"UFO's and the Royal Battalion that just vanished" by Trevor Grove ========================================== They were all workers at Sandringham. When the war came they mysteriously disappeared in battle without a trace. Abduction by UFOs was one bizarre theory. ========================================== The men of E Company had known each other since boyhood. They had scrumped apples together, played village cricket, chased girls, helped gather in the harvest summer after summer. And now, as members of the 5th Territorial Battalion the Royal Norfolk Regiment, they were to go to war together. It was the same all over Britain that hot August of 1914. It was a popular war. Lord Kitcheners target of 100,000 volunteers was soon overtaken, as groups of friends, teammates and work colleagues scrambled to enlist. But what the amateur soldiers of E Company had in common was something rather uncommon -something that was to make their unexplained fate a year later amid the chaotic slaughter of Gallipoli a matter of intense concern and speculation for the next three-quarters of a century: they all belonged to the staff of the royal estate at Sandringham. The company had been formed in 1908 at the personal instigation of their employer, King Edward VII. He asked Frank Beck, the land agent who loyally managed the estate and was already a captain in a volunteer battalion of the Norfolks, to undertake the task. This he did enthusiastically, raising more than 100 'Saturday night' soldiers. As was the pattern in the territorial battalions of the day, military rank in B Company was dictated by social caste. Members of the local gentry like Frank Beck and his two nephews, formed the officer class. The estate's foremen, butlers, head gamekeepers and head gardeners were the NCOs, While farm labourers, grooms and household servants made up the rank and file. Their mothers, wives and sweethearts were Queen Alexandra's chambermaids or they prepared jellies in the Sandringham kitchens. The whole of this small, close-knit rural community was involved. The men of the Sandringham Company were ordinary country folk. BEFORE joining up, the only - guns m t of them had ever heard fired were the 12 - bores of the royal shooting parties, knocking brace after brace of pheasant out of the wide Norfolk skies. They were scarcely the Household Cavalry. But as a result of their royal connections and in view of what was to happen to them, they would certainly come to be seen as a very special sort of Household infantry. What happened to the Sandringhams during the disastrous Dardanelle's campaign is that in the middle of their very first battle, on the afternoon of August 12, 1915, nearly all of them disappeared, almost literally, in a puff of smoke. One minute the men were there, led by the 5th Battalion's commanding officer, Sir Horace Proctor-Beauchamp, charging bravely against the Turkish enemy. The next they were not. Their bodies were not found. There were no survivors. They did not turn up as prisoners of war. They simply vanished. General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British Commander-in-Chief in Gallipoli, was as puzzled as everyone else. In a dispatch to Kitchener he reported that in the course of the fight 'there happened a very mysterious thing'. During the attack, he explained, the Norfolks had drawn somewhat ahead of the rest of the British line. 'The righting grew hotter, and the ground became more wooded and broken.' But Colonel Beauchamp with 16 officers and 250 men, 'still kept pushing on, driving the enemy before him.' 'Among these ardent souls was part of a fine company enlisted from the King's Sandringham estates. Nothing more was ever seen or heard of any of them. They charged into the forest and were lost to sight and sound. Not one of them ever came back.' Their families had nothing to go on but rumours and inconclusive official telegrams stating that their loved ones had been 'reported missing'. George V, who had succeeded to the throne in 1910, became increasingly concerned and personally cabled Sir Ian Hamilton, who could give his sovereign no further information other than that the Sandringhams had comported themselves with 'ardour and dash'. Queen Alexandra made inquiries via the American ambassador in Constantinople to discover whether any of the missing men might be in Turkish prisoner-of-war camps. Grieving families contacted the Red Cross and placed messages in the papers, hoping for news of their sons and husbands from returning comrades. But all to no avail. So grew the legend of the Vanished Battalion. It is one, which lingers to this day - even in the more outlandish regions of the internet (Woaaa) where the battalion's disappearance is attributed to divine intervention and abduction by UFOs. And tomorrow, a moving and only marginally fictionalised BBC drama, All The King's Men, starring David Jason as Frank Beck, will bring the story to the small screen. So what really happened? The 5th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment had set sail from Liverpool on July 30, 1915, aboard the luxury liner Aquitania, though there was little luxury for the thousands of troops aboard. They were seasick, overcrowded and short of drinking water and fresh air. Nevertheless, it wasn't only the Oxbridge-educated officers, with their romantic feelings for the classics, who looked forward to fighting on the plains of Troy. Everyone was exited at the prospect of a swift, decisive campaign against the derided Turks, who had been so ill-advised as to enter the war on the side of Germany. The men of the Sandringham Company were buoyed up by a farewell telegram from the King himself: "I have known you all for many years and am confident that the same spirit of loyalty and patriotism, in which you answered the call to arms, will inspire your deeds in the face of the enemy. May God bless and protect you. George RI." At 54, the King's land agent Captain Beck need not have led his men to war. But despite his age, he was determined to do so. 'I formed them,' he said bravely handing over the job of running Sandringham to his brother. 'How could I leave them now? The lads will expect me to go with them; besides I promised their wives and children I would look after them ' This very personal sense of duty to his own people as well as to king and country was not unique to Frank Beck. Among the battalion's officers were some of the brightest and best in the county, several of them brothers or closely related to each other, as were many of the men. The battalion landed at Suvla Bay on August 10, amid bursting shells and the sound of machinegun fire, and was immediately ordered inland. The official history of the Norfolk Regiment quotes a senior officer describing the terrain that confronted the bewildered young troops, straight off the ship from Britain, as they toiled up from the beach bowed under packs. Before them lay a sandy plain covered with scrub, and a dry salt lake showing dazzlingly white in the hot morning sun. 'Beyond the plain a number of stunted oaks, gradually becoming more dense further inland, formed excellent cover for the enemy's snipers, a mode of warfare at which the Turk was very adept,' the regimental history goes on. Officers and men were continually shot down, not only by rifle fire from advanced posts of the enemy, but by men, and even women, behind our own firing line. 'The particular kind of tree in this part lends itself to concealment, being short with dense foliage. Here the sniper would lurk, with face painted green, and so well hidden as to defy detection. 'When discovered, these snipers had in their possession enough food and water for a considerable period, as well as an ample supply of ammunition.' Besides the Turkish snipers - some of whom, the newly arrived Sandringhams were warned, disguised themselves as pigs to get close to the British lines - the climate was broiling by day and freezing at night. Swarms of flies settled on their food even as they were putting it into their mouths. Men were already suffering from dysentery fir from the side-effects of inoculations and seasick tablets administered on the voyage. Above all, there was a desperate lack of water - two pints were supposed to last each man three days. It was all a far cry from the shady lanes and lush pastures of Sandringhams peaceful acres. Then, on August 12, just two days after they had arrived in this arid, hostile land, the 5th Battalion was told it was to attack that afternoon. The orders were confused. Some thought the plan was to clear away the enemy's forward positions and root out snipers, in preparation for the main British assault the following day. Others believed their target was the village of Anafarta Saga on the ridge ahead of them. No one knew the position of Brigade Headquarters, where the field-dressing stations were or even where the battalion's machine guns were supposed to be. The officers were handed maps, which, they soon discovered, did not even show the area they were supposed to be attacking. The men had been out in the sun all day. They were thirsty, scared, inexperienced - and now they were supposed to launch a major assault on a well-armed foe in broad daylight and with scant cover. Even the 14-year-old Norfolk lad, Private George Carr, who had hoodwinked the enlisting officer into letting him sign on with the Sandringhams would have seen that the whole enterprise was a shambles. George, at least, was to survive the bloodshed that afternoon. Exhausted by the battle, he was saved by a stretcher-bearer called Herbert Saul, a pacifist who refused to carry a rifle on principle but who behaved heroically on the field. At 4.15-pm whistles blew and the Norfolks began to advance, led by Colonel Beauchamp, smoking, waving his cane above his head and shouting: 'On the Norfolks, on.' Apart from him, all the officers were armed with rifles instead of revolvers so that Turkish snipers shouldn't be able to distinguish them from their men and kill them first. Captain Beck was at the head of the Sandringhams. Someone gave the order to fix bayonets and to advance at the double, even though they were still a mile-and-a-half from the Turkish positions. The carnage began immediately, the Turkish artillery well able to track the advancing British by the sun glinting on their bayonets. By the time the Norfolks reached the enemy lines they were already exhausted. Worse, the speed of their advance had put them some way ahead of the rest of the brigade, so that the Turks were able to surround them from the rear and cut off their retreat. A desperate battle ensued, officers and men being cut down all around by snipers hidden in the trees, heavily camouflaged with foliage tied around their bodies and green-painted faces. When some of the snipers were later captured, several turned out to be 16-year-old girls. Everywhere officers and men of the battalion were dying. A shell landed close to Frank Beek. He was last seen sitting under a tree with his head on one side, either dead or simply tired to death. Others showed extraordinary heroism, defying bullets and shrapnel to get their injured eomrades to safety. Amid the bloodshed, Colonel Beauchamp continued to advance through a wood towards the Turks' main positions, leading a band of 16 officers and 250 men. Among them were the Sandringhams. Eventually, the Colonel was spotted, standing with another officer in a farm on the far side of the wood. 'Now boys,' he shouted, 'we've got the village. Let's hold it.' Then the wood began to burn. That was the last anyone saw or heard of Beauchamp, or any of his men. And that was the last of the Sandringhams. There they disappeared, amid the smoke and flying bullets, never to be seen again. It was, as General Hamilton put it, 'a very mysterious thing'. In 1918 the-war ended and, under the terms of the armistice with Turkey, the War Graves Commission was allowed to search the Gallipoli battlefields. Of the 36,000 Commonwealth servicemen who died in the campaign, 13,000 rest in unidentified graves (and there are another 14,000 whose bodies were never found) One day a soldier engaged in this grim task stumbled across a Norfolks regimental cap badge, buried in the sand. Looking around, he discovered the corpses of a number of soldiers. The find was reported to the Rev Charles Pierre-point Edwards, MC, who was supposedly in Gallipoli on a War Office mission to find out what had happened to the 5th Norfolks. It was more likely that he had been sent there at the private instigation of Queen Alexandra still hankering to know what had really happened to her faithful land agent Frank Beck and the men he had undertaken to lead safely through the war. Edwards - besides having been the brigade chaplain and having won the MC for his bravery on August 12, rescuing wounded men in no-man's-land under enemy fire - also had royal connections, so this was a plausible assumption. Edwards's examination of the area where the badge had been found uncovered the remains of 180 bodies; 122 of them were identifiable from their shoulder flashes as men of the 5th Norfolks. The newspapers made much of the story claiming that the British soldiers had died facing head-to-head with similar numbers of Turks whose bodies had also been found suggesting a glorious fight to the last man. But Edwards's official report, kept secret for more than 50 years, was more prosaic. The bodies had been found scattered over an area of about a square mile, some 800 yards to the rear of the Turkish front line 'lying most thickly round the ruins of a small farm'. This, he concluded, was probably the farm at which Colonel Beauchamp had last been seen. The surroundings were wooded, the only area in the Suvla vicinity that tallied with General Hamilton's description of a forest. And the spot was half a mile behind enemy lines, which also accorded with accounts of the Vanished Battalion's last sighting. Four years later came news from Turkey of a gold fob-watch, looted from the body of a British officer in Gallipoli. It was Frank Beck's. It had been given to him by Sir Dighton Probyn, who had originally been presented with it by Queen Alexandra. After its return, Sir Dighton presented the watch to Margeretta Beck, Frank's daughter, on her wedding day. And so the story of the Vanished Battalion might have ended, with powerful circumstantial evidence that Colonel Beauchamp, Captain Beek and the Sandringhams had simply been wiped out on that awful day, which explained why there were no survivors and no PoWs to tell the tale. But then many years later, in April 1965, at the time of the 50th anniversary commemorations to mark the Allies' Gallipoli landings, a former New Zealand sapper called Frederick Reichardt issued an extraordinary testimony. Supported by three other veterans, Reichardt claimed to have witnessed the supernatural disappearance of the 5th Norfolks in August 1915. On the afternoon in question, according to Reichardt, he and his comrades had watched a formation of 'six or eight' loaf-shaped clouds hovering over the area where the Norfolks were pressing home their attack. Another similarly shaped, solid-looking cloud was resting on the ground. Into this cloud, said Reichardt marched the battalion. An hour or so later, the cloud 'very unobtrusively' rose and joined the other clouds overhead, whereupon they all sailed off to the north, leaving no trace of the soldiers behind them. This disconcerting story first appeared in a New Zealand publication called Spaceview, and was then taken up by a UFO magazine called Flying Saucers. Yet despite its unreliable provenance and its manifest inconsistencies (Reichardt cited the wrong date, the wrong battalion and the wrong location), it I somehow gained a kind of retrospective authority in the popular imagination. Such a myth, it came to be assumed, must indeed have done the rounds among the bereaved Sandringham families back in 1915, brining them comfort in the same way that the legend of the appearance of an angel to the troops at Mons did to those whose loved on endured the horrors of the Belgian trenches in 1914. But this was not so. What put paid to such fancifulness was painstakingly researched BBC2 television documentary in 1991 called "All The King's Men." It was narrated by Prince Edward and accompanied by a book "The Vanished Battalion", written by one of its makers Nigel McCrery, from which most of the information in this article is taken. McCrery generously ascribed Reichardt's story of the loaf-shaped battalion-lifting cloud to a genuine confusion rather than downright fabrication. But he also unearthed two important items of evidence, which pretty definitively scotched any further speculation. The first was the account by Gordon Parker, a successful businessman who had been a Royal Engineers signaller at Gallipoli, of a conversation he had with his friend the Rev Pierrepoint Edwards some years after the war. According to Parker, Edwards revealed an extraordinary detail he had withheld from his official report about the fate of the 5th Norfolks - namely, that every one of the bodies he found had been shot in the head. It was known that the Turks did not like taking prisoners. And that was confirmed by the second piece of evidence, when a Mrs Madge Webber told the BBC film-makers the story of her brother-in-law, Arthur, who fought with the Yarmouth Company of the 5th Norfolks during the battle of August 12, 1915. Arthur was shot in the face, she said. As he lay injured on the ground, he heard the Turkish soldiers shooting and bayoneting the wounded and the prisoners around him. Only the intervention of a German officer saved his life. His comrades were all executed on the spot. Arthur Webber lived on to the ripe old age of 86, still with the Turkish sniper's bullet in his head. He died in 1969. But the implication of what he and Parker had to say as regards the true fate of the 5th Battalion was plain enough. Quite simply, after their bold dash through the wood on that unglorious 12th of August. Colonel Beauchamp and the Sandringhams were overwhelmed by their Turkish enemies. They were either captured or they surrendered. Then they were butchered. The Turks took no prisoners. That was what became of the Vanished Battalion. • The Vanished Battalion by Nigel McCrery is published by Simon & Schuster. "All The King's Men" will be shown at 9pm Sunday, 13 November 1999, on BBC-1.
