Sometime in the early 1890s Johnnie Butterworth disappeared from his Rochdale home after a family quarrel. He was not heard of again for months, probably several years. Suddenly, in July 1896, however, a letter arrived at 32 Yorkshire Street from ‘Corporal John Butterworth, Kings Royal Rifles, Jullundur, NW India’. For the next four years regular correspondence between Johnnie and his family would reunite the family.
By 1896 Johnnie had become Corporal John Butterworth, an ‘Uncommission Officer’ in Queen Victoria’s army, serving with the King’s Royal Rifles in post-Mutiny Imperial India. At first Johnnie would describe the excitement and the stimulation of the new experiences which life beyond Rochdale offered. But he would also explain, often in careful detail, routine army life, with its physical demands, long working hours, the heat exhaustion of India and the continuous fight against disease. As time went on even the attempts to be positive began to wane. Johnnie was on the army ship, the ‘Warren Hastings’, when it was ship wrecked. Having survived that ordeal he would then spend eighteen months in Mauritius, where tedium, overwork, arduous training for ‘modern warfare’ and constant illness seemed to fill his Battalion’s seemingly purposeless and weary days. Finally Johnnie would fight with the Rifles for sixteen long months in the Boer War. Letters home were scribbled on any bits of paper he could find. Campaigns, battles, horrific sights, appalling conditions, exhaustion, near starvation, all the horrors of war fill the pages. Johnnie and his colleagues become more and more disillusioned, devastated by the loss of so many friends, becoming increasingly suspicious of the motives of the politicians who controlled their lives.
More and more homesick for the family he had originally left in disgrace, Johnnie found reconciliation through his letters home. The letters would reconnect him to the love of his family and to the safety and convictions of his early, highly Methodist influenced, childhood. For four years the letters to and from his family would sustain Johnnie through the long exhausting days, the difficulties, the loneliness and finally the horrors of the Boer war. Johnnie’s own letters were passed around family members, treasured, and then finally typed and bound into a family-cherished typescript book.
Today these letters offer to us the most remarkable picture of the daily life of an ordinary soldier in the Victorian army. Being written for family, with only the constraint of possible army censorship, they are a detailed first hand, in situ, personally opinioned, record of routine soldiering in some of the most important years of the British Empire.
Royalties from this edition will go to the Methodist Relief and Development Fund (MRDF) for children in Mali
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