Charge at Huj – the last classic cavalry charge in the history of the British Army
HAMISH Gray-Cheape knew as a child that his grandfather, Lt Col Hugh Gray-Cheape, had served in the First World War in Palestine but that was it.
No more details were forthcoming, no tales of heroics or talk of where he served and the battles he survived. It just wasn’t spoken about.
Only later, when a teenager, did Hamish discover that his grandfather had taken a leading role in a most audacious act of bravery. The last cavalry charge – an arme blanche – in the history of the British Army.
Known as the Charge at Huj, the bravery of the men is immortalised in a 1918 painting by Lady Elizabeth Butler which hangs at the Warwickshire Yeomanry Museum in Warwick. It depicts the moment when, on the hot and dusty plains of the Sinai Desert, soldiers of the Warwickshire and Worcestershire Yeomanry drew they swords and met enemy artillery with cold steel.
Hamish’s grandfather, though a Worcestershire man, had been commanding the Warwickshire Yeomanry since 1915 and valiantly led them at Huj. The charge was not talked about in the Gray-Cheape household said Hamish, who lives in Haselor. “These things weren’t talked about in those days which seems strange to us. My father never talked about his war time experiences [in the Second World War] and never talked about his father’s.
“I discovered later that [Lt Col Gray-Cheape] had been in the Boer War and then the Worcester and Warwickshire Yeomanry, but that was when I was grown up and started to take more interest in the family history.”
It was when he joined the Grenadier Guards that Hamish really gained an insight from a soldier’s perspective. “Once I was in the military and understood how things worked and how one was sort of conditioned to go into battle, then it all made more sense,” he added.
The scene is set in Palestine 1917. A starving segment of the Ottoman Empire is besieged by the Egypt-based British under General Sir Edmund Allenby, one of the last great cavalry leaders of the British Army.
Following the withdrawal from Gallipoli in 1915, the government decided to redouble its efforts in the Middle East and prime minister Lloyd George was determined to make up for the stalemate in Flanders by giving the nation ‘Jerusalem by Christmas 1917’.
In the early hours of 31st October, 1917, the general launched his long-awaited offensive against the Turkish line, which stretched from Gaza on the coast to the inland Bedouin town of Beersheba.
The audacious capture of the town by Australian Light Horse proved to be the beginning of end for the Turkish Empire in Palestine and a week later the Egyptian Expeditionary Force found themselves rolling north towards Jerusalem attacking a stubborn retreating army.
By noon on November 8th, however, the advance of the 60th Division was being seriously hampered by shelling from the Turkish rear-guard stationed on a ridge in front of Huj.
A bold opportunity to advance on the enemy was discovered and two, one and a half squadrons of mounted yeomanry situated in the ridges to the south-east of the enemy, were commanded to attack.
The force split into three parties led by Lt Col Gray-Cheape, Major WH Wiggin and Captain Rudolph Valintine, a dashing master of the hunt from Snitterfield.
Wednesday, 8th November 2023, marks the 106th anniversary of this heroic cavalry charge made by the Warwickshire Yeomanry who, aided by their Worcestershire comrades, took on the might of heavily armed Turkish Infantry Brigade firing at point-blank range.
Accompanied only by the sound of the hunting horn, 190 mounted yeomen from the Midland shires galloped across the desert to face an onslaught of field guns, machine guns and rifles.
Their ranks were thinned by the bullets, but it did not stop them dashing through the Turk’s flank guard of infantry, capturing the enemy guns and using them against the departing soldiers who scattered in panic fearing more cavalry.
It caused a ripple effect throughout the Turkish Infantry Brigade, estimated at some 2,000 men.
The yeoman captured 11 guns, four machine guns, stores and prisoners. Inevitably, the action was not without casualties and 26 lost their lives and more than 100 horses were killed or maimed and subsequently destroyed.
Vivid accounts of the action are documented in various contemporaneous diaries, dispatches and official records kept in the archives of the Warwickshire Yeomanry Museum.
They make dramatic reading.
The handwritten account of Cpt Charles Armstrong, a yeomanry officer who was in the vicinity shortly after the charge, reveals what happened in the aftermath of the attack, when the men found themselves under constant sniper fire and shelling from small pockets of remaining Turks.
He recalled how Lt Col Gray-Cheape’s adjutant, Cpt Drake, cantered up from the valley where Cpt Armstrong and fellow soldiers lay, to inform them that Cpt Valintine had been seriously wounded in the stomach, while the troop sergeant and others had been killed.
He wrote: ‘Drake added with a grin “and I’ve got one through the calf of my leg”’. The wounded solider then managed to ride to the casualty clearing station some 16 miles away.
Cpt Armstrong continues: ‘He told me afterwards, that if he had got off, he’d never have been able to mount again and wished to avoid the long jolting ride in a cart. Not until they had injected the anti-toxin did he faint away’.
He also writes how the poor troop sergeant ‘had half sat up to reload his rifle when a Turkish sniper shot him clean through the head… I afterwards had the battered Warwick badge of the bear and ragged staff from his cap, his watch and pocket book and sent to his relatives at Kineton’.
He came across the wounded Cpt Valintine being carried in a blanket for a makeshift stretcher. ‘He looked deathly white and in great pain but gave me one of his cheery smiles. What a rotten thing warfare is! You see your best pals being butchered around you but still have to carry on with your own particular job of work’.
Lt Col Gray-Cheape wrote in his journal: ‘Captain Valintine led his men and captured the field battery. No award could be too high for his gallantry.’
The 39-year-old Cpt Valintine died a few days after the attack. He was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery.
Cpt Armstrong describes how enemy planes continually signalled their positions and the remaining men were consequently targeted by shells and high explosives. He paints an extraordinary picture of Lt Col Gray-Cheape (who had survived leading a section of the charge) and Major Watson who ‘walked about that zone of fire as if on their own lawns at home, continually assisting the medical bearers… they seemed to bear charmed lives among that hail of bullets’.
In 2013, Hamish travelled to Israel on a battlefield tour of the ‘affair at Huj’ as it was called at the time. This was meticulously researched and led by Sir Jerry Wiggin, son of Major Wiggin. Hamish says he felt it was crucial for him to visit the actual site. “I thought it was very important for the family as it was a pretty momentous occasion, I wanted to know what had gone on.
“That really brought it home to me when you do a battlefield tour and you stand on the site and you’ve got someone relating or reciting the whole story and you’re sort of reliving it – you’re standing on precisely the spot where they all formed up prior to the charge and you saw where they went this way and that way.
“Then the whole thing was pretty emotional really. If you’ve got any imagination at all it is pretty mind blowing as to what they went through. And when you read some of the accounts, it’s pretty horrendous. These men were charging and all they had to silence the guns were sabres to hack at the people operating the guns. It seems extraordinary that only just over 100 years ago people were hacking at each other with swords.
“But they had to do it. They were ordered to do it and they did it. It came home to me then, and I really did feel emotional about it.”
Lt Col Gray-Cheape, who was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and bar, and Cpt Drake were to tragically drown the following year when their ship, the SS Leasowe Castle, whilst on its way to Europe from Alexandria, was torpedoed. Rather than abandon their men they chose to go down the ship. Nine more Warwickshire men were lost.
“All I know it that he was on the bridge with his adjutant and the ship was sinking, but he was directing operations with the captain, making sure that the lifeboats were lowered,” Hamish says. “It’s just so British, you’re on the bridge and you go down saluting. That’s how it was. You were trained to look after your men.”
A Warwickshire yeoman, Private Philip Campion, recalled those final horrific moments in his memoirs. ‘We watched horribly fascinated, men jumping and falling off in all directions, the ship being absolutely for some seconds. We saw the captain, our own Colonel Gray-Cheape and adjutant, remain calmly on the bridge and go down with her.’
Following the charge at Huj, the Allied Forces were able to make their way steadily towards Jerusalem and after a difficult advance across the Judean hills, General Sir Edmund Allenby (later to become the honorary colonel of the Warwickshire Yeomanry) walked into Jerusalem and claimed it for the Allies.
Medical officer Major Oscar Teichman, who followed closely behind the charge, wrote in Cavalry Journal in 1936, said: “The Charge at Huj had it occurred in a minor war would have gone down in history like the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. In the Great War when gallant deeds were being enacted on all fronts almost daily it was merely an episode, but as the official historian remarks, for sheer bravery, the episode remains unmatched.”
Lt Col Gray-Cheape is commemorated at the Chatby War Memorial Cemetery in Alexandria, Egypt, along with those other Warwickshire men who went down with the Leasowe Castle.
Hamish’s hope is to visit there one day and honour once again his brave grandfather.
