Thomas Benson 1899 – 1996
Recently, I’ve been researching my great-grandfather, Thomas Benson.
There is something quite extraordinary in the juxtaposition between the man I remember and the young man I have discovered through my research.
Each Christmas, as we sat together opening gifts, Tommy would pipe up from the corner:
“It weren’t like this Christmas 1915, you know…”
At which point, we would all silently pray that somebody would pass him a toffee before he elaborated any further.
How I wish now that I had let him continue.
Tommy had signed up as a schoolboy soldier, lying about his age to enlist. By the age of seventeen, he was already a veteran of trench warfare, having seen action at Ypres, St. Eloi and Kemmel Hill, before facing the horrors of the Somme in 1916, where he was wounded.
During my research, I discovered that by the age of seventeen he had earned himself the nickname “Cucumber”, reflecting his coolness under fire.
That was not the Tommy I knew.
To me, he was the eccentric old man whose sight had long since dimmed. Widowed long before I was born, he would walk from his home at Danby House into town, occasionally wearing odd-coloured shoes, parting the oncoming traffic with his white stick like Moses with his staff.
The memories I carried of him simply did not match the young man emerging from the records.
Nor had I understood that, at the age of 87, this frail, almost blind old man travelled back to France in September 1986 to honour the comrades he had left behind there seventy years earlier.
Perhaps the most enduring things people leave us are not objects at all.
Sometimes they are tucked away, almost unnoticed, in our memories — waiting for us to become old enough to understand them.
The King’s Shilling
I’m currently working on The King’s Shilling, a longer piece exploring Tommy’s story from schoolboy soldier to old age.
The research draws on family memories, photographs, newspaper reports, surviving military records and, most importantly, a video recording made in the 1980s in which Tommy recounts his experiences in his own words.
I’m considering sharing The King’s Shilling here as a short series before it forms part of a wider family-history trilogy.
There is still more to uncover — but perhaps that is part of the story too.
Sources used
Ripon Gazette interview, 1986
Family archives and memories
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