Bin And Gone

Lord Foolish remembers a war hero

This way up (source)

A number of my collateral ancestors have indulged a predilection for changing their family name. I have written before of how Charles Waldemart became Charles Caridaweigh; this was a once-only transformation. The Pannier branch of the family has a tendency to sire females who, marrying at or below their own level, naturally retain their birth name in hyphenated form. Panniers of all stripes also had a historic habit of anglicising their names whenever relations soured with the French, and back again afterwards. My distant cousin Lady Helena Handbasket, for instance, might have remained Lady Helena Pannier-Main (of Pannier Manor, rather than Handbasket Hall) had it not been for the Suez crisis.

Lady Helena’s great-uncle Walter Pannier-Bryte served as an intelligence officer in the Great War. At school, his initials had earned him the nickname “WastePaperBin”; and since the Army was in many ways a smooth continuation from school (Eton) and university (Cambridge — deferred due to hostilities), he retained the soubriquet into adulthood. WPB was a popular fellow and also a talented actor, known for his party-piece in which he would put a waste-paper basket over his head to imitate a standard lamp. While the punning element of this performance would be lost on a stranger, there were seldom many strangers in his audience. He took to keeping a waste-paper basket on hand at all times to alleviate the boredom of the trenches.

WPB himself had little opportunity to be bored. In addition to listening-in to enemy conversations on tapped wires, and attempting to distinguish ciphers from superfluity, he occasionally volunteered for missions behind the lines into occupied territory. Several times he visited La Chatte Rose, a favoured haunt of the enemy commanders in Beaumont-Hamel. In a striped shirt and beret, and with a string of onions around his neck, WPB would sit in a corner all night nursing a single beer and looking sullen. To the locals he was an obvious impostor, but he calculated correctly that he would be as much in character (“French Peasant”) to the Germans as he would to any Englishman who saw him. The Boche would grow louder and less cautious as the evenings grew longer, and WPB would cycle home through a gap in the barbed-wire with a head full of secrets.

On his final night at La Chatte Rose, WPB arrived late and noticed through the window that his usual seat was occupied. Suspecting a trap, he crept away, returning through the rear door to a space by the pissoir that was used for temporary storage. Here he found an old waste-paper basket not unlike the one in his trench, and by dint of putting this over his head and keeping very still, succeeded in making himself invisible among the detritus in the ill-lit passageway. He was able to overhear several incautious conversations among relieving officers before moonrise dictated that he must depart.

WPB never saw La Chatte Rose again. The next time he was in the vicinity, the line had advanced, following a bombardment that obliterated much of Beaumont, including all of La Chatte. He did locate what he presumed to have been the useful waste-paper basket, which had been flattened into a disc. WPB picked it up and threw it away, and was surprised to see that it flew easily through the air. He later wrote a paper about the possible use of such things as weapons, in collaboration with a Major Frisby, but nothing ever came of it.

WPB’s own trench-waste-paper-basket survived the war with him, and is now on display in the Caridaweigh Museum.

**Caridaweigh Castle Moxburghshire**

Lord Serendipity Foolish, Proprietor Stuart James, Creative Consultant

Visitors may be assured that the word Étaples on the base of the Caridaweigh Trench-WPB is the name of the French fishing-village where Walter bought it, and not (as has been suggested) the mutilated branding of an office-supplies warehouse.

Obviously not the same place (source)