Alf Razzell

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Alfred Charles Razzell (born March 9, 1897 in Lambeth , † 1995 in Watford ) was a British veteran of the First World War . He became known for the description of his experiences during the Battle of Arras , which the musician Roger Waters processed on the 1992 album Amused to Death .

Life

Razzell was born the third son of Annie Elizabeth and Thomas Razzell. He had two older brothers, Thomas (* 1893), and Augustus (* 1895). Razzell's father, a railroad engineer, was killed in an accident at work around 1899. His mother worked as a cook. The family was supported by the railway company. A private grant of £ 15 a year enabled Razzell to attend school. At the age of 16, Razzell began training as an electrician at the General Post Office . After seven months he joined the British Army as a teenager when the war broke out and was deployed in France. After the war he worked again for the post office. In 1919 he married his wife Winnie, whom he had previously met on convalescence leave in Watford, and settled there with her. He died in Watford in 1995 at the age of 97.

First World War

education

On August 12, 1914, Razzell joined the army. A crowd had gathered in front of Lambeth Town Hall, including Razzell. He was approached by a recruiting sergeant who persuaded him to join and recommended that he pretend to be nineteen. However, his wish to join the Royal Engineers was not granted. Instead, he was assigned to the 8th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers . From August 1914 to May 1915 he was trained at the army bases at Hounslow Barracks, Colchester Barracks, Shorncliffe Camp and Aldershot . Few of his instructors were seasoned soldiers. The military discipline did not seem overly harsh to him, but there was an incident during his training in which a corporal known to be violent was thrown out of the window of a barrack by a recruit and had to be admitted to a hospital. There was a court martial in which the perpetrator received a prison term; the corporal was transferred.

From the end of May 1915 he was used in Belgium and France as an infantryman and sniper in various places, including the fighting for the Hohenzollern Redoubt . There was no hatred towards the German soldiers and even pity towards the injured. In the end, however, the image of the Germans was shaped by years of reporting that a German attack would inevitably have to come sooner or later. As a sniper he was armed with a normal Lee Enfield rifle with a telescopic sight attached . Although the gun had a far greater range, it was typically fired at distances of around 300 yards . After the fighting, it was his job to search the bodies of killed British people for their pay books and documents in order to identify them. During the Battle of the Somme , Razzell was injured in the face by shrapnel .

Bill Hubbard's death

In May 1917, during the Battle of Arras, Razzell was taken prisoner by Germany while he was looking for documents from dead British soldiers. He found the soldier William "Bill" Hubbard, known to him from his training, seriously injured in a trench. He tried to take him from the battlefield, but the fatally injured Hubbard could not bear the pain of the transport, so that Razzell eventually left him dying at his request. The German soldiers who had captured Razzell looked exhausted and disoriented and made no move to assist in the recovery of Hubbard.

End of war

Razzell experienced the end of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Germany. This was taken over in November 1918 by a workers and soldiers council from Bremerhaven . Razzell traveled back to Great Britain via Hamburg , where he was demobilized in 1919 with the rank of corporal.

Contemporary witness

In 1991 Razzell appeared as a contemporary witness in the BBC documentary "A Game of Ghosts" and reported on his war experiences. In addition to collecting the personal documents of fallen soldiers, the incident with Bill Hubbard haunted him the most and most persistently. It was not until 1984 that he found the name Hubbard on a memorial stone near Arras . With that he was finally able to close this chapter. All his life he wondered if he'd done everything in his power to save Hubbard.

Razzell's oral account of Hubbard's death was used by Roger Waters in the 1992 instrumental piece "The Ballad of Bill Hubbard". It opens the album "Amused to Death", which Waters dedicated to the memory of Bill Hubbard. The album is labeled: Dedicated to Private William Hubbard (1888-1917), Eighth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment.

literature

Emma Hanna: The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain, Edinburgh University Press, 2009, ISBN 9780748633906

Web links

Trivia

  • The soldier Bill Hubbard is the 29-year-old, married private William Hubbard from the London borough of Vauxhall, whose death date is given as May 3, 1917. His memorial stone is in the Arras Memorial.
  • The play "Voices" by Stuart Clarke is based on the accounts of veterans of the First World War, namely on Razzell's accounts.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alfred Charles Razzell. In: Lives of the First World War. Imperial War Museum, accessed February 13, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c Razzell, Alfred Charles (oral history). In: Catalog of the Imperial War Museum. Accessed February 13, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Keith Collman: Herts Great War Portraits. In: Hertfordshire Life. August 5, 2014, accessed February 13, 2018 .
  4. ^ Portraits of the Great War survivors. BBC News, November 6, 2009, accessed February 13, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Private HUBBARD, WILLIAM. Commonwealth War Graves Commission , accessed February 13, 2018 .
  6. ^ Dom O'Hanlon: The Lion and Unicorn present Voices by Stuart Clarke. londontheatre.co.uk, March 9, 2015, accessed February 13, 2018 .
  7. ^ Alan Flynn: Voices, Lion and Unicorn Theater - Review. In: everything theater. April 15, 2015, accessed February 13, 2018 .


personal data
SURNAME Razzell, Alf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Razzell, Alfred Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British WW1 veteran
DATE OF BIRTH March 9, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Lambeth
DATE OF DEATH 1995
Place of death Watford