Joe’s sister Rozi and her then husband Bill used to live in the Buchan Peninsula in Scotland. (David is an oil-man). For a number of consecutive summers in our late teens and early twenties, Joe and I used to take our summer holidays up there.
One day we drove down to a farm in Edinburgh, where Joe’s aunt Dee lived. She was rather a grand and larger-than-life lady, given to flamboyance and also a touch of hypochondria. Ostensibly she had flu when she received us in her bedroom, propped up on a large four-poster bed, and gave us an “audience” (literally!). She was hilariously melodramatic and quoted Shakespeare liberally. I was thoroughly impressed.
On a more serious note, she was busy sorting through old letters. One was written by what would have been her uncle (her Mum’s brother) – had only she known him – Sidney Herbert William John Whiles (1897-1915). His was one of the many lives lost needlessly in World War I. He was only 18 years old when he was killed on Hill 60 at Ypres on 24 April 1915, although the exact circumstances are unknown. A letter sent to his mother by his Quartermaster Sergeant states he was shot and died instantly. His body was never recovered. (It may have been obliterated by artillery fire).
Like 56,000 other men who fell at Ypres, but who’s bodies were never recovered, Sidney Whiles’ name is inscribed on the Menin Gate memorial in Ypres. (Panel 54)
Sidney Whiles’ letters home were utterly heartbreaking. Joe and I were struck by both the formality of the letters (probably a trait of the times) and his attempts to assuage his mother’s fears. The “I’ll be home by Christmas” line in the song is a fiction (he never wrote that) but it was a sentiment common to the early volunteers in 1914 and juxstaposes with the fact he never came home.
Something of an artist, Sidney included a charcoal drawing and a dried poppy in one his letters.
These artefacts exuded a particular personal poignancy. Just to think he had actually touched these.
I was struck by the idea of a letter transcending the ages to speak to an unintended audience, some 80 years later. And what message he might wish to bestow upon his great-nephew, Joe.
The song “Remember You” is our tribute to Sidney Wiles. The only thing we can offer this unfortunate young man to honour him are our memories.
It seems apt on the eve of the 100th anniversary of this senseless war.
Joe’s maternal grandfather Horace Whiles was profoundly affected by the loss of his brother. He also joined up (to avenge his brother, perhaps?) and survived the war. In 1977, he spoke at a memorial service for Sidney Whiles and we reproduce the content of a short biography of Sidney. One is left with a sense of profound waste.
Henk supplied the verses and middle-eight, which survived from an earlier version that had existed since, maybe, 1990. Joe supplied both the bridge and choruses during a writing session on December 02 2013. We finished it of with a harmonica flourish. In the last chorus, you can hear play a few bars from “The Last Post” on the harmonica.
The song has Joe read out an excerpt from WW1 poet Laurance Binyon’s “To The Fallen”. The line in the middle eight “Some corner of a foreign field” is a verbatim quotation from another WWI poem, by Rupert Brooke. The line that follows “Forever England will be” is adapted from the same poem.