22nd December 1917, Age 27
DAR ES SALAAM WAR CEMETERY
Henry Beaumont Haine was born towards the end of 1891 in Blandford Forum, Dorset, England. He was the youngest of the six children of Henry Haine and his wife Sophie Thorner. Before Henry was ten his father, who was a painter and glazier, had moved his family to Bournemouth, which was then in the county of Hampshire. Henry Haine Senior died in mid-1903, when his youngest son was not yet twelve years old. Henry in 1911 lived with his widowed mother Sophie, his sister Rose, her husband, and his niece, in Boscombe next to Bournemouth.
In April 1909 Henry Haine was taken on by Bournemouth Post Office as an assistant Postman, and in July 1910 he started work in Poole as a Postman, before being transferred in April 1911 back to Bournemouth. In 1911, Henry Beaumont Haine was living with his family at Boscombe Grange, 183, Christchurch Road and working at Boscombe Post Office. His older brother, Edward George also served in WWI, joining the Mechanical Transport Depot, Army Service Corps.
Aged 20, Henry Haine married Millie Courage, also 20 years old, in the summer of 1912. Their only son Ronald Henry Haine was born in the last quarter of 1913.
Henry Haine enlisted in the Royal Engineer Territorial Force with the Regimental number T4038. In Christchurch, Hampshire, he enlisted in the Royal Engineer Regular Army Regiment as a Sapper. His Regimental Number was 500637. When he arrived in East Africa he was taken on the strength of the Imperial Signal Company and posted to the Base Signal Depot. On 12 September 1916, Divisional GHQ moved to Dar es Salaam, and later No 3 East African Stationary Hospital was stationed there. The town became the chief sea base for movement of supplies and for the evacuation of the sick and wounded.
Telegraph Pole Work
The work could be very hazardous setting up telegraph lines ahead of troop movements.
At the outbreak of the First World War Tanzania was the core of German East Africa. From the invasion of April 1915, Commonwealth forces fought a protracted and difficult campaign against a relatively small but highly skilled German force under the command of General von Lettow-Vorbeck. When the Germans finally surrendered on 23 November 1918, twelve days after the European armistice, their numbers had been reduced to 155 European and 1,168 African troops.
Dar es Salaam was the capital of German East Africa. On 8 August 1914, the first recorded British action of the war took place here, when HMS Astraea shelled the German wireless station and boarded and disabled two merchant ships – the “Konig” and the “Feldmarschall”. The Royal Navy systematically shelled the city from mid August 1916, and at 8 am on 4 September the deputy burgomaster was received aboard H.M.S. Echo to accept the terms of surrender. Troops, headed by the 129th Baluchis, then entered the city.
The war in East Africa was not like that on the Western Front. There were no large scale battles; it was a bush war. The German forces in German East Africa (Tanzania) were always outnumbered by Allied forces but fought a very successful guerilla war, achieving the aim of the German General Von Lettow Vorbeck of diverting large numbers of troops from the European front . After a disastrous attempt by the Indian Army in November 1914 to take Tanga the war stalled until the appointment of South African Jan Smuts as Commander in Chief of the Allied troops. Through 1916 the Allies drove the Germans southwards through German East Africa, and at the end of the year Smuts was called to London declaring that all that was left was a mopping up operation. That was not, however, the case and the Allies continued fighting through the whole of 1917 in German East Africa and then all of 1918 in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and the Germans finally surrendered a couple of weeks after the Armistice.
There is a very large river in Tanzania called the Rufiji about 200km south of Dar es Salaam and in January 1917 the Allies took the crossing there which pushed the war southwards. The long rains in early 1917 were the worst for many years making the terrain almost impossible to move through “torrents of rain, slimy sticky clay and mud up to (porters’) middles and sometimes up to their necks” but fighting continued nonetheless. Lindi, on the coast 24 km away from Mingoyo, had been taken in late 1916 by the Allies but the Germans remained inland, and in mid-1917 when many of the Lindi force had been sent northwards to Kilwa, there was fighting in June-October 1917 in the Lindi area with many Allied casualties, although at a huge cost, the Germans were forced across the Lukuledi River. Mingoyo which was on a narrow gauge railway was the scene of fighting in June 1917. It is not possible to say where Henry Haine was during this period – the Base Signal Depot to which he was attached seems to be a catchall, and I have found that the Soldiers who died in the Great War records frequently lists Base Signal Depot as a soldier’s unit when service records that Signallers might be with an entirely different unit at the time of their death.
The following appeared in the Bournemouth Guardian, announcing Henry’s death…
“Sapper Henry B. Haine of the S.M.R.E. who died in East Africa of dysentery on 22nd Dec, was the husband of Mrs. Millie Haine of Iford, and younger son of the late Mr. Henry and Mrs. Sophie Haine, of Southville Road, Pokesdown. He voluntarily enlisted in May 1916, previous to which he had been working as a postman at Boscombe Post Office, having by his diligence and merit risen from telegraph messenger to that rank. He was highly esteemed by his colleagues for his genial and obliging nature, and they all regret his untimely death.”
World War 1 was apparently the first war where more soldiers died in action rather than of disease. But this was not the case in East Africa. One estimate is that 30 men died of tropical related illnesses for every one killed. Dysentery was a big killer. Because of the very long supply lines rations were often reduced almost to starvation levels and men were debilitated and less resistant to infection. He was buried in Mingoyo Cemetery, Lindi Province, German East Africa, with the Grave Marker II B 6. In the 1970s when the Commonwealth War Graves Commission brought graves which it could not guarantee to maintain into the new Dar Es Salaam War Cemetery, Tanzania, Henry Haine was reinterred. The Grave Reference is 7 G 10.
His British War and Victory Medals were returned after the War, possibly because they were undelivered.
Henry Haine is commemorated on the Memorial in Bournemouth Post Office Delivery Office, as shown in the following image.
Henry Haine, commemorated at the Bournemouth Delivery Office.
There is an additional memorial commemorating the men who died whilst serving in the Army Signal Service in East Africa during WWI, and there is an image of it below.
Army Signal Service Roll of Honour East Africa, 1914-1918
Appropriately, this memorial is opposite Dar es Salaam harbour, on a side wall of the entrance to the small Post Office.
To get a flavour of what a signaller’s life was like, there is a diary of one who survived and who was in Mingoyo hospital in October 1917. It is a fascinating document transcribed by his grandson.. http://dockraydiary.wordpress.com/
War Memorials at St. James The Greater, Pokesdown 