The Docks at Avonmouth – near Bristol – were constructed in the 1860s, extended with the construction of King Edward Dock (opened 1908) & by the start of The Great War was considered one of the most modern in Europe. It should be born in mind that in 1914, mechanisation was in its infancy and there was a huge Army reliance on horses and mules to provide transportation of supplies, weapons and men. The British had lost 320,000 horses in the 2nd Boer War from 1899 to 1902, which had prompted the creation of the Horse Registration Scheme. This meant that within only twelve days of war breaking out, the government was able to draft for military use 140,000 domestic and farm horses. An incredible number in such a short time, but nowhere near enough to sate the industrial-scale war machine. The contribution of animals, especially to the transport services and artillery was of central importance. Horses pulled the divisional supply trains nearer to the front lines; they pulled makeshift sledges carrying the wounded over mud men could barely walk over. They took ammunition to the guns, food to the field kitchens and carried morale boosting mail to the soldiers. It is fair to say without them the ability of the British Army and her Allies to sustain four years of war would have been extremely problematical. From 1914-1918, The War Office bought & shipped over an additional 500,000 horses & mules, mostly from Canada & the United States. About 7 in every 10 of these imported animals passed through the gates of the Shirehampton Remount Depot, which, due to its proximity to Avonmouth Docks, was considered by the War Office as the ideal place to build a stabling & training facility for horses & mules for the British Army.
The Depot’s principal purpose was to provide a minimum of two weeks quarantine for the new arrivals. They were cared for and trained to get used to wearing saddles, being ridden and pulling carts, before they were sent onwards, principally to the Western Front. The veterinary hospital at the Depot could handle 200 horses at a time, but the bulk of the camp was set out to accommodate 3,500. By 1918, the deport was twice its original size with newspaper reports stating that at one time there were 7244 animals being held at Shirehampton & that at least 500,000 horses had passed through the remount Depot. The constant stream of fresh remounts was needed because the previous horses & mules kept dying, en masse, killed by gunfire, artillery and poison gas; they were also killed by disease, and in the squalid conditions of the front ; they were even killed by starvation………..
The facility at Shirehampton was absolutely enormous. The overall depot covered 114 acres (approx 46 hectares) and also included dozens of other buildings – vets, dispensaries, blacksmiths, etc, not to mention accommodation, offices, canteens and so forth for the human staff. These were initially civilian, under army oversight, with the breaking and training of horses done by a volunteer paramilitary force by the somewhat fantastic name of ‘Legion of Frontiersmen’. By February 1915 the army took the whole thing over, but there remained plenty of work for civilian vets, grooms, saddlers, blacksmiths, and so on, assuming they were ineligible for normal military service of course. Plus less horse-specific needs like plumbers and electricians, the latter being more notable than you might think as the Remount depot was somewhat advanced for its time in being electrically lit. The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps were brought in to do cooking, cleaning and clerical work (the era being what it was). Altogether there were roughly 1500 staff. Every day, 60 daily wagons of hay + sawdust came in to the Depot and 12 wagons of manure would go out – mostly to local farmers. When Gloucestershire farmer Mr Bridgman won an award for his root vegetables the Western Daily Press credited it to his contract for several hundred tons of remount manure. At the end of hostilities, the surviving horses & mules at the Front were sold off to local farmers. The horses & mules remaining at the UK remount depots were auctioned off locally. Today, no visible remains of the Shirehampton Deport survive. We do, however, have Shirehampton’s War Horse Memorial sculpture – which was unveiled on Saturday 16th September, 2023. It stands in a green space known as the Daisy Field, part of the larger Lamplighters Marsh nature reserve. The horse is made out of 380 used horseshoes, and was built by a former resident of Shirehampton, one Jason Baggs. Fittingly, Mr Baggs is a farrier and blacksmith who turned his hand to sculpture, rather than a sculptor deciding to dabble with equine themes and materials.
© DJM 2024
If you want to come and see the horse for yourself, it’s all of 2 minutes walk from Shirehampton Railway station, itself on the Severn Beach line, making it an exceedingly rare example of somewhere in Bristol that’s fairly easily accessible from somewhere else in Bristol. Esp. if you don’t have a car. (That’s assuming of course that GWR actually manage to run any trains that day, which is not always a safe assumption).
© DJM 2024
