The boy who fell

Another church, another grave. This time not an infant. A teenager. Alfred Hickman, the fifteen year old boy trainee at HMS Ganges, the Royal Navy's shore college at Shotley Gate in Suffolk, who fell to his death from the training mast in 1928.

You may have read my recent post about a visit I made last July to the site of HMS Ganges, which closed in 1976 and is presently undergoing - or supposed to be undergoing - redevelopment into a housing estate. I had long been fascinated - morbidly, considering my fear of heights - by the college's tall training mast, which every boy student had to climb. One student would be selected to be the Button Boy, and had to work his way to the topmost tiny platform, a round disk the size of a drinks tray, and stand there saluting, with very little to hold onto. Overcoming vertigo would have required not only the stern force of Naval discipline, and a teenager's belief in his own immortality, but a determination to live up to the honour of being selected. 

Standing steady on that Button needed a dry day with no breeze. But also to get up there (and down again) the agility and climbing skills of a monkey. So, the boys were encouraged to practice on the mast, and get used to dizzying heights, and develop the physical techniques required to ascend (and get down from) a traditional sailing ship's rigging. You might think that by 1928 such techniques were long redundant. But the Royal Navy took a different view. And never changed its mind until 1976.

Incidentally, there really was a rank of Boy, and - mainly depending on your age - you might be a Boy 3rd Class, a Boy 2nd Class, or a Boy 1st Class, before furthering your career as an adult seaman. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_seaman. 

Here are some screenshots from Wikipedia about the mast, the difficulties boys faced when climbing it, and the particular fate of Alfred Hickman:

Just a coin. But it needs to be interpreted as a medal. The Button Boy would have proved himself the bravest and most physically accomplished student of his year.

But there was no denying that climbing a high mast was dangerous, whether as part of a ceremonial display or only for practice. However, the Royal Navy admits to just this one death from falling:

Alfred Hickman's death was clearly smoothed over and eventually forgotten. An unfortunate accident. Nowadays the matter might be taken a lot further, but not in 1928. Wikipedia says he was 'an orphan with no known family', and if this was true, perhaps there was nobody to make a prolonged fuss on his behalf. That being so, I was curious to know what was done as regards his burial. Did the Navy pop him into an unmarked grave at Shotley church? Or was he treated better than that? 

On the final day of my Suffolk holiday, on 19th July, I made the effort to go and see.

Shotley church stands well apart from Shotley village. There's a valley in between. The church is surrounded by attractive farmland, with a good view of the River Orwell and the huge container port at Felixtowe. Here it is. Rather boxy and barnlike on the outside.

Inside, it's more impressive, and rather formal. You can tell at once that it was the 'official' place of worship for everyone at HMS Ganges.

There was full information on the burials. I found Alfred Hickman listed.

There you are: 'Accident on the Mast'. The only boy whose cause of death was so described. 

I was surprised at the number of deaths over the years of boys who were - after all - in the care of a national naval college. Nor were they routinely used on any kind of active service during the First World War, although they would have to spend some time furthering their studies on board a warship, and might have become exposed to harm that way. 

Meanwhile they were fed and looked after, albeit in a spartan manner with aggressively firm discipline. But they had the resilience of youth, and were in any case physically fit. And yet the greater number of buried boys' deaths were from 'illness', and - given the dates - not mainly from the Spanish Flu epidemic rampant in 1918 and following years. Perhaps it was just very, very easy to fall ill and not recover in the days before modern medicines. In some cases the cause of death was 'Unknown' - again beyond understanding when these youngsters were so closely supervised. I wondered whether some suspicious or embarrassing deaths - suicides perhaps - had been glossed over. 

Well, back to young Alfred Hickman. I had at least established that he was on a register of burials, and definitely had a grave. Could I find it?

The graveyard was large. The 'public' part was close to the church. Beyond were the forces graves. There was no mistaking those for HMS Ganges Boys. A sea of them stretched away to the perimeter of the graveyard.

I'd need to look at every one until I came across Alfred Hickman's. It was early evening by now, and I was getting hungry after a long day out, but I wasn't going to shirk finding him. And I did in the end. His grave looked exactly like the others. The Royal Navy hadn't treated him differently. 

Even though he had died by accident, possibly from larking around high up, the Navy had done the right thing. I was glad of that. He was nothing to me personally, you understand, but even so I felt concerned to find him and make sure that his grave was as good as the rest. That duty done, I was free to go. 

It was hard to imagine what this fifteen year old boy could have been like as a person. I imagined that having no family was a misfortune he was acutely aware of. But it let him be his own person, and he might have been the most boisterous, the most daring, the most confident and self-assured of his class. Perhaps he was also the cockiest and the most unruly, and the constant target of oppressive official punishments. That might make him defiant; or so miserable that he would care nothing for his own safety, courting welcome death if need be. Who knows.