The Life and Death of Malcolm Jackson of the Royal Engineers

In an article I published on the London Overlooked website earlier this year, which can be accessed by following this link, I wrote about a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes that has been in my family for many years. It has a bookplate identifying its first owner, John Gilchrist Coltart, who turns out to have been a man of considerable interest.

What follows below is a similar investigation, in that it starts, again, with a book belonging to my family. This book also has a bookplate. And the bookplate, like the one in the Conan Doyle, points to a remarkable life story, although the subject of the story, a chap by the name of Malcolm Jackson, had little in common with John Gilchrist Coltart.

The book in question is The Makers of Florence, and it was published by Margaret Oliphant in 1876, although this particular copy, which was given to Malcolm Jackson as a school drawing prize, is a later edition. Given that one of the Florentine makers of the title is Giotto, the book was perhaps not a bad choice for a talented draughtsman. The surprise, though, is that Malcolm would only have been fourteen at the time, which suggests that his school — more of which later — was ambitious for its pupils!

Coming down south

Malcolm’s family had strong connections with Scotland. His father, William Gray Jackson, was born in Midlothian, and his mother, Eleanora Menzies, had some Scottish blood in her veins, even though she had been born in Lambeth. In fact they were married in Lambeth, in 1858, although when exactly William had moved down to England is not clear. He was a successful distiller, and by the time Malcolm was born, on 2 March 1870, he and Eleanora had settled in Greenwich. Malcolm was their youngest child, and Eleanora had already given birth to three sons and four daughters. Sadly, though, two of their daughters died in infancy.

The Jacksons must have been comfortably off, for they were able to employ a nurse, a cook and two housemaids. William was clearly a successful man, but he had become a father relatively late in life, and he was already fifty-two at the time of Malcolm’s birth. In fact Malcolm barely knew his father, for in the late summer of 1878 William Gray Jackson died, the cause of death being a diseased lung. He was sixty-two.  

First the Freemen’s School …

Although the loss of his father at the age of eight must have cast a shadow over Malcolm’s childhood, he was fortunate in that he was eligible for admission to the City of London Freemen’s Orphan School. Eligible children were those who found themselves in reduced circumstances following the death of their father. It was also required that the father had been a freeman of the City of London, and Malcolm qualified in this respect too, as William Gray Jackson had been granted the necessary freedom in 1850.

The school opened on Shepherd’s Lane in Brixton in 1854, and initially took in seventy boys and thirty girls, whose age on entry had to be from seven to ten. These hundred pupils would be maintained, clothed and educated until they reached the age of fourteen. They followed a curriculum that was solidly based on Religious Knowledge and the three Rs, but it included languages — French and Latin for boys and French only for girls — as well as two practical subjects — book-keeping for boys and needlework for girls. Drawing was also taught, which gave Malcolm an outlet for his youthful creativity, and in which he excelled.

Other details of Malcolm’s time at school are scanty. In one respect it must have been quite challenging for a boy of Scottish descent, given that almost all the pupils came from London or the South East. The only exception among the pupil body was his older brother Campbell. However, the brothers might have found it comforting that the headmaster, the Rev Marcus Tulloch Cormack, hailed from Caithness in the Highlands, which, even for the Greenwich-born sons of a Lowlander from Midlothian, might have been a connection of a sort!   

… then the Royal Engineers

For a number of years Malcolm’s movements are hard to trace. He would have left school in 1884, having reached the age of fourteen, and it is more than likely that he undertook an apprenticeship as a draughtsman. At some point he lived in Myanmar, a province in British India that would have been known then as Burma. Although we cannot be sure, it is a fair guess that he was involved in some capacity with the surveying of Burma, which was been vigorously pursued by the British in the late-nineteenth century.

In 1893, when he was in his early twenties, Malcolm enlisted in the Royal Engineers. His skills as a draughtsman were certainly recognised, for he was sent for special instruction to the drawing school in the Royal School of Military Engineering at Chatham in Kent, graduating in 1895 with flying colours. He was now a fully-fledged army surveyor, and we have a detailed breakdown of the qualifications he achieved. He was highly competent in military topography, that is to say in the drawing of maps for the use of soldiers in the field, but he made a particularly strong impression in his handling of surveying instruments and in his ability to carry out calculations. It would seem that the Freeman’s School had given him a good grounding in mathematics as well as in art!

For the first five years of his service Malcolm was posted to one British base after another, and he found himself for varying lengths of time in Chatham twice, Aldershot twice, York twice, and Curragh in County Kildare once. All this while he was working with the national mapping agency — the Ordnance Survey — which was largely staffed by Royal Engineers. But he also served abroad, and between July 1898 and November 1899 he was in Weihaiwei on the north east coast of China. Weihaiwei was a leased territory of some strategic importance, and Malcolm and his fellow Engineers were under orders to conduct an extensive survey in connection with the proposed building of a major naval base. In the end the proposal was shelved, but that would have been of little concern to the up-and-coming army surveyor, who now returned to England with a great deal of valuable experience under his belt.

Off to war

Malcolm must have seen himself as a career soldier. Having initially enlisted for a period of seven years, he extended his service twice, first to twelve years and then to twenty-one. As a result his discharge would not fall due until after the outbreak of war, which, as we shall see, was to have unfortunate consequences. In the meantime, though, his professionalism and exemplary character enabled him to rise steadily through the ranks, until in 1908 he was promoted to Engineer Clerk Quartermaster Sergeant.

By this time he had married. His wife, Edith Rose Johnson, was employed as a domestic servant, and she, like Malcolm, had been brought up under the shadow of the death of a parent. For her father, David Johnson, had died of a heart attack in August 1877, only two weeks before she was born. He was a greengrocer with a business in Croydon, and at the time of his death he was only thirty-two.

In September 1914 Malcolm was promoted to Acting Superintendent Clerk, but by then, of course, the First World War had broken out, and early in November he was posted to France with the 8^th Division, which had been formed a month earlier to strengthen the British Expeditionary Force. As the First Battle of Ypres drew to a close, the Royal Engineers were kept busy over the winter repairing trenches and roads, making duckboards, and generally re-equipping front line troops. Then in April 1915 a horrifying development in military technology claimed Malcolm as one of its early victims, and, although it did not kill him outright, it had consequences that would affect him for the rest of his life.

All went down

This development was the use of gas. Exactly when and where Malcolm was exposed to this fearsome new weapon is not clear. But there were certainly German chemical attacks on the northeastern shoulder of the Ypres Salient, where Royal Engineers were fully engaged in consolidating Allied positions, as well as supporting troops who had been withdrawn after a ferocious engagement with the enemy.

Released by specialist troops from cylinders holding a liquid chemical agent, the gas floated over the battlefield and into trenches in a noxious cloud. Its effect on men protected by little more than a damp cloth clamped over the mouth and nose was devastating. In small doses it caused coughing and vomiting, but in larger concentrations it killed, and at all times it was feared, as Private Harry Cox, who had fought at Ypres, vividly recalled:

Well then on the 5th of May the same year, they gassed us. And how I got out of it, I went up a tree. All the others – you know gas being heavier than air – they all went down in the shallow in the trenches of course there they all laid out all sprawled out and suffering agonies. Of course a lot of them ran away. Actually the battalion was wiped out – there was only five really fit men left.

Doing his bit

The importance of the work of the Royal Engineers on the field of battle cannot be overstated. The surveyors were able not only to map out the general form of enemy lines but also to determine the position of their heavy guns. They supplied gunners with the bearings and elevations needed to hit key targets, and one Royal Engineer captain, Harold St John Loyd Winterbotham, acquired the unofficial title of ‘The Astrologer’ in recognition of his uncanny ability to provide accurate data.

Nor did Malcolm’s contribution go entirely unrecognised. Even before the outbreak of hostilities he had been given a Good Conduct Medal, which marked length of service as well as quality of character. But in 1915 he received the very much more prestigious distinction of being twice mentioned in despatches. In due course he would be awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, although for reasons that will soon become clear he was unable to receive these tokens of his service to his country in person.

Towards the end of 1915 Malcolm’s period of engagement came to an end, and in the second week of December, having served with the Royal Engineers for twenty-one years, he was discharged. However, he had no intention of sitting out the war at home, and the following year he re-enlisted as a temporary quartermaster with the honorary rank of Lieutenant. And so in December 1916, at the age of forty-six, he embarked for France once again.    

And now the end

Clearly, though, he was not in good health, and in the autumn of 1917 he was sent back to England on medical grounds. The order was given by No. 8 General Hospital in the evacuation centre at Rouen in northwestern France, which, being situated well behind the lines, played a vital part in caring for injured servicemen. He arrived at Southampton on the troopship Western Australia early in October, and two medical boards, in London and Epsom, ruled him unfit for any further service. After a short spell in hospital, where he was treated for chronic laryngopharyngitis, he was instructed to return to his home in Surrey.

His poor condition was the legacy of the gas attack, or attacks, the German army had launched against Allied positions in 1915. In spite of efforts to recuperate at home, his health declined rapidly, and before long he was admitted to the King Edward VII Sanatorium in Midhurst in West Sussex. There, on 23 May 1918, he died. Ultimately he had succumbed to cardiac failure, but it was noted on the death certificate that for the previous fifteen months he had been suffering from tuberculosis, which had probably been latent at the time of his gassing, though it would certainly have been aggravated by the toxic fumes.

There was no will, and Edith, who had a son and two daughters by Malcom, petitioned the War Office for financial support. She received a Special War Gratuity of £17.10.0, some of which was to reimburse her for the cost of Malcolm’s funeral, while the rest was divided between her and her three children. She also put forward a claim for a Chelsea Pension that she hoped might be due to Malcolm, but it would seem that the most she received was a temporary pension of £175 per annum, from which 1½ guineas was deducted for every week her dying husband had spent in the sanatorium.

A strange and cruel history

Malcolm has not been entirely forgotten. Edith succeeded in arranging the posthumous award of the 1914 Star, the medal issued to soldiers who had served in France or Belgium in the opening months of the war. And there are other honours, though of a different sort. His name, for example, is inscribed on war memorials in Sutton and Carshalton, the towns on either side of his family home in Fairview Road. And his burial place in the churchyard of St Mary Easebourne, which stands only a short distance from the King Edward VII Sanatorium, is a poignant reminder of the common experience of soldiers, for five other servicemen who lost their lives in the Great War lie alongside him.

Edith died in February 1949 at the age of seventy-one. She had suffered terribly, for not only had her husband died in 1918, but in 1929 their son Malcolm Menzies Jackson died too. He was a pilot in the Royal Air Force — just twenty years old — and he had crashed while flying at Netheravon on Salisbury Plain. His sisters, Edith Eleanora Jackson and Mildred Menzies Jackson, at least lived long lives, but even so history repeated itself, strangely and cruelly. For Mildred, who had been born in 1917, would never have remembered Malcolm, just as Malcolm could only have had a few memories of his father, while Edith had no memories of her poor young father at all.

Far better to remember Malcolm Jackson in happier ways. Far better to remember him as the fourteen-year-old schoolboy stepping up to receive his prize copy of Mrs Oliphant’s book on the makers of Florence, with its beautiful illustrations, and its splendid bookplate with the young draughtsman’s name.