David Worsfold explains how he researched the remarkable life of Thomas Kelly, a man who served for more than 50 years in the British Army. He is the subject of Worsfold’s book Fighting for the Empire.
Researching and writing a biography of someone whose long, adventurous life covered over 20 countries across four continents is a major challenge. Thomas Kelly’s family knew many – but by no means all – of the highlights of his extraordinary life but there were significant gaps, not least around his role with the Indian Medical Service in the First World War.
The starting point was the family’s knowledge of this period of his life which provided a basic but rather incomplete outline. The real story was far richer and more engaging and discovering that provided one of the really big breakthroughs of almost two years research.
The family knew he served as a doctor in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) where the British and Indian forces were fighting the Turks and that he commanded a hospital in Nasariyah. He returned to India after the war with the Distinguished Service Order, several Mentions in Despatches and a wife. He met a nurse at the hospital in Nasariyah in 1917 and married her as the war drew to a close the following year. That was more or less it. Filling in the gaps was going to be an interesting challenge but one that had to be faced if the Kelly story was ever going to make it as a book.
The starting point was the Indian Army Lists in the British Library. These revealed that he didn’t just serve in Mesopotamia but also in Egypt and Aden, only arriving in Mesopotamia in early 1916 in the wake of the disastrous conclusion to the siege of Kut. They also offered the crucial information that before taking command of the 83rd Combined Stationary Hospital in Nasariyah he commanded the 105th Indian Field Ambulance.
Armed with this information my next port of call was the National Archives in Kew searching for references to the units he served with. One box of War Diaries and related files listed the 105th IFA. I opened it not with any great sense of anticipation because other references had turned out to be rather thin and disappointing but at the bottom of this box was a reasonably thick buff folder marked 105th IFA.
This looked more promising but I wasn’t sure what to expect as I opened it because very few War Diaries from medical units from that theatre of war seem to have survived.
Inside was a covering sheet saying it was the War Diary for the 105th IFA so I carefully turned that over and saw the almost indecipherable handwriting which I instantly recognised from a collection of letters Kelly wrote to his sister from Tibet a decade previously. These were the War Diaries Kelly kept during WW1, almost complete from the day his unit was mobilised in Peshawar in 1914 to the day he returned to Bombay to get married four years later. It was a true eureka moment but one that I couldn’t share too loudly in the hushed reading room of the National Archives.
The diaries were a revelation. They provided a day-by-day account of where he was during the war, not in the rather dry style of other medical unit war diaries, merely listing the casualties in, deaths, those returned to the their units and so on alongside any major events. Kelly’s diaries were very much in his own voice, full of comments, often terse and clearly directed at his superiors, acute observations and insights into the huge challenges he faced in Egypt, Aden and Mesopotamia.
His entry for 28 August 1915 in Aden is typical. As the fighting units retreated in the face of a Turkish counter-attack, Kelly found himself at the Advanced Dressing Station, treating the wounded as bullets tore through the fabric of their hospital tents: “caught in crossfire” he noted. He wasn’t so sanguine about the performance of some of his unit under fire that day: “The men of IBC [Indian Bearer Corps] who accompanied this column under Major Beit IMS were very unsteady and could not be relied on to work under the somewhat arduous conditions of a retirement under heavy close range fire. The drivers of Ambulance Camels worked very well all through.”
There are many similar comments, all handwritten. Doctor’s handwriting is notoriously difficult to read at the best of times, a problem exacerbated by it being committed to paper 100 years ago. None of the diaries are typed, unlike the majority of those you see from the Western Front, a further glimpse into the harsh conditions and limited resources available out there.
The diaries weren’t the end of the search. I turned to the London Gazette archives to find the various dispatches he was mentioned in, again filling in some crucial gaps. The one dispatch that couldn’t be found was the one with the full citation for his DSO: this was lost when the ship carrying it back to the UK was sunk by a German submarine.
There were many other significant breakthroughs as I pieced together this fascinating story: finding a chapter devoted to him and his battle against the plague in Persia in 1908 in a book by Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, locating an appendix to a contemporary book on the Tibet Mission in 1903-04 that contained a day-by-day record of weather conditions kept by Kelly and eventually locating the records that completed the story of his service as a ship’s surgeon in WW2.
From a starting point that left months, even years, unaccounted for I finished knowing where he was with almost unnerving certainty throughout his life, often to the day, time and place. He was rarely very far away from some excitement or adventure.
Fighting for the Empire by Sabrestorm Books is out now.
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