The next hero I set out to find was Clarence Bascom.
Clarence is buried in St John, a sparsely populated parish on the east coast of Barbados. In 2010 its population was only 8,963 with a density of 680 people per square mile. This makes it the 3rd smallest of the 11 Bajan parishes in terms of populace.
The bus journey was uneventful other than for the fact we passed through Gall Hill. This might mean nothing to most people but for me it denotes the home of Charles Mortimer Lashley, a West Indian solider killed or possibly even murdered, on the SS Orca when returning to the West Indies in 1919 after the end of the War. I was delighted when only a minute or two out of Gall Hill the driver shouted to let me know that we’d reached the stop for St John’s church. This meant after I’d found Clarence I could visit Gall Hill and look for traces of Charles Lashley’s short life.
I walked about 400 yards up a deserted lane towards the church. There was no sign of life. St John is a beautiful but sleepy part of the island with no large towns.
What it does have is the church with almost certainly the most spectacular view imaginable. The church is near to Hackleton’s Cliff and offers magnificent views of the rugged east coast and Atlantic Ocean. The cliff is named after one Mr Hackleton who committed suicide by riding his horse over the 1,000 feet drop.
The position of the church affords beautiful views but it also exposes the building to the extreme forces of nature that can occasionally hit the east coast.
The original wooden church had been built in 1645 but was destroyed in a fire and replaced by a stone structure in 1660. The building cost the diocese 110,000 lbs of sugar. Sadly, the hurricane of 1675 badly damaged the new church which eventually collapsed the following year. One can only imagine the anguish suffered by the people of St John as they saw their beautiful new church destroyed. In echoes of the Three Little Pigs building their houses with increasingly robust materials, the citizens of St John didn’t give up and built yet another church but this too was then badly damaged in the hurricane of 1780. The church was restored but then destroyed, like many others on the island, by the hurricane of 1831. The current and fourth church was built in 1836.
After taking in the view I went in search of Clarence’s grave. I found the grand graves and tombs of several famous and wealthy families. These would have been, in the main, plantation owners in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the star of the burial area is indisputably Ferdinand Paleologus a nephew of the last Emperor of Byzantium, Constantine XI. Ferdinand lived in Barbados for 20 years before dying on 8 October 1678. He was the first owner of Clifton Hall Great House and served as a warden at the church from 1655 to 1656.
Ferdinand named Clifton Hall after his birthplace in Cornwall. In spite of the Greek name he was born in England to where his father Theodore had moved in 1596. He married Ferdinand’s mother, an English lady called Mary Balls in 1600.
Ferdinand fled England in 1645 after fighting, unsuccessfully, for the Royalists against Cromwell in the Battle of Naseby in the English Civil War.
After the hurricane of 1831 his body was found under the organ loft in the vault of Sir Peter Colleton the Deputy Governor of Barbados in 1673 who also owned a large part of Carolina in America. The body was moved and reinterred in a vault. However, on 4 May 1844, in the face of rumours that Ferdinand’s body had been buried ‘backways’, a church official ordered that the vault be opened. Sure enough, Ferdinand’s coffin was in a different position from the others and when the lid was opened it was found that his skeleton, which was embedded in quicklime, had been buried in line with Greek Orthodox tradition which demanded that a dead person’s head should point to the west and their feet to the east. Mystery solved, the coffin was closed and buried in its present location. An inscription reads:
“Here lyeth the body of
Ferdinando Paleologus
Descended from ye imperial lyne
Of ye last Christian
Emperors of Greece
Churchwarden of this Parish
1655-1656
Vestryman, Twenty years
Died Oct. 3 1678”
Ferdinand didn’t die at Clifton Hall. By the time of his death the house was owned by the Rous family. When it was later sold to the Haynes family in 1810 for £35,350 it included 365 acres and 151 slaves. There is every chance some of Clarence’s ancestors would have been slaves at Clifton.
A more recent owner was Peter Morgan a former Minister for Tourism in the Bajan government. A frequent visitor to his home was the Honourable David John Howard Thompson the former Prime Minister of Barbados who is also buried at St John’s church. David Thompson was a mentee of Errol Barrow and won the seat of St John after Prime Minister Barrow’s death in 1987. He went on to become Barbados’ 6th Prime Minister but died in office on 23 October 2010 at the tragically young age of 48. He was buried at St John’s on 3 November 2010 after a State Funeral at the Kensington Oval.
Less famous, but my personal favourite, is the grave of Thomas Hughes who at his own request was buried standing up as he so rarely sat in his life time.
It very soon became obvious to me that this area was the preserve of the wealthier ex-residents of St John. Clarence must be buried elsewhere.
The only other person in the vicinity was a lady who seemed to be responsible for security. Not the most stretching of jobs. I was the only other person around and I wasn’t going to cause any trouble. She advised me that it was much more likely Clarence would be buried in the commoners’ cemetery about 400 yards down the deserted lane. In fact, precisely where I had got off the bus.
Walking back down the lane I’d built up a thirst in the heat of the morning. I saw a small shack which looked as if it may have sold drinks. I ventured inside and found a tired and harassed looking woman in a rather sparsely equipped shop. She told me there had been a funeral the previous day which I think was an indirect explanation as to why the shop looked as if it had been looted. She managed to find 2 bottles of Sprite which I took unhesitatingly. “$6 Bajan” she said. I only had $5 Bajan and $10 Bajan notes. With typical Bajan generosity, or an air of weariness which may have even been a hangover, she accepted the $5 Bajan note and wrote off the extra Dollar.
I crossed the road to the cemetery. Graves were strewn haphazardly. Many of them had goats tethered to them. It was a large cemetery with a small, simple coral coloured chapel which I assume is where the service for Clarence would have taken place in 1921. Despite the fact I hadn’t noticed it when I got off the bus, this was a large cemetery and finding Clarence was going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack unless I hit lucky. I didn’t.
In contrast to the grand tombs in the grounds of St John’s church this cemetery had many simple wooden crosses with hand painted epitaphs. This showed the poverty of the area but also the love the relations had for their lost ones and their desire that they be remembered even if it was in the simplest and therefore most touching of ways.
I searched, and searched, and searched for Clarence. I decided to swallow my pride and ask for directions. Something men rarely do. Two grave diggers were considering a hole. I didn’t really want to disturb them as they were concentrating on this hole very seriously. I needn’t have worried as it soon became apparent that they were very happy to have a diversion from the possibility of actually doing something with the hole. Either that or they displayed typical Bajan generosity of spirit in doing all they could to help me find Clarence.
I wouldn’t want anyone to get the feeling that Clarence with his fancy Commonwealth War Grave was a personality in this grave yard in the way that Ferdinand Paleologus was in St John’s church yard. The grave diggers weren’t aware of Clarence or his claim to fame but eventually we found him and I thanked them for their help. They went back to their hole.
As I stood over Clarence’s grave I looked back at his short life. We know that he decided to join-up in January 1917 and formally enlisted into the Army for the “duration of the war” on 6 March 1917. At that time, he was working as a mason for a M White, in Sherbourne, St John. He had made his mind up to go to War and fight for King and country several months before and had a preliminary medical examination on 3 January 1917. Who knows, he may have spent New Year’s Day 1917 mulling over his future and opting for what he thought was his duty. He was 19 years and 10 months at the time meaning that he was born in approximately March 1897. He was 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighed a meagre 128lbs – just a little over 9 stones – and had a scar on his right shoulder.
It is safe to say that, as Clarence worked in Sherbourne, he almost certainly lived there too. Transport was not good in Barbados in the early 20th century and most people could find employment within easy travelling distance of their home. Even now Sherbourne is a small community, about 8 miles north-east of Bridgetown and overlooked by Mount Tabor and near to the Mount Tabor Moravian Church.
Given that Clarence’s next of kin was shown as his aunt, E Bascom of St John, it would seem that his parents were no longer around. This may have made his leaving St John and Barbados easier to contemplate. We will never know what thoughts went through his head as he determined his future.
Clarence was re-examined in advance of his posting abroad on 6 March 1917. He was assessed as fit for service and all that was left now was to await a date to sail to Europe.
Clarence was assigned to the 8th Battalion of the British West Indies Regiment and, like 99% of Black soldiers, was a Private, the lowest rank. His service number was 10906 and he left Barbados as part of the 2nd contingent of volunteers on 7 July 1917 arriving in Brest, France on 31 July 1917.
He possibly didn’t adapt to military life quickly or easily as, on 18 October 1917, he was deducted 7 days’ pay for “malingering.” His medical records show that he was regularly sick. His incapacity was usually gastritis but he also suffered from bronchitis and dyspepsia.
On 28 December 1917, he was transferred to Marseilles where he was hospitalised on 1 January 1918 being returned to duty on 14 January 1918.
His ill health continued though with frequent spells of treatment and hospitalisation. He’d been treated in at least three hospitals in France; The Canadian General, 29 General Hospital in Le Havre and Marseilles Stationary Hospital.
Eventually, on 14 April 1919, he left Cherbourg to return to Barbados for the final time arriving in the West Indies on 29 April 1919 when he was immediately admitted to the Barbados Military Hospital.
Clarence was officially discharged on 15 June 1919. After discharge Clarence was examined by a Medical Board on 7 January 1920 (almost 3 years to the day since he’d enlisted and had his first medical) to establish if he was entitled to a pension. In effect, the Medical Board determined three questions; 1) did he have a disability and if so 2) was it due in part or in total to his war service and 3) what was the extent of that disability. Clarence explained in his application that he had fought in Belgium from 11 July 1917 (|the date he left Barbados) until November 1917 and in France from November 1917 until May 1919. He described his disability, probably naively, as gastritis. It transpired that his illness was much worse than that and he was suffering from Pulmonary Tuberculosis (TB).
TB was a common and lethal illness in the trenches of World War I. More often than not the illness lingered until well after discharge but death was usually an inevitable outcome.
Clarence attributed the cause of his illness to “indifferent food and irregular meals” which pretty much sums up the lifestyle of soldiers in Europe during World War I. Did he ever wonder why he had given up the security he had in his homeland for the inhospitable trenches of Western Europe and the illnesses he was suffering in such miserable circumstances?
Medical Boards were often far from generous in their assessment of disability but in Clarence’s case the Board on 7 January 1920 unhesitatingly decided his TB was wholly attributable to his war service and awarded him a 100% pension. The award wasn’t approved until 25 March 1920 and we have no idea how much longer it took to actually get some payment to Clarence. We don’t know how he survived between being discharged in June 1919 and being awarded a pension. One assumes that as he was 100% disabled he could not have returned to his old job as a mason and nor would he likely be fit for any other type of work. Life must have been hard but hopefully he was nursed by loved ones during his illness. Surely nothing could be worse than the trenches?
The pension was awarded until 19 April 1921. In theory Clarence’s award would have been reviewed in April 1921 but in reality the Medical Board must have known his illness would prove fatal and their medical prediction proved spot on as Clarence passed away on 5 March 1921 just 6 weeks before his pension was due to expire. He was 22 or 23 years old.
Clarence qualified for a British War Medal and a Victory Medal but both remained unclaimed as they would only have been available after his death.
Clarence’s is the only Commonwealth War Grave in St John’s cemetery.
As I left Clarence in eternal peace amongst the goats and makeshift graves, I turned my mind to Gall Hill and Charles Mortimer Lashley. On reflection, Charles is much too important a character to be treated as a footnote to Clarence’s story so we’ll leave him until another day and let Clarence have the limelight on this occasion.
“Here lyeth the body of Ferdinando Paleologus Descended from ye imperial lyne Of ye last Christian Emperors of Greece Churchwarden of this Parish 1655-1656 Vestryman, Twenty years Died Oct. 3 1678”