Joseph (Joe) Murray

1896-1994
Leading Seaman, Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division

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• Biography

  Joe [Joseph] Murray was one of the most remarkable survivors of World War 1. Fierce resilience, facility with oral and written language, a photographic memory backed with excellent note-taking and good luck brought him from a mining village in Durham to acknowledgement as one of the best known veterans of conflict at Gallipoli and the Western Front. We are fortunate to have his two books about his experiences, as well as, among others, a wonderful 27 hours of interview available on the Imperial War Museum oral history site.

  Joe Murray was born into the mining community of Burnopfield in Durham. He spent six years before the First World War working at the local mine. His older brother, Tom, had joined the Royal Navy as a regular some years before. When war broke out, In October 1914, Joe followed his brother’s choice of service into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

  After basic training at Crystal Palace in London, Joe volunteered for the Royal Naval Division (RND) and went for further training at Devonport in November 1915. While there. he learned that Tom had been killed in the disastrous naval battle of Coronel off the coast of South America.  This bereavement left Joe with a fierce determination to get even with Germany and her allies for the loss of his brother, linked to an equally firm intention to get back to his mother in one piece so that she would not lose another son to the war.
  
  He was sent into C Company of the Hood Battalion, one of the two most glamorous battalions of the RND: the Hood had officers like Arthur ‘Oc’ Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son and the poet, Rupert Brooke. They spent the winter with the rest of the division in Blandford Camp in Dorset. Joe soon became Asquith’s runner (messenger) and so his portraits of RND life and personalities are likely to be better informed than those of many others.

  Joe was not happy about much of his time at the muddy and uncomfortable Blandford Camp. He recorded with some scorn the training the Division went through, as well as irritation at the limited expeditions the ‘other ranks’ were allowed to make into Blandford town in their spare time and their skirmishes with Military Police trying to enforce the curfew.

  Finally, on the 20th February 1915, the Hood’s commanding officer, Colonel Quilter could reveal that the Division was going, as many had guessed, to the East: Gallipoli and eventually Constantinople. Like the others, Joe was happy that they were to have a go at the enemy after so much hanging around and realised that the Division was off on a never-to-be forgotten expedition. He had started a diary from the day of Winston Churchill’s pre-embarkation inspection on 8th February 1915, which he maintained for the rest of the war.

  The diaries and memoirs are very precise, though occasionally, Joe’s position out of the decision-making ranks leads him astray. For example, the battalion marched over the downs to Shillingstone Station to start their journey to Gallipoli. Murray grumbles that they went to that station rather than Blandford, because there was no-one to wave them goodbye. He thought this decision was made for half–baked reasons of secrecy. In fact, investigations at the centenary of the departure in 2015 suggested it was more likely to relate to the station layouts:  Shillingstone Station was far better suited than Blandford to the movement of thousands of troops and the management of the rolling stock that collected them.
  
  Joe’s descriptions of the journey to the Gallipoli peninsula via Avonmouth, Malta, Egypt and Skyros reflect different realities on board ship from those of the classically educated officers who relished the Homeric lands they travelled past and through, and had far better quarters and food all through the voyage than the other ranks. He then provides detailed descriptions of the battalion’s time in Egypt: the RND and their hats apparently went down well with the Australian and New Zealand troops who were in camp there.

  On the day of the first landings, Murray was proud to be among thirty volunteers in a ‘suicide party’, supporting a heroic swim by Lieutenant Commander Bernard Freyberg, later famous as commander of British forces in Crete during the second world war, to set off flares on the coast to divert the Turks’ attention from the real landing sites.  

  Freyberg completed his swim and won a DSO. It is not clear that the enemy was taken in. Murray, along with many others subsequently, was doubtful about the point of it all. ‘Were we lost? If it was the intention to land, why didn’t we?’(Murray,recording dep. 1995)
  
  Several days later, the RND and the Hood landed on Gallipoli, and went quickly into action. Murray describes the three battles of Krithia in May and June 1915 in great detail, culminating in the stories of his charmed existence at the Third Battle of Krithia on the 4/5th June, when the British, French and their allies attacked the lines of Turkish trenches right across the south of the peninsula. But no progress was made on the right of the Hood battalion, so the Turks could fire right across the line of their advance: this ‘enfilade’ fire blew up both Joe Murray’s chest ammunition pouches at the same time.

  With some others from the Hood, Joe managed to advance a good way through enemy lines that day. But the Hood could not hold the position and Murray was forced to go back across the first two lines, one of which the Turks had reoccupied in the meantime: he fell in front of a trench full of Turkish soldiers and had to lie there till dusk while one fired his rifle through a loophole just above his head. 

  Joe continued to chronicle the misery of Gallipoli right through to the withdrawal in January 1916. By then, his knowledge of mining had been exploited in a mass of tunneling expeditions under Turkish lines and he describes how commonly they found themselves feet away from Turkish miners tunnelling in the opposite direction, wondering who could set up their mine and blast it first. But it was all hopeless, of course, and eventually the Hood was withdrawn, one of the last units to leave the Peninsula.

  The Division was on the verge of disbandment after the withdrawal from Gallipoli. They had spent weeks at Mudros, the base just off the Turkish coast, and morale at all levels was poor. Its naval trappings did not fit easily with the generals’ need for soldiers and more soldiers in a unified command structure on the Western Front, but the Admiralty was not at all sure they wanted to let go of them. Eventually, the Admiralty made the decision to hand the Division over to the army and In spring 1916 the RND went to France.
  Murray appreciated their reception at Marseilles in May ‘Because we stole away from Devonport, Blandford and the Dardanelles we never had a send off, but here in Marseilles they made a fuss of us. Lasses were running along the lines kissing the fellers.’

  They travelled north by train.  He found the Western Front very different from war on Gallipoli where enemy trenches were often only 10 to 15 feet away. ‘ It seemed alarming that we were able to walk around in No Man’s Land as one would in a football field.’ Because the massed artillery could, if directed, batter any front trenches unmercifully, those trenches were lightly manned and the area between the front lines was relatively safe – most days.

  The Division’s absorption into the army had been eased by the retention of Major General Paris as the officer commanding. But when he was wounded and had to leave them the atmosphere was changed by the appointment of a soldier well accustomed to all sorts of trench warfare, General Shute. Shute was a competent commander whose legacy is hopelessly compromised by Alan P. Herbert’s assault on his drive for cleanness in the trenches: The general inspecting the trenches/exclaimed with a horrified shout/’I refuse to command a division that leaves its excreta about.’/But nobody took any notice,/no-one was prepared to refute,/ that the presence of shit was congenial/compared with the presence of Shute.

  Shute’s first task was to lead the Division against the high ground of a ridge near the village of Beaumont Hamel which the Germans had held for a long time, despite many attempts to dislodge them. Preparations were careful and thorough and by the early hours of the 13th November the assault troops were in position. Joe found himself waiting next to Bernard Freyberg, who had by then become CO of the Hood. ‘You too are still with us,’ said Freyberg. ‘So pleased to see you. Make yourself as comfortable as you can and good luck.’ (Murray, 1980)

  Over several days, the RND succeeded where so many others had failed and seized the ridge from the Germans. Freyberg won a VC for his part in the action, but was wounded seriously enough to take no further part in active service for several months. Joe Murray was wounded by a shell splinter, but after a brief convalescence was able to rejoin the Battalion where he was promoted to NCO and commanded a Lewis gun section.

  Murray was not so lucky in an action at Gavrelle near Arras in April 1917. His description of the events that day shows him at his best, both in describing the chaos of battle and in the unflinching honesty with which he describes the brutality that he encountered from his own side ‘ Advancing through the village, Murray described, ‘ … no line and no direction. You couldn’t see any officers and you couldn’t see any men. … sometimes you were on your own wondering where everybody had got to… In the midst of the shambles Murray  tripped over and was shot by a German hiding in a nearby cellar. He killed the German but sustained a serious wound in his wrist. 

  He set off to make his way back for treatment and en route found himself face-to-face with an unarmed and terrified young German soldier. Eventually, the German understood that he was not going to be killed and that Joe was asking for help with his injury. He managed some rudimentary treatment and the unlikely pair set off back to the British lines. ‘When I did get a move on, I was very groggy and kept falling down. The German lifted me up and arm-in-arm we went on, me and the bloke I had intended to kill a little ago.’ Eventually, they hobbled into a ‘great big dugout, a smashing place, originally Jerry’s.’   Soon afterwards, in came one of Joe’s pet hates, a sergeant ‘with his buttons brightly polished, and a good crease in his trouser and his artillery boots up to his knee.’ He seized hold of the prisoner and was intent on shooting him. Joe protested but the sergeant ‘would keep on getting hold of the German’. Joe took out his revolver and pretended to check if it was loaded while pointing it at the sergeant. ‘…off he went and I saw no more of him…Honestly, I felt like shooting him as without my prisoner I would only have got half the distance.’(Murray,1984)

  That was the end of active service in France for Joe Murray. After the war, he married Maud Jones from Essex. Their son, Pritchard, died when he was relatively young.

  Murray became well known as a chronicler of battle through a series of events long after both world wars. In 1963 he told Tony Essex, the BBC producer, that he had ‘emerged’ from WW1 with diaries and a mass of notes on pieces of paper. He spent some time on Spitzbergen as a mineral prospector in 1920 and pulled his papers together while there.
  After that, he apparently put them one side until he met the man who had been his Chief Petty Officer in the Hood Battalion. He suggested Joe should take his material to the author Peter Singleton-Gates, who was writing a biography of Lord Freyberg at the time.

  Singleton-Gates saw the possibilities and set Murray on course for his first book, which was published as Gallipoli As I saw It, and much later re-published as Gallipoli 1915. Joe was recorded for Tony Essex’s Great War TV series (the first of his TV appearances) and memorably noted, ‘the eyes of the world were upon us ... Well, the eyes of the Turks certainly were, and so were their rifles’.

  In 1980, Joe published his second book Call to Arms which deals largely with his service in the RND after Gallipoli. In 1984 he gave a remarkable interview to the IWM which permits us 45 half hour reels of recording to hear his detailed, articulate accounts of all his war service and more.

  He remained a popular figure at Gallipoli-related events and was frequently in demand as a source for the ever-growing literature of the campaign. He died in a nursing home in Dorking on the 29th January 1994 at the age of 97.

• The community

   

• Examples of work

  Murray, Joseph (1965) Gallipoli as I saw it William Kimber (republished as Gallipoli 1915 in 2004)

  Murray, Joseph (1980) Call to Arms William Kimber

• Correspondence

   

• Other primary sources

  Murray, Joseph (1984)Interview with Peter Hart, Department of Sound Record, ref. 8209
  
  Murray, Joseph (dep 1995) Interview with Leonard Sellers, deposited in the Liddle Collection Edward Boyle Library, University of Leeds

• Where commemorated

   

• Gallantry awards

   

• Secondary sources

  Sellers, Leonard (1995,2003) The Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division, Antwerp, Gallipoli, France 1914-1918. Sellers interviewed Joe Murray for this book.

• Additional activity resources