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. Then, in 1896, 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
apparently 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.
General
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