1916: DESCRIPTIVE REPORT ON ENLISTMENT.

My daughters Kendra and Emlyn arrived here after midnight last night (This morning? Doesn't sound right—it was quite dark!) and after laughing and chatting for a long while, we finally drifted off to bed. That's where they both still are!

Anyway, in an earlier post I mentioned I came across the complete First World War military file of George Mills. We'll look at it over the next few weeks, bit by bit, and see what it has to offer.

Today's bit of ephemera is more interesting for what it doesn't say than what it does. It's George's "Descriptive Report on Enlistment [below, right]," presumably done at the Town Hall in Kensington, London, before he took his physical in January 1916. On it we find that Mills stood 5 feet, 10 inches tall. He had identifying moles on his right collarbone, left chest, and two below his "left rib." Not earth-shattering stuff.

Of somewhat more interest is George's chest measurement: 33 inches, expanded, with a range of expansion of 3 inches. That means Mills had a 30 inch chest at age 19. I have had difficulty coming up with the parameters for British recruits at the time, but a 1918 book called The Principles of Hygiene by David Hendricks Bergey pegs the average height of an American military recruit at 5 foot 7 inches in WWI, and that the average 5' 10" recruit would be expected to have a 34 inch chest, typically with 2½ inches of additional expansion [below, left].

We find that Mills is actually on the slight side, especially for a potential combat participant. This fact, I believe, will come into play to a great degree when Mills finds a late-in-life aptitude and noteworthy enthusiasm for the sport of croquet and becomes a true aficionado! It is my suspicion that, as a boy, Mills might not have been a very powerful (or popular) athlete, despite his love of sport in general.

Lastly, we find the rest of the document blank: No campaigns, no action, no "special instances of gallant conduct" or "mentions in public despatches," no medals, decorations, or annuities, and no "injuries in or by the service."

There's nothing here to suggest that Mills was overseas during the war and/or involved in combat during the war.

The sheet also indicates he's never passed any "authorized class of instruction" such as "swimming, chiropody, &c."

No wife, at the age of 19 years, 3 months, and no children.

There is o indication what Mills might have been doing for the four years before showing up for recruitment in Kensington in January 1916.

Does the lack of "authorized classes" mean that Mills never was an apprentice at Wallis and Steevens in Basingstoke as I have suspected? With an uncle currently active as an officer in the Royal Engineers at the time, one easily could think that serving the previous four years an apprentice to Alfred Wallis might have been documented, and Mills ticketed for the R.E.

Yes, this document is far more interesting for what has been left blank, rather than what has been documented. Mills seems to have been involved directly with the military during his stint in the army from 1916 to 1919, but not involved directly with the war—and by that I mean the fighting—itself. It's a start on knowing what, as we've wondered aloud, Mills did during WW I.

More next time: My girls are beginning to stir!

From The Grove to Budleigh, via Picadilly Place

Today, it is time to hit the rewind button—I almost said "on the tape," even though that now sounds, in a DVD/DVR world, like saying that I donned "spats" and my "fob"—and travel back in time for a while. We'll leave behind the coastal croquet lawns of Budleigh, Parkstone, and The Saffrons and turn the compass northward as well. Our destination? London, much earlier in the 20th century, where we'll try to find young George Mills, the teenager!

This note arrived yesterday from Michael P. of the Eastbourne Local History Association:

"Having noticed that GM was educated at Harrow, I told Rita Boswell, the archivist there, of your website and asked whether she had more info on him. Below is her response:

I have checked our school paper and photograph collection for George Mills but both have drawn a blank so far. We are having the paper digitised at the moment which will enable a better search in due course. It is also possible that a photo will turn up in due course, so I will keep looking. Meanwhile, all I can tell you is what appears in the School Register. That is:

George Ramsay Acland Mills, son of the Rev. B. R. V. Mills (Old Harrovian) of 38 Onslow Gardens S W London. George entered Harrow in September 1910 and left in the summer of 1912; while here he resided in a small boarding house and another house called The Grove [pictured, right]. He served in the Great War from 1916-1919 as a Corporal in the Rifle Brigade but transferred to A.P.C. and then the R.A.S.C. He went up to Christ Church Oxford and became a Preparatory Schoolmaster. His address in 1951 is given as the Naval and Military Club at 94 Piccadilly, London W.1.

I hope this is of interest to you."

Yes, it is, Michael, and thank you so much!

First of all, it's quite exciting to think that there may be a story or two, and perhaps even a photograph, of a young George lurking in a school paper somewhere at Harrow. Mills arrived at Windlesham House School in 1925 after having attended Oxford as a schoolmaster and immediately became involved in that institution's stage productions. It isn't difficult to imagine that, as a boy, Mills had been involved in extracurricular endeavors at Harrow that included drama, and that Harrovian student productions were well covered by the school paper.

"The above makes even more sense when one reads the current description of The Grove on Harrow's website:

The Grove is situated on what is nearly the highest point of the Hill, next to St Mary's Church, and is home to about seventy boys.

The Grove occupies a central and prominent position near the highest point of the Hill, yet its quiet location is an attraction. Boys come from all over the United Kingdom and links with more distant prep schools are actively maintained. The Grove is strong in Art and Drama, and increasingly in Music, with a longer reputation for sporting prowess.

Variety in the intake of boys gives the House its strength, and its success depends on their talent."

Given the proclivity of George Mills to have been involved as a schoolmaster in the arts, particularly drama and music, as well as sports, The Grove must have been a perfect locale for his education!

I suppose it is even possible that we might gain a clue as to where George Mills went when he departed The Grove in the summer of his 15th year. Mills reappears in the historical record in the summer of 1916 when he is recruited to the Rifle Depot in July and sent off to war.

Still, one wonders what a sixteen-year-old in early 20th century England, from a well-to-do family and with an education at Harrow does with himself for four years.

I've speculated that the teenaged George may have tried to follow to some degree in the footsteps of his uncle, Major Dudley Mills of the Royal Engineers, eschewing the military for the time being and becoming an apprentice at the engineering firm Wallis & Steevens, Ltd.

However, that supposition rests on the tenuous evidence of a ship manifest from 1915 containing the name George Mills, who at the time was a 19-year-old British apprentice sailing from Buenos Aires to Liverpool with then-54-year-old Alfred Wallis of the famed engineering firm [right].

The point of Stanley Elkin's novel, George Mills, is that the world has always been populated by a plethora of run-of-the-mill, indistinguishable men by the name of George Mills. Hence, basing any supposition on a U.K. document containing the name 'George Mills' is, I realize, a longshot.

However, while freely admitting it may not actually be the case, I have no other peg upon which to hang my metaphorical hat regarding the missing years of George Mills, 1912-1916, especially since Mills signed his army recruitment papers with his occupation listed as "student"—a term which could loosely, I suppose, be applied to an apprentice, particularly one from a scholarly family such as George's.

One other interesting aspect of the above information is George's 1951 address: The Naval and Military Club, then at 94 Piccadilly, London W.1. [left].

We've seen George use this address before. In 1944, he wrote The Times about the Royal Army Pay Corps, having been an officer in it recently, and used that exact address. And, now, here we have Mills still using the same one some seven years later.

His father, Rev. Barton R. V. Mills, used The Athenæum, Pall, Mall, S.W.1 [below, right], as his professional address even when he lived nearby in Kensington. The Military and Naval Club is, coincidentally just blocks away from his George's father's haunts at The Athenæum in 1951, and less than a mile away from the family's past residences, west of Green Park and Buckingham Palace.

George's mother, Edith Mills, had passed away in 1945 while living with George's sisters in Kensington. By 1947, the spinsters Agnes and Violet Mills, had moved to Grey Friars in Budleigh Salterton, where George was certainly known to have resided, where he passed away in 1972, and where he may have been buried.

It's possible, I suppose, that Mills resided at the Military and Naval Club after the war, well into the 1950s. I understand that it's affordable for one to stay there now, compared to other lodging in central London. It may have been even more affordable at the time, especially given that it would have been undergoing construction to repair bombing damage in 1941 [pictured in Life magazine in 1941, right].

The question becomes: After relinquishing his commission in the RAPC due to ill-health in 1943, where did Mills go? Did he then live in Cadogan Gardens with his mother and sisters? And, after the Misses Mills departed for Budleigh in 1947, did he tag along, or stay? Or even relocate elsewhere—something quite possible given his lifelong inclination to Sussex?

Thank you, Michael, for the information above! It inches us closer to a more thorough knowledge of the author, George Mills. But, as always seems the case, with answers come new questions. And if you have any information that can help, please don't hesitate to contact me!

Wallis & Steevens, George & Uncle Dudley, and Hants & Brazil

Wallis and Steevens began doing business in 1840 as merchants and carriers of corn, coal, and salt under the name R. Wallis and Sons in Hampshire, England. They soon became ironmongers, and later opened a foundry for iron and brass.

By 1860, the firm was producing machinery and was taking its first steps toward producing steam engines. By the end of the decade, the firm, then known as 'Wallis and Steevens' after Charles Steevens came aboard, was producing threshing machines and steam engines, including steam engines as English farming went large scale and threshing contractors moved from farm to farm.

Their steam engines soon became portable, and in the 1870s, trade was opened with Denmark, Bavaria, and South Africa for their award-winning agricultural machinery. Development continued on portable steam and traction engines, but, after a series of poor summers, an agricultural depression hit England by 1879.

The company soon developed the first portable engine developed specifically to produce electrical light, and 1882 saw the construction of the two largest engines ever built by the company. Trade in fixed engines remained steady as family member and mechanical engineer William Alfred Wallis joined the firm as a junior partner in 1888.

In the 1890s, Wallis and Steevens begins producing road rollers [pictured, right] and low pressure steam engines. Trade with South Africa diminished when Herbert Wallis died in Johannesberg in 1894, but a year later the company debuted the first 'road locomotive.' The company contemplated making smaller engines while, in 1896, Frank and Alfred Wallis attended the Motor Car exhibtion at the Crystal Palace and determined that the "future lies with light steam traction engines." [In hindsight, it seems that decision may have been a tad short-sighted.]

The company was disappointed in sales of a larger tractor they produced after road restrictions were eased from three tons to four in 1904. By 1906, the firm added a reverse gear to their engines, but by 1910, the agricultural side of the business diminishes in favor of road vehicles.

In 1913, the company decided to reverse gear themselves, and were moving toward creation of an internal combustion engine when further development was postponed by the outbreak of the First World War. By 1914, the company was producing shell casings as well as road rollers and traction engines for the War Department.

A loan opportunity for Brazil extended from Britain was withdrawn due to the onset of global hostilities, and it wasn't until well after unrestricted submarine warfare was begun by Germany that the country of Brazil, along with the United States, entered the Great War.

With many prior trading partners suddenly embroiled in the war, Wallis and Steevens was likely doing everything it could to find new trading partners to supplement its government contracts. Brazil, one of the four most powerful nations in the Americas, and South America's foremost power, would have been a good bet for trade among then-neutral nations early in the conflict. U-boats had not, at that point in 1914, begun sinking merchant vessels from neutral nations.

It was the sinking of a non-neutral ship, the R.M.S. Lusitania, on 7 May 1915 off the coast of Ireland that turned public opinion in non-aggressor nations worldwide against Germany, and probably changed the trading plans of Alfred Wallis of Wallis and Steevens who had been in South America with an entourage in early 1915.

The manifest [seen below, right; click to enlarge] of the Avon, a steamer sailing for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, states that the ship sailed into Liverpool on 15 March 1915 from Buenos Aires, by way of Montevideo [where Wallis, et al, had boarded], Santos, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, Leixões, and Vigo.

Wallis had been sailing with a brace of apprentice engineers: James Young, 19; Albert Hopson, 17; John Thomas, 21; and George Mills, 19.

It's not a stretch to think that a teenage George Mills—having left Harrow in 1912 and seemingly not immediately interested in continuing his education in the classroom—had begun an apprenticeship in the years between his time as a Harrovian and when he's sworn into the army. It would also go a long way toward explaining why a fellow who'd departed Harrow four years before had listed himself as a "student" when called upon to provide his current occupation at the enlistment office in Kensington in 1916.

Traveling by rail to Basingstoke would have meant he would have a trip of a mere 40 miles or so from home. An apprenticeship with prestigious Wallis and Steevens would have kept him relatively close to the family in a geographical sense, and he'd have been "close" to a family member in another way as well: George's uncle, Major Dudley Acland Mills, had served for decades as an officer in the Royal Engineers [some of whom are pictured in 1914, below left]. Dudley's work took him the world over, China, India, Canada, the South Seas, and he eventually was named a governor of Jamaica. I'd be stunned to find that, as a boy, George hadn't keenly admired his exceptionally interesting Uncle Dudley.

As an engineer, Major Mills would have been intimately acquainted with the terrain, climate, people, navigable waterways, railways, roads, potential roads, weather patterns, peoples, customs, and the laws of a plethora of nations, spanning the globe. According to his obituary in the London Times on 22 February 1938, Uncle Dudley was "an authority on things Chinese and early maps and a man of all-round culture and knowledge."

It must have been a thrill for young nephew George to have Uncle Dudley visit with tales of his latest travels and exploits. And, as George grew older and cast about for a career of his own, Uncle Dudley's Royal Engineers simultaneously would have been the delighted recipients of the War Department's First World War contracts with Wallis and Steevens for "traction engines and road rollers." The connection there is obvious.

George at that point in his life seems to have shown none of the passion for religion that his father, Rev. Barton R. V. Mills had shown, or a desire for a prolonged career as a military man as both his Uncle Dudley and half-brother, Arthur F. H. Mills, had shown. His career path evolved in a different direction.

As far as the skills George later exhibited in life, he was a talented writer, and had helped write, produce, and compose songs for dramatic productions at Windlesham House School. He had some bookkeeping, if not accounting, skills that enabled him to re-enter the military as an officer in the Royal Army Pay Corps in 1940, but those seemingly were not apparent when he enlisted the first time in 1916 and was apparently assigned to the Rifle Depot.

He was also a schoolmaster based on time spent at Oxford after WW I. Presumably, it was also that time spent at Oxford [Had he also told the military that he was a graduate?] that afforded him a commission as an officer in the Pay Corps.

There's just no evidence to indicate that the vocations and talents he exhibited throughout what we know of the rest of his life could have evolved out of a 4-year student apprenticeship in industry between 1912 and 1916. He must have been involved in trying some other line of work, and his connections to engineering make it likely that those "missing years" in the life of the adolescent George Mills had been spent near those blazing Wallis and Steevens foundries at Blasingstoke in Hants. Mills was alwas creative, as we know, and the industry was, at the time, growing quickly and always seeking the next great idea or design.

We clearly know that Mills had perennial trouble settling into a single career, job, or long-term home in his adult life. Would it seem highly unlikely that, after dabbling in what I assume was the quite serious, material business of engineering and manufacturing, George eschewed that industry for a return to the abstractions of the classroom in Christ Church and Oxford following his demobilisation from the armed forces in 1919?

My position is that it would not be a quantum leap to suppose that—despite Stanley Elkin's suppostion that the world was, is, and always will be populated by armies of indistinguishable George Millses—the George Mills, sailing in his 19th year, that steamed into Liverpool out of Buenos Aires on 20 March 1915 was, indeed, the George Mills of our interest here.

As always, however, I invite your thoughts, additional information, or informed speculation on my hypothesis—a speculation that, as much of a long-shot as it may be, seems to be the only one for which I can find any evidence at all!