Old Contemptibles Great War Site

"We'll do it!! What is it?"- Motto of The Old Contemptibles 



Above:Capt JP Danny

Photograph used with kind permission of Captain JP Danny's Grandson Robert Danny 15th June 2010.

The Old Contemptibles Association was founded by Capt JP (John.Patrick) Danny, Royal Artillery on June 25th 1925. The Association had 178 branches in the UK & 14 overseas branches. It produced its own magazine The Old Contemptible and all members were known as "chums": The members of the Association are survivors of the First British Expeditionary Force of August-November 1914  - that 'little mighty Force that stood for England...stood fast while England girt her armour on' -that withstood the German onslaught at Mons, The Marne, The Aisne and Ypres, they kept the enemy from the Channel Ports. They derive their honourable title from the famous "Order of the Day" given by the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, at his headquarters, Aix-la-Chappelle, on the 19th August, 1914:-

"It is my Royal and Imperial Command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers, to exterminate first, the treacherous English, walk over General French's contemptible little Army." 


The last member of that British Expeditionary Force "The Old Contemptibles", and the sole remaining survivor of the 1914 Christmas truce, Alfred Anderson(below), died aged 109 in 2005. He recalled how, as a lad in Scotland, he was carried aloft by a soldier returning from the Boer War in 1902. He remembered the eerie silence of the Christmas truce. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, a shell exploded over his head, injuring him and killing many of his friends.

        


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