The Diary of an ‘Unknown’ First World War Soldier.

In September 2014, I heard that Northumberland Archives needed volunteers to delve into the experience of the First World War. As an amateur archaeologist I am interested in history and thought this would be a fascinating project to get involved in, and as I do freelance work, I would be able to do it when I was not working.
I went along to the training days which were very interesting. I was already familiar with the family history section of the archives at Woodhorn as we have been researching my husband’s family, the Lindsays of Alnwick. On completion of the training days we were each given a project to undertake and mine was to transcribe the diary of an ‘unknown’ First World War soldier which had been handed in to the Archives.
I found this to be utterly fascinating. The diary is very well written, full of humorous stories, heart breaking and vivid accounts of the writer’s experience of death and war, drawings, and even a theatrical programme! I actually found it a privilege to be one of very few people to read this diary since it was written. Some of his accounts moved me to tears and brought the whole experience of the war very close to me, and as a mother, I couldn’t help but be mindful that each account of a soldier dying such an awful and lonely death was somebody’s son. I was privilege to details of their deaths that their mothers probably never knew. The author reveals a loyalty to his country, respect for superiors and acceptance of ‘doing one’s duty’ which is rare today.

I became so interested in this man’s stories that I really wanted to find out who he was. He gave some clues along the way, such as the fact that he knew a lot about sheep and farming. A German steamer had run aground near Cheswick Burn ‘to the south of our land’, and his brother had been in command of the coastguard at Berwick. From this it was clear that he had some connection with farming in an area I am very familiar with in Northumberland, and I thought that it would be easy using the internet to find out the name of his brother. I had no luck and emailed the RNLI and other organisations such as the website of the London Scottish, his regiment, but had no replies. I took my husband along to have a look at the diary and we read on further. The words jumped out from the page when we read that his ‘dear brother Cecil’ was killed whilst in command of the cruiser H.M.S. Bayano on 12th March 1915. This was an enormous clue. We went home and spent the evening in pursuit of our soldier and found him.
Using Google we found that his brother was called Henry Cecil Carr who was 43 when he went down with his ship. From this, I had his birth year so I then looked at census records and found Cecil in the 1881 census when he was 8, along with his father John Carr who was a Merchant and Justice of the Peace, five sisters and 4 brothers, Reginald E, George, Hubert and John E. Which one was our soldier? The census showed that they had all been born in Gosforth and were living at Roseworth Cottage, Coxlodge. I then found Cecil in the 1911 census living in Rochester, Kent, with his occupation as ‘Royal Navy Commander’ so I knew we had the right family.
With these clues, I googled and found that Reginald E was the coastguard, so that narrowed our unknown soldier down to George, Hubert or John E. Remembering that our soldier had mentioned ‘our land’, I decided to look at Kelly’s Trade Directory for 1914 for Berwick, and found one John Evelyn Carr on page 21 as Manager of Scremerston Coal Company, coal owners and merchants, brick and tile manufacturers and farmers. I strongly suspected we had our man! (It was midnight by this time).
I was about to do some double checking to make sure this was our soldier and decided just to put his name into Google to see if there was any more information on the net about him. I got a shock! Up popped an entry for Northumberland Archives about one John Evelyn Carr who had written 4 war diaries, and who had had a special study on him done by Emily Meritt in 2014. I read her work about the soldier and recognised from the information about him that my soldier and hers were one and the same person! There was even a photo of him, which I found fascinating I could now put a face to the person behind the diary. His words had also featured in a book called ‘Tommy at War 1914-18, the Soldiers’ own Stories’ by John Sadler, and I found another photograph and information that he had been a sheep breeder on ‘Historypin’. The mystery was solved but I was a tiny bit disappointed that my soldier had already been known about, and his diary wasn’t unique. He seems to have been a prolific writer! We have still to find out if my diary is part of the four already known about, or separate.

I found out that he had been married in 1900 at St Andrew’s, Newcastle to one Gertrude Isabella Moncriff Blair (obviously not a scullery maid). He had worked after the war as Managing Director of the Scremerston Coal Company and lived at Heathery Tops Scremerston and Spittal, where he died in 1958. I have recently found out that there is a farmer whose surname is Carr who farms at Scremerston today and am minded to get in touch with him to see if he is a relative. It would be interesting to know how the diary came to be in the Archives and not cherished by John Carr’s family as a precious heirloom.

I feel that I know this man. I think he descends from The Carrs of Etal who once owned Barmoor Castle where our family have a holiday home today. It is odd that he was born and brought up about half a mile from where I live, and that he lived and worked in an area I know well and love. I even know the road where he lived in Spittal. It was meant to be that I got to transcribe his diary, and I hope I can do justice to his bravery and brilliant storytelling, so that other people can experience the immediacy, humour and sorrow that I have felt while transcribing it.
We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Carole McKenzie for supplying this article for our Northumberland At War Project.