A Toast to Tom

To Oxford, for the funeral of one of our oldest friends. The Crematorium Chapel is full to overflowing, for it is a sad fact that the younger you die the larger the number of people who can come to your funeral. Live to be ninety and you’ll have outlived most of your friends. Tom was just six months short of seventy, a milestone we passed some time ago.

He had a talent for friendship. Though he never married, and always lived on his own, his circle of friends was wide and he worked hard at keeping in touch. He had retired early (very early) but was the lynchpin of a group of friends and former colleagues – the ‘Old Farts’ – who met not often but regularly. Not that they got together to reminisce about the good old days: Tom had little respect for some of his former bosses, especially those he felt had dealt badly with younger members of the organisation. His wrath against his last boss was unfading: if we so much as mentioned their name, he imposed an instant fine of 50p for each offence. He never collected the fines – his good humour simply a way of deflecting his outrage.

 

Year by year Tom’s diary filled up with a kind of carefully-plotted royal progress, making his way around Britain or abroad to visit family and friends. He never expected any ceremony: he would arrive on the doorstep at teatime encumbered by rucksack, sleeping bag and pillow. These having been dumped wherever he was going to sleep, he was keen for us to go in search of the first pint of the evening.

Good beer always influenced his choice of the pubs to which we would be summoned to celebrate what he laughingly referred to as his ‘official birthday’. Indeed, the standards he applied to beer were exacting: Greene King was denounced for having abandoned hand-pulled ale in favour of what he likened to the Watney’s Red Barrel of dreadful memory. By contrast, he praised Hook Norton beer for remaining true to its origins; to prove the point he insisted we should visit the Hook Norton brewery with him. I thought I knew quite a lot about Victorian architecture; thanks to Tom, however, that day’s visit to the wondrously idiosyncratic but entirely practical five-storey Tower Brewery showed me how much I had still to learn – about beer and buildings.

He was a very good travelling companion.  Before the coming of Covid, continental itineraries usually included battlefields, golf courses and cricket grounds (he was a loyal camp-follower of the Barmy Army). We went on holiday with him at least fifteen times, initially to France, where our first night would be spent in Boulogne, staying at a quirky hotel with two things recommending it to Tom: first, its resident talkative macaw who greeted guests as they came downstairs to breakfast and, second, its proximity to the town’s Welsh Pub. This, though neither Welsh nor a pub, was a restaurant whose seafood, wine and atmosphere Tom relished. He had some special eating places, their locations usually determined by links with both world wars. 

The Old Tom Hotel in Ypres was a favourite, and its signature dish, Eels in Green Sauce, always his first choice; he would cheerfully disregard the dismay of his companions on catching sight of such a plateful. At Arromanches, the Marine Hotel on the edge of the beach (Gold Beach during the Normandy Landings of June 1944) offered another restaurant Tom was always glad to revisit. To see him on a sunny afternoon sitting by the window, ploughing through a pyramid of shellfish and gazing out to sea at the remaining concrete caissons of the Mulberry Harbour was to see a man at peace with himself and with the world.

Tom’s passion was military history, particularly the histories of the two World Wars, though 1914-18 perhaps more than 1939-45. On our first visit, he had offered to find for me the graves of two English poets, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas, both in Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries near Arras. We duly visited both – though not before my inadequate map-reading meant we got stuck in the centre of Arras, going round and round trying to find a way out; poor Tom’s rage (he was driving) on this occasion was mercifully short-lived and later became a standing joke between us.

 It was with Tom’s help that I first began to understand CWGC and German war cemeteries and memorials as a way of ‘reading’ the cultural history of the aftermath of war.  On that very first visit, he also took us to the Thiepval memorial and the Menin Gate, inscribed with what Siegfried Sassoon described as ‘those intolerably nameless names’; to cemeteries at Neuville St Vaast, at Newfoundland Park (site of the first day of the Battle of the Somme), to Vimy Ridge and to the German Cemetery at Langemark.  Langemark, largest of all the Great War German cemeteries, is surrounded by trees: ‘I’ve never heard birds singing here,’ Tom told us. Later he took us to Rancourt, where the British, French and German cemeteries are within sight of each other, each displaying starkly contrasting ways of expressing the imperative to memorialise. ‘The graves of the soldiers admonish to peace’: these words of Albert Schweitzer are displayed in all the German cemeteries. 

On other visits we found (with difficulty; my map reading again) the Anglo-German cemetery of St. Symphorien at Mons, with the graves of 284 German soldiers and 229 Commonwealth soldiers and a remarkable German memorial acknowledging the heroism of the English soldiers in the first battle of Mons – chivalry indeed. With equal difficulty we located the German cemetery at Vladslo, enclosed by high hedges and guarded by great oaks.  Here we saw the iconic statues of the Die trauernden Eltern (the Grieving Parents) by Käthe Kollwitz. We also visited the daunting Ossuary at Verdun and the grave of Wilfred Owen in the little village cemetery of Ors. Back in England we made almost the most unexpected discovery of all: a huge German cemetery hidden in plain sight on Cannock Chase.

These expeditions opened my eyes to the largely unexplored territory of contrasting British and German approaches to commemorating the dead of two world wars. This subject has preoccupied me now for the past twenty years, thanks to Tom; without him, I would not have been able to write and lecture in Britain, Germany and France about the art, literature and architecture of Remembrance. I can’t speak for my readers and listeners, but for me it has been one of the most important and rewarding subjects I have ever explored.

We didn’t agree about everything to do with the First World War. Once, while we were standing by the equestrian statue of Field Marshal Haig in the main square of Montreuil-sur-Mer, Tom ticked me off me severely, accusing me of underestimating Haig’s achievements and of overstating his responsibility for the huge casualties suffered by British and Commonwealth forces from 1915 onwards. I was duly chastened, knowing that Tom had read far more than I ever would about Haig. (Tom’s library of First World War history was, to put it mildly, extensive; indeed, I understand his entire collection has been given to the Library of his old Oxford college, St. Catherine’s; he’d have been very pleased about that.) 

I’d love to know, though, whether Tom had managed to read a recent book about Haig by the highly respected historian, Robin Prior: Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain 1914-1945, published just last November.  In the week of Tom’s funeral, this book was reviewed in the Literary Review, according to which Prior argues that, though Haig’s orders ‘betrayed flashes of insight into the sanguine [sic; sanguinary, surely?] realities of the conflict’, these were no more than flashes, ‘stifled by brutal, unwarranted overconfidence’ and what the reviewer called ’Haig’s lethal bullheadednesss’. I think Tom and I could have had a good argument over this book, perhaps after supper with a bottle of Calvados on the table.  Calvados was something else to which he introduced us: our trips to Normandy always involved finding a ferme selling its own Calvados from a barn behind the farmhouse. I shall miss him. Here’s to you, Tom.

Adrian Barlow

Illustrations: (i) Tom on the Isle of Skye, 2016 (ii) The Tower Brewery, Hook Norton (iii) The remaining units of the floating Mulberry Harbour, Arromanches, Normandy (iv) Equestrian statue of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Montreuil-sur-Mer. All illustrations copyright Adrian Barlow

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