After a really merry Christmas the Battalion began to melt away. Demobilisation began in earnest with the New Year, and parties of twenty-five or thirty left for England almost daily. Large crowds assembled outside the Battalion Headquarters to give the lucky ones a rousing send-off, and the procession through the village was headed by the Regimental Band, until the day came when the Band played itself out of the village and left for home.
Before that day came, however, the Band had supplied the orchestra for a highly successful revue, “Pack up,” which was played in the theatre by a company of officers, N.C.O.’s and men of the Civil Service Rifles trained by Corporal Bailey of “B” Company. The “book” was written by Major D. Young, M.C., second in command of the Battalion, the music was “put together” by Second-Lieutenant P. H. Small, and the play was produced by Corporal Bailey. R.Q.M.S. Hart excelled himself with the wonderful stage effects which he devised.
Of the actors special mention should be made of Private Perrin, Captain “Florrie” Ford, and the two “girls,” Lance-Corporal Harnett and Lance-Corporal Flight, and Sergeant Taylor. But the whole Company is to be congratulated on the best show ever given by a Battalion concert party. The production got such an enthusiastic reception that it was given at Auchel and other places for the benefit of other units.
Although demobilisation began just before New Year, it was not until the 10th of May, 1919, that the last remnants, the “Cadre,” consisting of about thirty all ranks, reached England.
It should perhaps be mentioned that there was not a single officer, N.C.O. or man outside the Quartermaster’s staff and transport section who served with the Battalion continuously throughout its stay in France.
Included in the Cadre was Sergeant Teasdale, a member of the Regiment for nearly twenty years. For more than nineteen of his twenty years he had been a humble private, and as a raconteur at Regimental concerts he never had an equal. He had been in France with the 1st Civil Service Rifles as a member of the Quartermaster’s staff ever since the Battalion landed in 1915. It is said that he accepted his third stripe owing to the keen demand for his stories in the Sergeants’ Mess.
The two war trophies that had been preserved by the Civil Service Rifles and brought home also deserve special mention.
One generally expects a war trophy to be some instrument of war, but the Civil Service Rifles war trophies were an instrument of music, viz., a piano, and a presidential chair.
The piano was captured at Nurlu during the heavy fighting on the Somme in the first days of September, 1918, and the Regiment is chiefly indebted to Major Young for this uncommon trophy. It is also through the ingenuity of the same officer that the Regiment was represented in the salving of H.M.S. Vindictive at Ostend, whence came the “presidential chair,” for it was through his efforts that two pioneers of the Civil Service Rifles found their way to Ostend in 1918, and worked on the salved ship, producing out of a piece of teak taken from the decks, a handsome chair on which the Regimental crest is carved. Thus it transpired that whereas their keenest rivals in the London Regiment are said to have sunk the Emden, the 1st Civil Service Rifles can claim to have salved the Vindictive.
The home-coming of the Cadre was an even more dismal experience than the celebration of the Armistice, for the party was taken stealthily to Felixstowe of all places, and from there the members drifted away one by one until all that remained were Colonel Feilding and Colour-Sergeant Chubb, the Orderly Room clerk. These were then permitted to return to Somerset House.