The Lost Tommies

Almost a century later it is easy to imagine that the ghosts of these lost Tommies still linger in the ancient French farmhouse where these photographs were taken. On a bitterly cold winter morning, above the very farm courtyard where thousands of young soldiers posed, I am stumbling up an ancient wooden spiral staircase on the last leg of what has been an intriguing historical detective story chasing the clues in the Thuillier images. Each step takes me further back in history, through the detritus of a family home stretching back generations. The wobbly and uneven steps are layered with dust, and I have to steady myself against the crumbling plaster and brick walls. I feel my way in the murky gloom as I step into the attic of this old farmhouse.

The attic is a long, dusty, oak-floored room. Although I am wrapped against the bitter cold of a French winter, the biting chill still penetrates the gaps in the eaves and walls. We move aside old leather suitcases, saw blades and bottles, a stack of empty salvaged Second World War American jerrycans; in one corner is an elegant, perfectly preserved nineteenth-century baby’s carriage with large painted cast-iron wheels. Above our heads the knots of old tree limbs can still be seen in the hand-chiselled oak beams supporting the heavy tiled roof.

My breath is visible as condensation in the frigid air. There is only the sound of feet shuffling up the stairs behind me, and the muffled noise of the occasional vehicle outside. We are all mute with anticipation. It scarcely seems possible that this decrepit attic could be, after months of searching, the place where a treasure trove of extraordinary First World War photographs has lain hidden. There are mounds of old motorcycling magazines from the 1930s that we carefully lift aside, peeling back the decades of a family’s jumble. Everything is covered in a thick layer of dust.

Then, by the light of an attic window, we see three old chests.

I lift the lid of one of them, a battered ancient metal and wood chest. And there they are: thousands of glass photographic plates – candid images of First World War British soldiers behind the lines. There were also Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, American, Indian, French and other Allied troops.

PLATE 13 The battered chests in which the glass plates were stored. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)

THE ORIGINS OF ‘TOMMY’ (#ulink_edb89867-83cc-530b-939b-4f3a7a5c8282)

There was a touching naivety among the officers and men who had marched to war as ‘Pals’ and volunteers; the depth of patriotic feeling and the urge to rush off to war to defend Mother England may seem extraordinary today. But this was an era of the great British Empire and there was enormous pride and loyalty to King and country. Men were proud to be British ‘Tommies’, a curious term for British soldiers that many believe has its origins in a story that underlines the blood and sacrifice that for most Britons back then made Great Britain and its empire ‘Great’. The term ‘Tommy Atkins’ was being used as a generic description of British troops early in the eighteenth century. But one account of how First World War troops came to be known as ‘Tommies’ was that it was appropriated from the story of a British soldier named Tommy Atkins who had died in a battle in Flanders, Belgium, in 1794. The story went that the Duke of Wellington was inspecting badly wounded soldiers after a battle. One of the wounded men was named Tommy Atkins. It was the stuff of legend that Tommy, asked if he was in pain, reassured the Duke: ‘It’s all right, sir. It’s all in a day’s work.’ Tommy’s stiff upper lip just before he died was seen as exemplifying the best of British courage and dogged persistence against terrible odds.

Perhaps, as the notable historian Richard Holmes has more soberly suggested, the real derivation was an 1815 War Office publication which used the name of ‘Private Tommy Atkins’ as an example to show soldiers how to fill out their Soldiers Pocket Book.

Whatever the true reason, the term ‘Tommy’ or ‘Tommies’ became a well-known generic and affectionate name for British soldiers throughout the war.

Finding the Thuillier Photographic Plates (#ulink_ae851f15-2dcc-5eed-bd17-07be595b2a2c)

The astonishing discovery all started with a healthy journalistic hunch. In a series of articles in May 2009, London’s Independent newspaper published images of some glass negatives of First World War soldiers. Most of the photographs were of British ‘Tommies’ and a handful depicted Allied soldiers from the far corners of the then British Empire. The accompanying articles said the photographs were rescued from a rubbish heap somewhere in northern France. The high-definition, near-century-old images generated great interest both in the United Kingdom and overseas and were by far the most visited items on the Independent’s website in that period. Intriguingly, the articles, written by John Lichfield, shed no light on who took the photographs – saying only that the photographer was ‘unknown’. The Independent stories recorded that the small cache they published had probably been stored in the attic of a barn at Warloy-Baillon, only a short distance from the original battlefield front lines. Warloy-Baillon was the site of an Allied clearance hospital during the war. In 2007 the barn was renovated and the plates were thrown into a rubbish skip but they were ‘rescued’ by passers-by. Dominique Zanardi, proprietor of the ‘Tommy’ café at Pozières, uncovered the Warloy-Baillon photographic plates with the help of a local photography enthusiast Bernard Gardin. Zanardi told the newspaper that the photographs were possibly the work of two separate photographers, but that attempts to find the location where they were shot or the photographers’ descendants had failed.

When the Independent stories were published online I was enthralled by the images – especially by the small number of images of Australian soldiers among them. There were also a handful of images held in the Australian War Memorial archives which, intriguingly, showed groups of men, clearly in a different location, photographed in front of the same distinctive canvas backdrop. Were there more? I and my colleagues wondered.

PLATE 14 A 1918 image of a group of Royal Fusiliers. The soldier seated on the ground is a machine gunner.

Outside of the war photographs taken mainly by British official photographers, there are relatively few high-quality images captured around the Western Front in France and Belgium during the First World War – especially images of the life immediately behind the lines in the rest and training areas like Vignacourt. Unlike at the Dardanelles, where many Allied soldiers took cameras into the front lines, on the Western Front the British command strictly banned servicemen from taking cameras into battle zones. From early in the war, authorized military photographers took most photographs but even these were limited for reasons of security. The images published in the Independent fuelled speculation that there might be more images like them taken by French locals or others not in an official role. Were there more photographs to be found? It seemed a reasonable prospect for further investigation.

The real hero of this story is Laurent Mirouze, a Loire Valley antiques and furniture dealer as well as a published historian and experienced journalist. Late in the 1980s, one of Laurent’s friends, who knew of his passion for military history, mentioned that he had seen some beautiful photographs of First World War soldiers on the walls of a council building in the small Picardy town of Vignacourt, just north of the city of Amiens. Sensing a good story, Laurent decided to drive the few hours from his home to Vignacourt to take a look. There, hanging on the walls of the tiny council offices, were the most extraordinary pictures featuring Allied soldiers, mainly British and Australians. Only about twenty pictures were exhibited, but Laurent eventually tracked down the photographer who had printed them from the original plates, a Vignacourt resident, Robert Crognier.

PLATE 15 Robert Crognier. (Courtesy Madame Crognier)

PLATE 16 Laurent Mirouze inspecting some of the Thuillier plates in 1989 before they disappeared. (Courtesy Laurent Mirouze)

When Laurent visited Monsieur Crognier at his home in 1989, he was astonished to discover that the photographs he had seen displayed at the local council offices were just the tip of an iceberg. There were thousands of pictures on photographic glass plates, he was told. He learned of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and Monsieur Crognier told him the plates were still in the possession of the family. (Monsieur Crognier was a nephew of Louis and Antoinette, and he had reproduced the images from the plates with the permission of Roger Thuillier, one of their sons.) Monsieur Crognier explained to Laurent that the collection was housed at the time in a family home in Vignacourt and, while he let Laurent take photographic prints of several hundred of the plates, he never disclosed the precise location of the full collection. As it turned out, this was an entirely separate collection from the photographs later published by the Independent.

Laurent realized very quickly that the plates were hugely important not only to British but all other First World War Allied countries’ military history. They were also a cracking good story for this aspiring military historian. He had himself photographed reviewing the plates, thinking – not without good reason – that he would have media and military historians beating a path to his door to view the collection. With the permission of Robert Crognier, Laurent wrote an article in France and England, revealing the discovery and publishing some of the images.

PLATE 17 Two Royal Fusiliers. The soldier standing wears the stiff service cap and the soldier seated the softer cloth cap introduced after the war began.

In the spring of 1990 Laurent also rang the Australian Embassy in Paris, formally writing to them and sending them copies of some of the pictures so they could see for themselves. ‘I said there’s hundreds of them – could this be of any interest to you?’ Laurent recalls. ‘But I could feel very clearly that they were not very interested in the story. A shame!’ Laurent laconically comments today, ‘Maybe these people are not interested in the First World War.’ Laurent never heard back from anyone at the Australian Embassy, nor did he get much interest from British researchers. Despite this, he made one last effort to alert military historians to his discovery by publishing a story about the Thuillier collection in a British military magazine, Military Illustrated, in November 1991. Absurdly, nobody ever contacted Laurent Mirouze. So he got on with his life, thinking no one was interested.

But there was someone else also trying to track down the Thuillier plates. Peter Burness, a historian from the War Memorial in Australia, is a tenacious military history investigator and a passionate First World War buff. In about 1990 a small commemorative pamphlet published in Vignacourt had landed on his desk. It featured a small sample of the prints of Allied soldiers which had been retrieved from the Thuillier plates by Robert Crognier. The pamphlet even helpfully told readers that these pictures were a fraction of the 3,000 or more images taken by Thuillier and his wife. ‘The photographs of this booklet are only samples of the collection,’ the pamphlet reads.

PLATES 18–19 The cover and images from the Vignacourt brochure featuring some of the Thuillier pictures.

The pamphlet had been produced for a commemorative ceremony on 22 April 1988 in Vignacourt. The guests included dignitaries and officials from the Australian Embassy in France. They were there for the dedication of one of the town’s streets to Australia, to be called ‘Rue des Australiens’, a tribute organized by Robert Crognier, the mayor Michel Hubau, and René Gamard, a Vignacourt historian. The Frenchmen were honouring a promise made back in 1918 by the town’s then mayor, Monsieur Thuillier-Buridard, to keep an ‘eternal bond’ with Australia and other Allied nations that had fought for France’s freedom.

For the ceremony, a small number of the Thuillier images were displayed by the proud locals. Like so many French people, the villagers of Vignacourt still honour the Allied soldiers who died for their freedom. Unfortunately the visiting officials seemed to have had no idea of the significance of the photographs and were still ignorant of their importance two years later when Laurent approached the Australian Embassy in Paris. However, gazing at the pamphlet on his desk, Peter Burness recognized the plates’ historical importance and set about trying to track down the source. Sadly, by the mid-1990s, Robert Crognier was ill and in 1997 he passed away. Repeated efforts to contact the remaining Thuillier relatives through the town council offices failed. Despite years of searching, it seemed the more Peter hunted for the elusive Thuillier collection, the more he sensed a deliberate evasiveness by some around Vignacourt. So the whereabouts of these photographic plates remained unknown.

In the course of our investigations, we approached a British historian, Paul Reed, who is well known for his books on the First World War and who also lives part of the year in a house in the Somme countryside. Paul was unable to shed any further light on the provenance of the Warloy-Baillon collection, but he did tell us about Laurent Mirouze, whom he had heard might know something about another collection of photographs.

From the moment we first spoke to Laurent, the Frenchman was overjoyed that somebody had finally contacted him. ‘I’ve been waiting twenty years for this,’ he said to us in our first phone call late in 2010. He told us that his photographer friend Robert Crognier had died in 1997, but Laurent agreed to help in the search for the full collection of plates. It was not an easy task. Each time we rang Vignacourt locals, our efforts to find Thuillier relatives were met with a polite rebuff. The family members with knowledge of the collection seemed to have disappeared. It was only later, when we actually knocked on their door, that we learned of an internal family rift; some members of the Thuillier family did not want the collection to be found. We learned that the Thuillier images had ‘disappeared’, probably because some family members, now dead, resented the way that all First World War memorabilia was being acquired by the French government in order to build up the collections of its war museums – including the large regional museum in nearby Péronne. It would seem the Thuillier plates went underground after the 1988 ceremony because some locals did not want the French government to plunder a piece of Vignacourt heritage without giving adequate compensation in return.

And so it happened that on a cold February morning in early 2011 in Vignacourt, we began where Laurent’s quest had ended twenty years earlier, at Vignacourt’s council building. There in the council chambers we saw the handful of tantalizing pictures hanging on the walls. The Australian War Memorial historian Peter Burness was with us and he was amazed by the quality and clarity of the images on the council chambers’ walls. The big question now was, where was the rest of the collection?

PLATES 20–21 Laurent Mirouze back where the trail started in 1989, and showing Peter Burness what he found on the walls of Vignacourt’s council chambers.

The breakthrough came after a day or so of knocking on doors led us to Madame Henriette Crognier, Robert’s widow, who still lived in the town. We were ushered into her cluttered living room and, as her cat purred under the table, Madame Crognier’s bright eyes scanned ours as we spoke of our search for the pictures. When we explained in detail the enormous historical significance of the pictures, and expressed our hopes that the Australian images at least would be displayed at the War Memorial, Madame finally let a gentle smile lift the corners of her mouth and with a twinkle in her eye she left the room.

Laurent was acting as our translator, and I anxiously asked him if we had said something to upset her. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘She says she has something for you.’ Madame Crognier had decided to trust us. Within a few minutes she returned with a couple of Second World War ammunition boxes under each arm, and a big smile on her face. She slid the metal cases over the table and, with her hand on one of them, said with a Gallic flourish, ‘Pour les Australiens,’ and flicked the lid open.

PLATE 22 Madame Crognier shows Peter Burness and Laurent Mirouze her secret stash of Thuillier plates. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)

After all these years she still had some of the Thuillier glass plates her husband had retrieved from the family’s hiding place. Better still, she believed the remaining thousands of plates were indeed still in Vignacourt in a farmhouse owned by Louis Thuillier’s grandson and granddaughter. We sat there stunned. ‘Thousands of plates?’ I asked. ‘Thousands of plates,’ Laurent confirmed the translation. I stumbled on for confirmation: ‘… that have never been seen before?’ ‘Oui,’ Madame replied, now delighted with our reaction.

Through Madame Crognier we learned of the surviving descendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, among them their granddaughter, Madame Eliane Bacquet, and their grandson, Christian Thuillier. Neither of them lived in Vignacourt any more but they did still jointly own the empty farmhouse where Louis and Antoinette had offered their photographic services to passing soldiers. Finally, after days of intense negotiations, they agreed to take us to the farmhouse. As it happened, our timing was propitious because the family was thinking of selling the old farmhouse and, in a few months, we were told its contents might well have been thrown on to a rubbish heap.

PLATE 23 A wartime photograph of the front of the Thuillier home at the time when many of the photographs were taken. (From the Thuillier collection)

PLATE 24 Exterior of the Thuillier farmhouse, Vignacourt, February 2011. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)

At the old kitchen table in the run-down farmhouse, Madame Bacquet told a sad story from the Great War. Her mother, the daughter-in-law of Louis and Antoinette, had described how as a young woman during the war she had heard the screams of young wounded men passing through the village in horse-drawn ambulances. ‘They were calling for their mothers,’ she said. ‘It was very sad.’

PLATE 25 Soldiers of the Army Services Corps pose with their Dennis troop-carrier truck in the main street of Vignacourt during the war. The buildings behind them still stand today.

Madame Bacquet would have made a good probing military interrogator in another life, questioning us for several hours about our motives. As it became clear to her that our quest was an honourable one and that the proud memory of her ancestors would be fulsomely acknowledged, she brought out a collection of Thuillier family photographs. For the first time we laid eyes on Louis and Antoinette.

PLATE 26 Louis Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)

PLATE 27 Antoinette Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)

Christian Thuillier, Louis and Antoinette’s grandson, is a Normandy businessman.

He had been nominated by the family to show us around the farmhouse, and it was Christian who, with a wry smile, conceded that the answer to our quest for the photographs might lie in the attic above the building. We stepped out of the kitchen anteroom into a huge outside courtyard, our hearts missing a beat or two as he led us up several flights of stairs to the attic where the Thuillier photographic plates had been stored for nearly a century. It was as if Louis and Antoinette had just walked away from their massive project and dumped everything upstairs. In the gloom we could discern boxes of unused glass plates and empty bottles that had once no doubt contained the chemicals used to develop the prints. No sign of the original camera. But there, under the light of an attic window … three chests. As soon as we opened the first of them we knew our search was over.

PLATE 28 Antoinette Thuillier poses with her son in the same position where she and her husband photographed thousands of Allied soldiers during the First World War.

PLATE 29 The man in the bottom of this single four-exposure slide is a young Louis Thuillier, almost certainly taken by his wife, Antoinette – perhaps while she was learning to use the cameras?

PLATE 30 Ross Coulthart looks at the Thuillier plates with, from left, Laurent Mirouze, Christian Thuillier and Peter Burness. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)

PLATE 31 An original Takiris silver bromide photographic paper box found in the attic. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)

Laurent recognized some boxes immediately. He had helped Robert Crognier sort through them nearly a quarter of a century earlier, but he had never learned of their hiding place. After Robert’s death, the plates had clearly been dumped and forgotten here in the attic. As we excitedly searched through box after box, we could hardly believe what we were seeing. The battered boxes were filled with thousands of glass negative photographic plates, and for hours we held them up to the attic window light, revealing often perfectly preserved ghostly negative images of thousands of British Tommies, Welshmen, Irishmen, Scots, Australian ‘diggers’, turbaned Sikhs, and French, Canadian and American soldiers. There were gasps of awe and excitement from all of us, especially Peter Burness, as he pulled out plate after plate. It seemed scarcely possible that this dusty attic, freezing in winter and no doubt stifling in the French summer, could have preserved the photographs so well. On this especially chilly winter’s day, it was sobering for all of us to think what it must have been like for the young soldiers in a French winter, nearly a hundred years earlier, as they endured the appalling conditions in the open trenches just twenty to thirty kilometres to the north-east.

Our quest for the elusive Thuillier collection was over, but our investigations into the stories behind the thousands of plates had only just begun.