An extraordinary record of the personal pocket diaries of a mapmaker who served on the Western Front in the First World War, and manned a small boat at Dunkirk in the Second, nearly dying on his return to England.
 
William Henry Tapp MC was a mapmaker and surveyor, spending his early career in the East Indies and Canada.
 
In 1912, the year the diaries begin, he moves to Canada and opens this record of his life with the entry “My new life begins” on 7th August. He carried out cartography work throughout Canada, and on the 1st January 1913 married his wife Eleonore Eva Taradis at Quebec Cathedral.
 
His diaries capture the rhythms of his working, romantic, and religious life, and he is very candid about his feelings, often experiencing depressive periods. He also records world events, such as the news of Captain Scott’s death on his return from the South Pole in February 1913.
 
 
On 4th August 1914 he marked a black cross in his diary to record the declaration of war, and he is immediately desperate to return of England and join the fight.
 
On 13th August he reports: “no news. Fair anxious to get to the war”, the following day there is still “no news”, and the day after he writes “wish I could get news of war”.
 
A relative, Sir Hew Dalrymple Fanshawe, KCB, KCMG (1860-1957), commanding officer of the Queen’s Bays (2nd Dragoon Guards), engineered a commission for him as a Lieutenant in the special reserve of the regiment.
 
The diary entry for 24th October 1914 reads simply: “W.M. Tapp left for the War. Eva went to Barnsley”.
 
Tapp’s work during the war was as a mapmaker and surveyor, mapping and contouring battlefields and presenting these to senior military figures. This was dangerous work, and he often put himself in the line of enemy fire in order to produce his maps.
 
In September 1915, he arrived at the Battle Of Loos, and was under the command of Field Marshall Haig:
25th September: “Work around Loos. Under hot fire making special sketch for Haig of Hill 70 at back of Loos.”
26th September: “Work around Loos. Hit amongst dead bodies planetabling. Hot fire. Dead horses.”
27th September: “Works around Loos. Recommended for MC. Lying behind dead bodies for survey”.
30th September: “Got my MC”.
 
Tapp’s matter of fact diary entries belie the bravery and courage he showed to carry out his work at Loos. Under direct orders of Haig, he took his surveying equipment into the front line of trenches, the better to fix observation points and correct contours on Hill 70. Setting up his plane table on this position led to him being hit of the 26th September. This is not the only time in the war that he would put himself in the line of fire to carry out his work.
 
In November he was working on “Tower Bridge” at Loos, the name given by the English to the ironwork of a pit winding gear in the town, and writes of how shells were falling all around him as he did this. The next day, 20th November 1914, he records that he was “wounded at Givenchy”, a small village south of Loos.
 
Tapp’s diary goes quiet for a month after being wounded, but records that he returned to duty at Bethune on 17th December.
 
Early in 1916 he was in the line of fire again, being hit by a shell while he worked on February 19th. During this period, his position as a mapmaker and surveyor seems to be coming under question, with senior officials wanting to bring in a new team to carry out the work. This sends Tapp into a depressive episode, recording in his diary on February 26th:
“May the Lord help me to bear it. Here I’ve made an office... and behold here comes a stranger and tears it all from me as if it were his, like a thief in the night he comes to steal... all enthusiasm is dead, I feel like a traitor, I walk, but falteringly and much distressed.”
 
Despite how he feels, he keeps doing his work, and putting himself in danger to do so. He is back at Loos on March 5th:
“At 1 shells were falling in front and behind us, at 2 all was quiet, at 3 we were both sniped and bombe. I expected every moment to get one right on the head, however we stuck to the job and successfully completed it. The positions all plot excellently”.
 
In between these acts of bravery, he continues to report his frustration with high command, and the sense that he work isn’t valued. On March 19th he writes: “have ceased to wear the MC as it isn’t really worth having”. But the very next day he reports that he was was working at Sully Grenay, took heavy fire, and was nearly killed by shrapnel. On March 22nd he notes that he was “mentioned in dispatches for bravery and work taken at Double Crassier”.
 
In July he was at the Somme, and was hit badly:
“Hit at 10:15am by rifle bullet and grenade rifle, carried to dressing station at Vernelles where by wounds were seen to, was unconscious til midnight when I first remember being on the operating table".
 
Here his handwriting is markedly changed, and the effect of being hit doesn’t just nearly kill him physically, but greatly effects him mentally as well. At midnight he was operated on by a doctor called Mackenzie, and when he came to he was in “an unconscious fit.”
This injury, which seems nearly to have killed him, ended Tapp’s service in the First World War. He was passed through several clearing stations on the way to Boulogne, and then travelled by ship to Dover where he stayed in hospital for a month.
 
In 1939, his diary records on 3rd September “ War declared at 11am against Germany.”
The diary for the following year is empty, with the first entry not coming until May 10th:
“Hitler invades Holland. Chamberlain resigns. Churchill becomes PM”.
 
The very next day, he is the first man to join his Home Guard: “I was the first to join the LDC of Wimbledon Town Hall”.
 
Two weeks later, he hears of the Dunkirk crisis, and is stirred into action:
25th May - “Dunkirk! Just think of it! After all our sacrifices in the ‘G.W. to end Wars’. Well I must get there somehow. To keep Mimi calm I shall tell her I am off for a couple of days or so on a FSD outing... my uniform, ribbons, what a mess it all seems.
I am well known in Dover. Slept the night in Dover Castle.”
 
26th May - “Shipped on board the yacht Rowan... hoving outside Dunkirk beaches was indeed a never to be forgotten night! The place was […] with every type of small craft, the sands covered with human beings… we felt black with them… we got 60 aboard, steamed off again, unharmed by any bombs”.
 
27th July 1940: “We returned this time into Dunkirk harbour, as we came out about 5pm, a bomb fell near us, I found myself in the sea astern of Rowan. I just missed being sucked into some ship’s slowly revolving propeller, I was hauled aboard some fishing … very sick on the way home.”
 
At this point Tapp was in his late-fifties and over twenty years had passed since he was hit at the Somme and left with a “mutilated body”. But here, in an instant, he was called to action and made two trips to Dunkirk harbour to retrieve Allied soldiers. In Dunkirk harbour on 27th July he records how a bomb fell near their boat, which flung him into the sea, and nearly sucked him into the propellor of a nearby ship. He returned home at 9pm, and went to work the next day.