THE LAST OF THE TURNERS OF ICKLETON

by Stephen Reardon

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I first passed through Ickleton about ten years ago. The name was on a road sign and I recognised it as the village my father spent his holidays in during his teens in the 1920s. My dad who is in his eighties now is not what you call a close family man. So bits and pieces of family history have percolated down over the years rather than me being steeped in it. I knew therefore that the family on his mother's side were the Turners. Judging by the number in the little Ickleton cemetary they had been in the village for one or two generations at least. My grandmother's uncle Bill (William) Turner and his wife, Aunt Elizabeth are buried there up at the back on the right.

Dad used to be sent to stay with them, at Vallance Cottage, during the holidays. He was born and brought up in Fulham where his mother, Charlotte (Lottie to my Grandfather) Turner as she was had been born after her father, Uncle Bill's brother, had moved from Ickleton. Grandma's father worked with horses in and around the village and eventually had moved to London taking up a job driving the number 11 horsebus from Hammersmith Broadway to Liverpool Street, a route the number 11 still follows.

This much I had gleaned from my father and had added to the sum total of not very much through some very rudimentary enquiries at St Catherine's House. The Turner who really attracted my attention, though, was Ruben. He is on the war memorial opposite the Church in Ickleton: Ruben Turner of the Suffolk Regiment.

The Imperial War Museum told me that he was killed on the Somme at Mailly-Maillet Wood in August 1916. The War Graves Commission told me that 16648 Private Turner had been recruited into the ninth battallion of the Suffolks in Cambridge. I expect he walked to the station at Great Chesterford to get there some time after the harvest was taken in, in the late summer of 1915.

At first my father could not recall who Ruben Turner could have been. But the it came to him that he must have been Ben Turner, Great Uncle Bill's and Elizabeth's son. Nothing was ever said about him in the house that my father could recall, but there was, he said, a framed certificate from the War Office on the wall in the parlour, recording his death. A bit ornate, my father said, like an award of some kind.

Ben Turner, as I now knew him, was just 21 when he died. The same age as my own son Ben when I was piecing all this together. He was the last male of the line.

This Remembrance Sunday I went to Mailly Wood. It has grown back again from the splintered mess it must have been by August 1916. You follow the high chateau wall along a field track to get to the wood. The wall still has the scars and gaps in it caused, according to Edmund Blunden's account of the place, by trees in the park falling onto it because of the shelling. The ninth battallion Suffolk Regiment went into the front trench before Mailly Wood on August 11 and held it until the 28th. Ben was killed on the 23rd.

Afterwards I went to the cemetary at Auchonvillers about two miles away, where Ben Turner is buried. It's a small plot behind a farmyard; immaculately kept of course, containing about three hundred graves. Ben has a couple of mates from the same battallion beside him who died more or less at the same time. You can look across the fields from there to Mailly Wood. It looks a bit like the country between Ickleton and Saffron Walden.

Uncle Bill and Elizabeth had obviously asked for an inscription. It just says "To our dear boy". Simple and heartrending. And for a moment I felt how they must have felt. No wonder Ben was never mentioned in front of my dad, growing up to be a young man on his summer holidays in Ickleton.

 

ends

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Steve Reardon, November 11, 1998

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