Early in the morning, on the second day of the Battle of the Somme, a private from County Antrim climbed out of a British trench and went into the ground between the armies. The day before, his platoon had tried three times to cross it. Three times it had been thrown back.
Now he was going back out. Somewhere in that ground, someone had said, his officer was lying wounded.
He was not looking for just any officer.
He was looking for the young man he served as batman, the heir to the estate where he had worked back home. He would go out seven times. And every time, he would come back carrying someone else.
His name was Robert Quigg. To understand why he kept going back, you have to start far from the Somme, on the north coast of Ireland.
Quigg was born in 1885 near Bushmills, in County Antrim, close to the Giant’s Causeway. His father, also called Robert, worked there as a boatman and a guide, showing visitors the strange stone columns along the shore.
Robert was one of six children. He went to the little Giant’s Causeway National School. When he grew up, he did the work that was there to be done: labouring on local farms, and on the estate of the Macnaghten family at Bushmills.
The Macnaghtens were the big family of the district. Their heir was a boy named Harry, eleven years younger than Robert.
In the normal run of things, the two would have lived very different lives on the same piece of land. One would own it. The other would work it.
Neither of them could have guessed that one day the labourer would walk into machine-gun fire, again and again, for the heir.
Then came 1914.
Quigg was already used to leading men. In 1913, he had been in charge of the Bushmills group of the Ulster Volunteers. When war broke out, many of the men who joined up with him came from the same towns and the same fields.
In September 1914, Robert Quigg enlisted as a private in the Royal Irish Rifles. He was posted to the 12th Battalion, known as the Mid-Antrim Volunteers, part of the 36th (Ulster) Division.
Harry Macnaghten joined the same battalion as an officer. He was only eighteen.
He had been to Eton, and he was heir to a baronetcy. In the records he appears as Sir Edward Harry Macnaghten, 6th Baronet.
And Robert Quigg, the farm worker from his family’s estate, became his servant in the army. The officer’s batman: the man who looked after his kit and his daily needs.
A young officer and an older labourer from the same corner of Antrim, now sharing the mud and the waiting of a war far from home.
In October 1915, the division crossed to France. From March 1916, it was stationed near Thiepval Wood, on the Somme. Quigg’s battalion was placed at Hamel, on the north bank of the River Ancre.
Everyone knew a great attack was coming. Nobody yet knew what it would cost.
On July 1, 1916, the attack began.
The 12th Royal Irish Rifles advanced from Hamel towards the German lines. They advanced into heavy machine-gun fire and shellfire.
Quigg’s platoon went forward and was driven back. It went forward again, and was driven back again. Then it tried a third time.
His Victoria Cross citation would later sum up that whole terrible day in a single plain line: “He advanced to the assault with his platoon three times.”
When that day was over, Sir Harry Macnaghten was missing.
No one could say for certain what had happened to him. He simply had not come back.
Then, early the next morning, a rumour reached Robert Quigg. His platoon officer, someone said, was lying out there wounded.
Out there meant no man’s land. It meant the strip of ground between the British and German trenches, still swept by machine guns and shells. It meant the place where, only hours before, his platoon had been thrown back three times.
Quigg went anyway.
The official record does not describe each trip in detail. It tells us only the essentials. He went out under heavy shell and machine-gun fire, searching for the young officer he had followed to France.
He did not find Sir Harry. But he found a wounded man. And he brought him back.
Then he went out again.
Again, no Sir Harry. Again, a wounded soldier lying in the open. Again, Quigg brought him in.
It is worth pausing on that choice.
Each time he reached the British line, he had brought a wounded man in, and he could have stopped. He had volunteered to go. Nobody would have blamed him for staying in the trench.
Instead, each time, he turned around and went back into the fire. Because the man he was looking for was still out there somewhere.
Three trips. Four. Five. Six.
The official citation describes it in words that are almost painfully calm: “Early next morning, hearing a rumour that his platoon officer was lying out wounded, he went out seven times to look for him under heavy shell and machine gun fire, each time bringing back a wounded man.”
Not one of them was the man he was looking for.
Think about what that means. Every wounded man he found was someone else’s son, someone else’s friend.
Every one of them was a reason to hope, for a moment, that this might be Sir Harry. And every time, it was not.
The last rescue was the most dangerous of all. The wounded man was lying almost at the German line itself. Quigg got him onto a waterproof sheet and pulled him back across the ground.
The citation records it in one line: “The last man he dragged in on a waterproof sheet from within a few yards of the enemy’s wire.”
A few yards from the enemy’s wire. Under fire, dragging a wounded man across open ground.
By then, he had been at it for hours. His body simply could not go on. The citation ends with the moment he finally stopped: “He was seven hours engaged in this most gallant work, and finally was so exhausted that he had to give it up.”
Seven hours. Seven wounded men brought back from no man’s land by a private who had gone out to find one.
And the one he had gone out to find was still out there.
Sir Harry Macnaghten was never found.
Not by Quigg that morning, and not by anyone afterwards. His body was never recovered. He was twenty years old.
Today his name is carved on the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, among the many men of that battle who have no known grave. Robert Quigg’s own name is on a memorial stone at Thiepval too, among the Ulster Division’s Victoria Cross recipients.
For the Macnaghten family, the summer of 1916 was not finished with them. Harry’s title passed to his younger brother, Sir Arthur Douglas Macnaghten, the 7th Baronet, serving with the 8th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade.
On September 15, 1916, Arthur was killed on the Somme as well. He was nineteen. He is buried at Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, at Longueval.
Two sons, two baronets, gone within eleven weeks of each other.
In Bushmills, the big house and the small cottages had both sent their young men to the same battle. That summer, the grief did not stay on one side of the estate wall.
Back at the front, Robert Quigg’s seven trips had not gone unnoticed. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery in the British forces.
On September 9, 1916, the award was published in a supplement of The London Gazette. His citation began with four words: “For most conspicuous bravery.”
The farm labourer from Bushmills was now a Victoria Cross hero.
In January 1917, Quigg was taken to York Cottage, at Sandringham in Norfolk, to receive the Victoria Cross from King George V himself.
What followed has been told and retold in North Antrim ever since, and the versions do not always agree.
In one account, the King told him, “You’re a very brave man Quigg.” Then he asked whether Quigg was married.
Quigg, by this account, answered: “No, Sir, but after what has happened to me I suppose I soon will be.”
There is also a well-loved local legend that when the King called him brave, Quigg replied: “you’re a brave wee man yourself, Mr King.”
In Ulster speech, “brave” can also mean decent or likeable. Nobody can prove he really said it. But people in Ulster have loved telling it ever since.
Other honours followed. In February 1917, he was also given the Russian Order of St George, Fourth Class.
But the recognition that mattered most came from someone who had lost far more than a battle.
It did not come from a king or an army. It came from a grieving mother.
Lady Macnaghten, Harry’s mother, gave him a gold watch. It was her thanks for what he had tried to do for her son.
She had lost two sons in a single summer.
The man standing in front of her had gone into no man’s land seven times looking for one of them. He had not been able to bring Harry home. But he had tried, again and again, until he was too exhausted to go on.
One account says that years later, during a time of money trouble, Quigg sold the watch for £100. It is a small, sad detail, and it says something about how hard ordinary life could be, even for a man with the Victoria Cross.
The war had given him a medal. What came afterwards was harder.
He stayed in the army. He served in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, and rose to the rank of sergeant. After the war, he remained a soldier.
Then, in 1926, the man who had survived seven trips into no man’s land nearly died in a fall. At the Sandes Soldiers’ Home in Belfast, he fell from an upper window, by one account about fifty feet. He was not expected to live.
He did live. But his army life was over. He was discharged that same year, after twelve years in uniform that had taken him from Antrim to France, and from France to the Middle East.
For a while, he worked as a civilian at the Royal Ulster Rifles depot in Armagh. Then, in 1934, he went home to the place he had started from.
He became a guide at the Giant’s Causeway, just as his father had been. The VC holder who had crossed no man’s land seven times now spent his days showing visitors the same stones he had known as a boy.
He never married, despite what he had told the King. According to one account, he lived in a small cottage on the Macnaghten estate, the same land where he had worked before the war, the land Sir Harry would have inherited.
In 1953, at Coleraine, he met the new Queen, Elizabeth II.
Robert Quigg died on May 14, 1955, at the Dalriada Hospital in Ballycastle. He was seventy. He was buried at Billy Parish Churchyard, near Bushmills, with full military honours.
His medals, including the Victoria Cross, are now kept at the Royal Ulster Rifles Museum in Belfast.
Almost exactly a hundred years after the Somme, on June 28, 2016, Queen Elizabeth II came to Bushmills and unveiled a bronze statue of him in the village. An Ulster History Circle blue plaque was also placed on the old school he had attended as a boy.
It is a strange and moving shape for a life. A boy from the Causeway, a labourer on a great estate, a servant to the estate’s young heir. Then, for seven hours on one morning in France, the most important person in that young officer’s world.
He never found Sir Harry. That search failed.
But it did not fail completely. Seven men came back from no man’s land because a private went out looking for someone else.
Sir Harry Macnaghten lies somewhere in the fields of the Somme, his name on a memorial with no grave beneath it. The man who went looking for him came home and lived to seventy, back beside the sea where he began.
Tell us in the comments: if you had just carried one wounded man back to the trench under that fire, would you have gone out a second time?
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