Frontispiece
1. Portrait of Captain Charlie May (Photo courtesy of family)
Plates
2. Charles Edward May (Photo courtesy of Jason Bauchop)
3. The steamship Westmeath (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
4. Port Chalmers, Dunedin, 1880 (Photo courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Ref: O.24194)
5. Princes Street, Dunedin, 1885 (Photo courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Ref: C.011756)
6. The May-Oatway Fire Alarm (Photo courtesy of Dunedin Fire Brigade Restoration Society Inc.)
7. The May Family in London, about 1905 (Photo courtesy of Susan and Charles Worledge)
8. Lily May’s wedding, 1909 (Photo courtesy Susan and Charles Worledge)
9. Trooper May at camp, King Edward’s Horse (Photo courtesy of family)
10. Charlie outside tent, Salisbury Plain (Photo courtesy of family)
11. Private Richard Tawney (Photo courtesy of LSE, Ref: LSE/Tawney/27/11)
12. Captain Alfred Bland (Photograph courtesy of Daniel Mace)
13. Lieut. William Gomersall (Photograph courtesy of Victor Gomersall)
14. Private Arthur Bunting (Photograph courtesy Adrian Bunting)
15. Maude with Pauline in her christening robe, 1914 (Photo courtesy of family)
16. Maude and Pauline in leather-bound case (Photo courtesy of Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)
17. Maude, Pauline and Charlie, perhaps on leave, Feb. 1915 (Photo courtesy of family)
18. Maude (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)
19. Pauline, aged about four with Teddy bear, c.1918 (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)
20. Charlie’s personal diaries (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Refs: MR4/17/295/1/1-7)
21. Pencil sketch by Charlie, ‘Our Camp in the Bois’ (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/5/1)
22. Charles Edward May, seated, at Imperial School of Instruction camp, Zeitoun, Egypt, 1915 (Photo courtesy of Susan and Charles Worledge)
23. Dantzig Alley British Cemetery (Photograph courtesy of Derek Taylor)
24. Charlie’s headstone, Dantzig Alley (Photograph courtesy of Derek Taylor)
25. Frank Earles, early 1920s (Photograph courtesy of Rosie Gutteridge)
26. Pauline, a friend and Maude in Fontainebleau, France, 1922 (Photo courtesy of family)
27. Pauline’s wedding to Harry Karet, 1950 (Photo courtesy of family)
What is it that makes one diary live and another simply die on the page? Nine times out of ten it is down to the intrinsic interest of the material or the quality of the writing; but every so often one comes across a diary where it is the sense of personality behind it that lifts it out of the ordinary: such a diary is that of Captain Charlie May, killed in the early morning of 1 July 1916, leading his men of B Company of the 22nd Manchester Service Battalion into action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
There is nothing very remarkable about Charles May, and that is the point about him: from the first page of his diary to the last haunting entries he feels so utterly familiar and recognisable. That is partly because his war was the war that a million men like him knew and endured and has become part of our historic consciousness; but more than that it is because Charlie May is ‘England’ as England has always liked to imagine itself, the England that stood in square at Waterloo and would stand waist-deep in water at Dunkirk, the England of a hundred 1940s and ’50s films, down to his English wife and his English baby daughter and the English batman and the Alexandra rose that he sports into battle – the unassuming, modest, enduring, reliable, immensely likeable kind of Englishman, with his kindness, his tolerance, his loyalty, his certainties, his prejudices, his pipe, his fishing rod, his horse, his good jokes and his bad jokes and his un-showy patriotism, that if you had to spend your war up to your knees in clinging mud you would be very grateful to find next to you: and he is absolutely genuine.
I do not know if it is odd that someone so quintessentially English should come from New Zealand, or if that is part of the explanation, but Charlie May was born in that most stonily un-English of towns, Dunedin, on 27 July 1888, the son of an electrical engineer who had emigrated five years earlier. His father made his name and the foundation of a successful business with a patent for a new kind of fire alarm device, and on their return to England, Charlie had entered the family firm of May-Oatway, acting as company secretary before moving with his new wife, Maude, from the Mays’ family home overlooking Epping Forest to Manchester where, just two weeks before the outbreak of war in 1914, a daughter, Pauline, was born. It is clear that the Mays did not lose sight of their New Zealand lives – their Essex home was named ‘Kia Ora’ (‘be well’ in Maori) and Charlie would call his new home ‘Purakaunui’, after a pretty coastal settlement, near Dunedin – but in 1914 there would have felt nothing odd about such a double identity. It was famously said that sometime between the landing at Anzac Cove and the end of the Battle of the Somme the New Zealand nation was born, but in the late summer of 1914, before Gallipoli was ever dreamed of, many of the thousands of New Zealanders who volunteered to fight in a war half a world away would have seen themselves as part of a single imperial family, one corner of the great Dominion ‘quadrilateral’ of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, on which the British Empire