack to the required degree of sophistication. Overall, no real gain was made; the finishing touches to the debacle being the German's use of chlorine toxic gas to sweep the British remnants off Hill 60.
• Even while the battle was raging, JN-G was wrestling with that other perennial problem, pay. 'Six bob a day for all tunnellers' was, as ever, the demand. The miners were mutinous about the pay differential between the 'clay-kickers' and the miners. Eventually, JN-G negotiated a settlement; every tunneller would start on two shillings and two pence being up-graded to the higher rate on proof of performance. Typically, JN-G immediately began the grading process of the men already on the strength of his favoured No, 171 Tunnelling Company.
• After the success of the Hill 60 mining operation, JN-G's thoughts now turned to broadening the activities of the tunnelling teams. His gaze fell on the whole of Messines Ridge as an objective and, with the discovery of the efficacy of a British explosive called Ammonal, a whole new sphere of operations opened up. (Ammonal was a mixture of three parts ammonium nitrate and one part aluminium with the explosive effect of 4 times the amount of black powder). TNT was also added.

He foresaw the creation of an earthquake mine, or rather a series of mines to create the effect of a huge earthquake, burying defences and defenders alike.

• Behind the scenes, the military machine ground on. It took all of JN-G's immense physical and mental energy to keep things moving in the direction that he intended, and in maintaining a steady flow of competent engineers and miners into the tunnelling teams. However, with General French's agreement to extend the British Front Line, and the inclusion of the Third Army into the Line in August 1915, the task was becoming too much for even a human dynamo such as JN-G. Also, the Chief Engineer, Brigadier Fowke, was feeling the strain, and was reluctant to take on yet more projects in Flanders.
• Further south, on the Somme, three more tunnelling companies has been assigned - Nos. 174, 178 and 179 - to the area that the British had taken over from the French.
• One more team - No. 175 - was assigned north of Loos. Here, four mines were successfully fired on the 25th September 1915 as part of what was to become the Battle of Loos.
• In October 1915, as a result of JN-G's hectic recruiting activities, four more tunnelling companies were formed; Nos. 250 -253.
• On the administration side, an Inspector of Mines for the Western Front was appointed effective from 1st January 1916. The 'new broom' swept clean, and was quick to resurrect the Messines Ridge tunnelling and mining operation; it would go cheek and jowl with the still secret 'Big Push' that the new Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Douglas Haig had planned for the Somme Sector. JN-G was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel (Temporary). With this came further realisation that his role was becoming an increasingly passive one as the new army engineers became experienced enough to take over the various operations. Still, he had one final 'big idea' and as usual he sold it hard.
• The 'big idea' was a mechanical tunnelling device and special shuttering to contain the clay spoil it produced. The mechanical digger JN-G chose was the 'Stanley Heading Machine' with a special cutting head designed for the flinty Flanders clay.
• The machine was installed on a site, near the village of Wytschaete, in the Messines Sector, by the No. 250 tunnelling team, and was started up on the 3rd March 1916. But its teething troubles proved terminal. By mutual consent the machine was abandoned in the hole of its own creation.

It was also JN-G's last battle with the Flanders mud. He took home leave He did not return to the Western Front during the Great War.

• In JN-G's absence the tunnelling work on both the Flanders and Somme Fronts continued.
• After a year of determined effort, many vicissitudes, and long worrisome periods of waiting, the order was given on the 7th June 1911 to explode the arc of the 21 Messines Ridge mines. It stretched from Hill 60 (again) in the North, in a 10-mile (16-km) arc, to Trench No. 127 near Ploegsteert Wood in the South.
• The 500 tons of Ammonal from the 19 mines that exploded went up with a with almost simultaneous roar, pulverising the German defences. The most southerly four mines were not fired for operational and strategical reasons and the two others were lost; one was discovered by the Germans, the second was flooded.

The earthquake explosion that JN-G has foreseen all those months earlier, had been achieved. That afternoon, the British top brass came to stroll in triumph along the now British occupied Messines Ridge.

On the 20th September 1930, JN-G dressed for bathing in the sea, and took a surf boat from the beach of the Casino Hotel near Alexandria, Egypt. Sometime later, the boat was seen to be empty, and a search party was launched. They found JN-G floating in the water, shot clean through the temple. No weapon was found, but the coroner's court gave a verdict of suicide. He was buried at Mickelham, Surrey, England on the 18th October 1930. He was just over 59 years of age.

N.B.: A recently published book, Tunnel-Master and Arsonist of the Great War, by Tony Bridgland and Anne Morgan, (Leo Cooper, 2003), has been a most useful source to confirm the record and provide additional personal information for this article.