Tunnelling under Arras

In 1916, a unique group of New Zealanders arrived in France – not to fight above ground, but deep below it. In this episode, we uncover the remarkable story of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company, the first of our people to reach the Western Front and whose war was fought in darkness, beneath the trenches.

     

Episode Transcript

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Gabriel Tongaawhikau 0:02

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This podcast is brought to you by Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Teresa Cowie 0:15
If you've ever flown into the capital and driven State Highway One into Wellington City, you'll likely have passed through a tunnel lined with large metal Flanders poppies. Above the three-lane tunnel, echoing with the noise of car exhausts, sits a place of quiet, calm reflection, our National War Memorial, Pukeahu. In lights at the tunnel's entrance are the words Arras Tunnel, 2014. While many places across Aotearoa are named after famous battles, the naming of the Arras tunnel runs deeper. It's not just another highway underpass. It's commemorating an actual network of tunnels and the brave soldiers who dug them, half a world away, during the Great War.
Teresa Cowie 1:24
Kia ora. I'm Teresa Cowie, your host for this episode of the app, the podcast from Auckland Museum that amplifies the incredible stories from our collections, our mahi and our place in the Pacific. In this episode, we're sharing the story of the Arras Tunnellers, a company of New Zealand men, mostly miners and labourers from humble mining towns, sent to the Western Front during World War One. Their mission? To dig for victory. So down your tools and lean against your shovel while I fill you in on what connects them to a highway tunnel in Wellington, a town in northern France, and a pickaxe head at the Auckland Museum.
In 1916, a unique group of New Zealanders landed in France. They weren't infantry soldiers, but they were the first of our people to reach the Western Front. These men were recruited, not for the battlefield above ground, but for the dark, dangerous labyrinth of tunnels beneath it, and in just a few months, they accomplished a feat that is considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the First World War. It's also a story that was long forgotten until an archaeological dig unearthed it by chance in the 1990s.
Their story begins amongst the flying shrapnel, the mud, the blood and the lice and rat-infested carnage of the trenches. Trench warfare became the defining tactic of the First World War, especially on what's known as the Western Front, the massive battleground that bordered Germany and stretched from Belgium through France. And it happened because of technology.
New weapons like machine guns and heavy artillery guns with barrels sometimes as thick as telephone poles, made traditional open warfare impossible. Machine guns could fire hundreds of rounds per minute and heavy artillery with barrels pointing to the sky, could bombard enemy positions from miles away. Suddenly, the old approach of marching soldiers across open ground toward the enemy just didn't work anymore. It was a death sentence.

So, both sides adapted by digging in, literally. They constructed vast networks of trenches. These were essentially fortified ditches protected by piles of sandbags and coils of barbed wire. But the battle lines barely shifted. For years. Between the two sides lay what they called No Man's Land, a few 100 yards between opposing trenches of churned up, crater-filled earth, constantly swept by machine gun fire crossing It was impossible. So, with fighting at a virtual standstill, both sides resorted to a century old military technique (00:09):
dig under key enemy locations and blow them up.

The tunnellers had one clear mission (00:10):
to keep our forces moving, restrict the enemy's movements and provide vital engineering support, wherever it was needed. In short, they were there to make it possible for the army to fight across every kind of terrain. For the allies, that's the French and British Empire troops, which included our soldiers known as The New Zealand Expeditionary Forces, these underground tunnelling operations carried huge hopes, that they might finally deliver the breakthrough needed to end the deadlock at the Western Front.
Gail Romano 5:39
The German Army had already been using tunnellers, and they were using specialist tunnellers, experienced men who performed that role, and it very quickly became relatively uncomfortable for the allies in France.
Teresa Cowie 5:56
Gail Romano is the Museum's War History Curator,
Gail Romano 6:01
So, the British began in February 1915. Just under a year and a half later, there were actually more than 30 allied tunnelling companies operating on the continent. So, it just goes to show how important they became in the early part of of the war. Now, New Zealand was asked to contribute in September 1915, and very quickly filled that quota. They were men who had not previously enlisted. Many of them were older. They were married. Some of them came from the coal fields.
Teresa Cowie 6:36

The New Zealand Tunnelling Company was a unit largely made up of men whose jobs back home involved shovelling. Quarry men, gold miners from Waihi and Karangahake, and labourers from the Railways and Public Works departments. Some were coal miners, too. Men from the West Coast of the South Island were brought in as well, even though they had been discouraged from enlisting in the past because their work was part of an essential industry (00:18):
coal. Until they got the call up, their job had been to keep the home fires burning.
Gail Romano 7:12
It was obviously a specialized unit. When they enlisted, they were not they did not only go through the normal medical assessment, they also went through a mining fitness assessment, where they were effectively examined, I guess you'd say, for their experience and for their skills and their general fitness as miners, and that was performed by mining inspectors. So, it was a very, very particular role. They weren't just random recruits. They had no military background. They had no military training. They went through a really rapid and really tough orientation in the two months that they were in camp here in Avondale racecourse. And when they arrived on the front as well, they were, even though they were experienced tunnellers the whole warfare environment, some of the specialized requirements associated with military engineering and military tunnelling required some some new learning for them. They were acquainted with the listening devices, for example, called geophones at that stage where none of them had any training in those.
Teresa Cowie 8:28
Geophones were ultra-sensitive listening devices used underground to detect movement. They came packed in a wooden box along with a compass, a stethoscope, like the kind a doctor would use, and two geophones themselves. These look like round wooden hockey pucks, only a few inches across with a thin layer of mercury sealed between mica plates inside. The operator would connect them to the stethoscope with rubber tubes, place them against the tunnel floor or walls, and then listen carefully. If a sound was heard equally in both ears, you knew the source lay at a right angle between the two discs. From there, the compass helped pinpoint the direction. Simple in design, but remarkably clever in practice. After military training in Avondale, the tunnellers left Auckland on the 18th of December 1915 aboard the RMS Ruapehu. They disembarked on the south coast of England for more training, and this time under British instructors. In early 1916, they arrived in France, led by a 33-year-old major, J E Duggan, a seasoned soldier and a veteran of the South African War.
Gail Romano 10:01
But they set themselves apart by their work ethic. So, Kiwis, we hear this all the time, regarding our New Zealand servicemen, how focused they are and what hard workers they are.
Teresa Cowie 10:20
The tunnellers quickly gained a reputation for toughness. Their first efforts on the Western Front were counter-mining operations, so basically trying to stop the enemy from mining under their own trenches. And it was incredibly nerve-wracking.
Gail Romano 10:36
People will have heard stories about how opposing trenches were often quite close to each other at strategic points, and they were packed with soldiers’ inventory, often with an eyesight of those on the opposite side. And then you had this area we hear of in terms of trench warfare is going over the top, you know, and having to go through No Man's land. It was, it could be a slaughter. One of the strategies that was being employed early on in the war was to tunnel under the opposing trenches, place a mine there and blow it up. And the impact of that could be quite devastating. You know, depending on how packed a trench was at that stage, or how close the tunnel was to the trench, and it would achieve, you know what, unfortunately, is the military goal of making progress into the other side's territory with potentially minimal loss of your own of your own men. So that type of warfare was very important in the first part of the war. So, we had, particularly since we had these largely permanent trenches, semi-permanent, but because, you know, there was a stalemate. Both sides were there. They weren't making progress. Once the Allies got into tunnelling, you would have opposing tunnels coming in from the other side. You'd be moving in opposite directions. But that was quite a fraught experience as well, and that's why listening was so important, because the tunnellers, one of their prime activities was listening, because they were listening for movement. It was apparently not always easy to know exactly A, how close, and what type of activity you were hearing.
Teresa Cowie 12:36
Imagine being deep underground and hearing the enemy whispering and even packing explosives just feet away from you. Then you'd be in a race against time to stop digging, retreat and set off your own one and a half tonnes of explosives first. When an explosion of this size went off underground, poisonous carbon monoxide gas would begin snaking its way through the cavity. Everyone in nearby tunnels, even unconnected to the explosion, would most likely have been killed. It was dangerous work. Official records indicate that 937 men served in the New Zealand Tunnelling Company, and more than 62 didn't return home. Remarkably, though, the enemy only managed to blow up a mine beneath the Kiwis once. Every other time the New Zealanders found and stopped them first.
Gail Romano 13:40
Tunnellers were valuable. The New Zealand tunnellers because A, they were fast, they were tough men who could work in a range of conditions and who could adapt their work for the conditions. Now that's also important, because apparently the Royal Engineers had, I guess today we would call it best practice, had guidelines for tunnelling, which effectively involved encasing the tunnel in wood.
Teresa Cowie 14:07
The Royal Engineers were the British Army's tech and engineering corps, so responsible for construction and infrastructure, like building bridges, railways and water supplies. They also operated communication systems like telephones and wirelesses.
Gail Romano 14:24
Soldiers, in general, felt secure going through a wood tunnel where, you know, it felt like it had been built and it was, it was, I probably would too, but tunnellers themselves, miners, like to actually see the rock face, because they can see, they can read the rock face. You have a much better idea, potentially, of what's happening. But the New Zealand Tunnellers didn't want to just use a one size fits all method of shoring up a tunnel as they were going through.
Teresa Cowie 14:56
In 1916 the British started preparing for the 1917 spring offensive. The New Zealanders were recruited to join the French and British tunnellers in Arras.

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Laurent Wiart 15:08
Arras is a town, now 50 minutes by train from Paris in the north of France, just between Amiens and Lille, not very far from London and Brussels. She's a small town with 42,000 inhabitants, but it's a city with a very large history, because the city was created by the Romans on the first century before Christ, and with a very large heritage. It was a city that was very touched by the First World War, because she was destroyed more than 86%.
Teresa Cowie 15:54
That's Laurent Wiart, Director of Heritage, International Relations and Tourism, for Arras.
Isabelle Pilarowski 16:03
At the beginning of the First World War, it was defended by the French army. Then they had to go to take part in another battle, the battle of Verdun, very famous in France, and the British army arrived in Arras to defend the town.
Teresa Cowie 16:21
Isabelle Pilarowski is responsible for Carrière Wellington Mémorial de la bataille d’Arras , also known as the Wellington Tunnels Museum. She and Laurant are part of a delegation from Arras that came to Auckland earlier this year.
Laurent Wiart 16:37
Arras has been circled by the German army at the beginning of the war. The first bombing of the city was on October 1914, and the city has been bombed by the German every day, with the destruction of all the buildings. So, the civilians start to leave the city, little by little, and they live in the cellars. Most of them live in the cellars during the bombing, but they were still alive in the city, a life that could be difficult because military authorities just wished to be alone in the city. So having the civilians with them was sometimes difficult. It was a very precarious life, because you can be killed every day, at every time by a bomb that come on the city. And the German guns were only two kilometres from the city. So, it was a very, very risky place.
Teresa Cowie 16:37
So, the New Zealand Tunnellers made their way to Arras to support the British army who were protecting the town.
Gail Romano 16:37
New Zealand Tunnellers arrived in France in March 1916. By the end of April in the Arras vicinity, apparently, they knew the location of most of the German underground galleries, already,
Teresa Cowie 16:37
Galleries, by the way, that's just another term for tunnels, but it can mean, more specifically, the horizontal passages, rather than the vertical ones.
Gail Romano 16:37
Now that's just remarkable from, you know, from hearing and from commonsense. And the New Zealand Tunnellers were certainly, you know, very skilled and upskilled quickly, because most of what they did, in terms of the military use of their skill, they learned on the job. At that time, the nature of war was starting to change as well.
Teresa Cowie 16:37
Trenches were still important, but the weapons used to attack them, trench mortars and howitzers had been improving steadily. Trench mortars were basically short tubes which fired shells at steep angles, dropping them directly into enemy trenches. Howitzers were larger artillery guns that also fired in high arcs, raining shells down from above. Both sides had been working frantically to perfect these weapons, because they could devastate trenches in a way that traditional straight firing artillery couldn't.
Gail Romano 17:23

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About that time, or maybe just prior to it, a New Zealand sapper apparently had discovered the old medieval quarries that were under the town of Arras, which had been the source of a lot of the stone that had been quarried to build the city above
Teresa Cowie 18:50
A sapper was a soldier, expert in military engineering work like digging, tunnelling and demolition. Incidentally, the word sapper comes from a French term sapeur, which means to undermine, to dig.
Gail Romano 19:05
And so it was one of those synchronistic things, I guess you could say. And the New Zealanders said, thought, we can support the advance by developing some critical infrastructure under the city for this very audacious ambush. And so the British were right behind that.
Isabelle Pilarowski 17:40
So this was decided in November 1916 they decided to use those quarries, and also they asked New Zealand Tunnelling Company to work in the quarries and dig tunnels to link all the quarries together to create a big underground city to billet soldiers and surprise the Germans on the ninth of April 1917, this was the plan of the Battle of Arras.
Teresa Cowie 18:26
To find out more about the incredible discovery 20 meters under Arras. Let's hear from Joe Hollander. He's the Director of the Engineer Corps Memorial Centre at Linton Military Camp in Palmerston North. It's New Zealand's largest army base.
Joe Hollander 18:26
When I think back of some of the things that we have done over the last 30 to 50 years, probably none of them come anywhere near the scale of what they did on the Western Front.
Teresa Cowie 18:35
Joe has a wealth of experience in this area. He began his career as a conscripted sapper in the late 1960s, and retired as a Lieutenant-Colonel after a couple of decades of service. He then worked professionally as a civil and military engineer, and he's closely connected to the Corps of Royal New Zealand Engineers.
Joe Hollander 21:39
The interesting thing about Arras is that by the time they were able to reconnoiter and use local information to get into some of the old Roman period caves and tunnels, that helped them immeasurably, because they would have known that the fact that somebody had been tunnelling there a couple of 1000 years ago that the ground, the geology and the structure, would have been relatively stable. The conditions that they were working in were pretty horrific at all depths. You know, in some cases they were sort of 40 or 50 feet underground. And so, issues associated with breathing, gas, all of these issues, flooding, water extraction, and so on. In those days, it was very much hit and miss, but having said that, typical Kiwis, you know, they performed in such a way that they managed to get around all of these issues and achieve some pretty competitive rates of tunnelling compared to other British Empire forces who were also tunnelling. I mean, the Australians, the Canadians and the Brits also had tunnelling teams, but the New Zealanders outstripped their performance hugely.
Teresa Cowie 22:54
Over the next five months, they worked at connecting and extending the two existing underground systems, creating new tunnels, and more.
Gail Romano 23:03
They did amazing things. They turned spaces into hospital spaces. There were barracks spaces, there were offices. I mean, not doors and things, you know, but they were defined areas. There were ablution facilities. They ran electricity cables down there. It's amazing, amazing work, and again, 24 hours a day.
Teresa Cowie 23:26
It's hard to imagine how they would have coped working 20 meters under the ground, the claustrophobic conditions, the lack of light and constant threat of death. It certainly puts today's complaints about working in an open plan office into perspective. It was a big job, so the men of the Tunnelling Company weren't the only Kiwi troops involved. In December 1916 a 43-strong party from the Maori Pioneer Battalion joined the effort. Foot soldiers from the New Zealand Division also helped out, along with British troops

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Joe Hollander 24:04
The New Zealand attitude towards, you know, doing things we don't want to just sit on our laurels and, you know, tick over every day at the same rate. We always want to try and improve both conditions and performance all the time. And if you're setting up competitions against other forces. There's an element of competition there as well.
Gail Romano 24:28
To help find their way around. They named different parts of the Ronville system after places in New Zealand.
Teresa Cowie 24:37
The Ronville system was the network of tunnels and caves under Arras, dug entirely by the New Zealand Engineers Tunnelling company. It took its name from the Ronville quarries on the city's eastern edge.
Gail Romano 24:49
So it's effectively an underground map of New Zealand with the northernmost point, called Russell, and the southernmost point is called Bluff. And then there's the Wellington tunnel system and the Auckland tunnel system, and there's Christchurch and there's Nelson, Blenheim.
Teresa Cowie 25:05
And if you'd like to see a map of the tunnels, check out the link in our show notes.
Gail Romano 25:11
In addition to enlarging the existing quarries and building new connecting tunnels, they apparently were able to create 2000 metres of new tunnels in those five months that they were under Arras.
Teresa Cowie 25:27
With a major Allied push planned, the tunnellers went on the attack. They dug tunnels towards German lines, planted three mines under enemy trenches ready to blast when the attack started, and created communication routes for the coming battle. Then, 24,000 troops lay in wait underground for eight days, before emerging for the battle of Arras, an attack meant to distract the Germans from a larger French offensive further south.
Gail Romano 26:04
The French were planning to do this major attack down in the Aisne. And the idea of the British was that a couple of days before they'd be doing this attack, which would be a distraction, and would focus the German attention there and then the French could come in.
Teresa Cowie 26:27
Just before the sun rose on the ninth of April 1917 they stormed the battlefield from their stations, just a few meters away from the front line and attacked the German trenches.
Gail Romano 26:39
Initially the attack on that area was really successful. I believe that there were German officers still in their pyjamas and their dugouts. You know, it was, it was that successful that they didn't and the hope was high, because it was the first couple of days, and they made, I believe, in terms of advances over the front line, quite a significant one.
Teresa Cowie 27:04

(01:42):
But despite these initial successes, the fighting soon ground into a costly stalemate, with around 300,000 lives lost.
Gail Romano 27:14
Unfortunately, there was no there was not adequate plan for backing them up, and it was cold, and it was winter, and the British had already they'd been underground for two weeks. They were, and that causes stresses on the body, even if you're not actually actively fighting. And then they went out into this environment, cold, damp, not enough food, no support coming in, no backup. And it ended up in a bit of a disaster. It was a failure in the end.
Teresa Cowie 27:46
However, on the same day, the Canadian Corps achieved what many thought impossible, the capture of Vimy Ridge, a position long considered unbeatable. After the First World War, the quarries fell silent, frozen in time
Laurent Wiart 28:06
After the war. In 1918 there was almost 400 person in the cities, and people come back after, but they have to rebuild, and rebuilding start only in the beginning of the 20s and it ended in 1934. So it was a long time to have a full population coming back in the cities. The quarries were used during the Second World War for the air bombing as air shelter, and they were assimilated by the population to the wars. So just after the Second World War, most of the quarry were forgotten by the citizens, because it was a remembrance of war.
Teresa Cowie 28:53
The secrets of the quarries lay dormant for decades, until the 1990s, when an archaeological team started exploring how they had been used in the Middle Ages. And they found a lot more than they bargained for. In addition to the tunnels carved city names and bunks that remained, the men who had passed through left their mark in more personal ways. Names etched into the stone, photographs of loved ones, greetings in te reo Māori, and small tokens that quietly declared, I was here.
Isabelle Pilarowski 29:30
It was a way for us to say, I leave a trace, and it was a real surprise to discover those graffities and traces left by the soldiers. It was almost like the soldiers left the day before, the week before. So it was really something very special. It was a rediscovery, with a real investigation on the subject, because in Arras, we didn't know anything about that part of the history of the town.
Teresa Cowie 30:11
Interest suitably piqued, the archaeologists tried to find information about what might have happened there in the French archives, but sadly, couldn't find anything,
Isabelle Pilarowski 30:22
So we had to go to England to investigate and find historical archives about the Battle of Arras, about this surprise attack and preparation of the battle and the underground life of the soldiers, and also the presence of New Zealand Tunnellers in Arras during the First World War. So that was really a big, big discovery for the town of Arras at that time.
Teresa Cowie 30:57
It must have been incredible to discover that your town had such a vast history, which had been, well, buried for decades. Imagine going deep underground and expecting to see empty quarries and finding so many echoes of soldiers past.
Isabelle Pilarowski 31:16
There are different writings, different carvings, such as names of soldiers with their soldiers number. And we also have some carvings and writings left by the tunnellers like Waitomo, and other carvings like Kia ora,. It was a way for them to remember their home.
Laurent Wiart 31:42
The carvings and the graffiti were very important because they mark the place, and they mark the presence of the Māori. And there is in the Blenheim query, a wonderful Tahitian prayer led by a soldier. And we know nothing about these soldiers, although he was there and he left this testimony of his being here in Arras at that time. But all the graffiti left by the soldier are very impressive, because they were there just before the battle, and for most of them, we don't know what happened to them just after, perhaps it's the last testimony they left before going on the battle and for a lot of them to be killed. So it's very important to preserve.

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Isabelle Pilarowski 32:31
The other thing we have, which is considered now as a treasure for us, is that in the Auckland quarry, we have some carvings and names left by the soldiers from the Cook Islands, and one of them left a conch shell very close to his writing. And this conch shell is now a symbol, because it has inspired an artist who created a memorial in Wellington at the Pukeahu War Memorial. He designed, and this conch you have the same in Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, and in the future years, there will be a memorial in Arras in the shape of a conch to make the link between the countries.
Gail Romano 33:37
The city is amazingly heritage-minded, you know, they're really focused on retaining the important part of their heritage, and part of that is the traumatic nature of that past. But then not all places that experience traumatic pasts do want to revisit it, and do want to to retain it in that way. So the special connection that has developed with New Zealand and then with the Museum has has come about from that, really, because the whole story that they relearned associated with the tunnels and what happened there, and who and who built them. I first met was Isabelle and the Mayor of Arras, and a few others in 2015 when they came out, they gave the Museum an official gift, which we have, we have in the collection now, which is the pickaxe head from the tunnels, and they have visited since then. They have also been, over that period, been developing strong links with other places in New Zealand that reflect the tunnels that were down below. So they visit Waihi, they visit Rotorua. They've got a strong relationship down there. And they travel to the Cook Islands on their visits as well. So that powerful connection comes from something that New Zealanders actually did over 100 years ago as part of their job, but as something which has such importance to the people of the city.
Isabelle Pilarowski 35:19
The reason why we decided to open this museum was this rediscovery, which was a major thing for the town, and the Mayor at the time, and the Director of the Tourist Office and the Archaeologists of Arras said, Well, we have to do something to share that story. It's too important.
Teresa Cowie 35:48
Visitors are now able to don helmets, headsets and an extra layer of warm clothes, and actually go the 20 meters underground to explore the tunnel's history.
Isabelle Pilarowski 36:05
We wanted to leave this as it was during the First World War. So that means that you're going down in the quarry and you are in the same conditions as were the soldiers during the First World War. So the light is following you during the tour, so that means that it switches on as you are walking forward. And we really wanted to have the account of the soldiers who are talking to you through the audio guides, but also show some artifacts. We wanted to focus on the presence of the soldiers, so we added some shadows going by. So it's really walking on the footsteps of the soldiers, and it's 11 degrees all the time, but it's very damp. As you enter the museum, there is a wall of portraits of the New Zealand Tunnellers, and it's a way of crossing the eyes of the tunnellers as you go down in the museum to discover what they did during the First World War in the underground quarries. It's a real underground city. You can realize the mass of soldiers being here for eight days, and you attend a ceremony which took place the eve of the battle. And then after that, you have different traces, different graffiti, that you can see that the soldiers left before the battle. You can hear in the audio guide some letters of soldiers few days before the battle.
sfx 37:55
"please don't fret on my account, dear Mother, I'm quite sound and keeping as cheerful as circumstances permit...."
Isabelle Pilarowski 38:01
And then you experience the first day, because at the end of the tour, you can see an exit, the exit number 10, which was one of the exits used by the soldiers on the first day of the battle.
Teresa Cowie 38:16
This part of the experience had a real impact on Gail, who went there one September,
Gail Romano 38:21
They stop you at one of the tunnels, one of the exit tunnels, and you look up and they have a light and a sound experience there. And all you can see projected up the sides of the tunnel as it goes rises above you, towards the surface, are these silhouettes of soldiers. I've got goosebumps now talking about it. And then you hear someone say, you know, a minute, lads the top. And then there's a whistle, and then they all go, and it was just oh my gosh. It was spine chilling.
Teresa Cowie 39:14
Sue Baker Wilson is a member of Waihi Heritage Vision, and has been researching the story of the New Zealand Engineers Tunnelling Company for the past 20 years. She's also a distant relative of some of the tunnellers. She's been to the Wellington Tunnels Museum in Arras. In fact, it was through Sue that Gail first became interested in the tunneller's story.
Sue Baker Wilson 39:38

(02:24):
The first time I became aware of them was when I was doing a project that I was just doing out of interest, because I had a love of photography, and I have a love of angel headstones. And amongst the headstones that I came across in Waihi Cemetery was a headstone that named the Tunnelling Company, and it was, what's the tunnelling company? I don't know about this tunnelling company. And so I asked a local historian, and she said, "well, you know, none of the miners served during the war. It was an essential industry". Well, that doesn't quite make sense with what I've just read. I need to find out some more. So that led me into investigating the story more fully.
Teresa Cowie 40:24
Sue got on the road and headed to the former mining town of Thames.
Sue Baker Wilson 40:28
So I hopped in the car, drove to Thames, not very far away from where I live, and thought, well, now what? Where do I start now? I’ll go to the pub? Because, you know, miners and pubs go together. So I walked into the pub and went up to the counter and said, "I'm doing this work on the New Zealand Tunnelling Company in World War One, if you've got any ideas where I can go and learn some more about those who enlisted in Thames?". And beside me there was a group of of elderly women, probably my age now, but they at the time, they seemed quite elderly, and they were having a girls day out, and one of them heard me, and she popped up to the counter and said "my father was a tunneller". And I thought, how easy is that? That's New Zealand for you. Ask, and you shall receive.
Teresa Cowie 41:16
Bit by bit, the chance meetings and pubs and dairies and mining towns. Sue has pieced together what made a tunneller.
Sue Baker Wilson 41:25
Determination, problem solving, strength of character, dedication, their ability to work in adverse conditions, their sense of brotherhood that existed before they went overseas, but was added to with a military-sense of brotherhood. And they were a hard group of men. They were older, a lot of them. They were married. They were used to doing really hard work. They had been in situations where they had been buried, where there had been accidents, were part of their life. Death was part of their life. But they had this ability to problem-solve.
Teresa Cowie 42:01
But being the men they were, these weren't the kind of problem solving skills you'd want to bring up in a job interview,
Sue Baker Wilson 42:08
And it could be even such things as when they were embarking and they were told you're not allowed to have alcohol on board the boat. Now, telling a miner that you're not allowed to quench your thirst and have any alcohol is probably not going to go down too well. So one of the things that they did, with the help of their womenfolk, who were every bit as strong of character as their men, was they took their putties off and they tied them into long ropes, put them over the side of the boat, and their womenfolk and others tied bottles of drink, and they hauled them up on board.
Teresa Cowie 42:43
Putties are those details that immediately say World War One soldier when you see them in photographs or films. They're the thin bandage, like cloths the men wrapped around their calves, and they were just great for booze-smuggling capers. On long marches, they did a similar job to modern day compression stockings. They also kept the muck out of your boots.
Sue Baker Wilson 43:08
They came to be regarded as one of the wildest units on the Western Front, and that's one of those things, how much is myth and how much is real. But I can tell you, there was an awful lot of punishments handed out because they were with the British Army, rather than the New Zealand Army, who who very quickly learned that tying men to the stake wasn't actually going to make them change their behaviour, it would just make their mate look out for them a little bit more. So even when they came back from overseas, they looked out for each other. They appealed to us as New Zealanders who like to see themselves as being a little bit irreverent of authority. One of the sadnesses that I have personally is that they never, perhaps received that recognition that they should have done, because this was a unique company that existed in World War One only.
Teresa Cowie 44:00
Unfortunately, despite the tunneller’s incredible achievements in Arras, many New Zealanders don't know their story.
Gail Romano 44:09
A lot of what New Zealanders did during both wars overseas is actually news to a lot of New Zealanders.

(02:45):
Teresa Cowie 44:17
Around the centenary of the First World War, Gail worked with Te Papa and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on a survey to get a sense of what New Zealanders knew about the war and our involvement in it. Unsurprisingly, Gallipoli and Anzac were the major answers. Even after the centenary, when public consciousness had been saturated for five years with lesser-known stories, they were still the top responses.
Gail Romano 44:45
I guess the legacy of the tunneller's story. What I would like to see is an increase in general awareness in New Zealand of the variety of roles that New Zealanders played during the First World War, and in fact, even beyond that in conflict, because they are significant. Obviously, they have huge impacts on the individuals involved and on their families and immediate communities, but they're also very important reflections of New Zealand and who we actually are. And I think being aware of the variety of our of our experience is important. I also hope that people realize the impact that we have overseas as New Zealanders, because we do. Arras is one of those overseas locations which was positively impacted by New Zealand's involvement in their conflict story. But they're not the only one.
Teresa Cowie 45:50
Overseas museums like Carrière Wellington are working hard to share these important stories.
Laurent Wiart 45:57
It's very important now for the people of Arras to be able to welcome the descendants of the soldiers and to say how grateful we are for what they did at that time.
Teresa Cowie 46:11
The story of the Arras Tunnellers is one of grit, ingenuity and sacrifice. It's also a story of remembrance of names etched in chalk, of descendants who travelled across the world to reconnect, and of international ties still alive today. Their story reminds us that history is not only written above ground in victories and defeats, but also deep underground, and the determination of men who worked in darkness so others could see the light of day.
Teresa Cowie 47:00
That was Tunnelling under Arras, brought to you by Auckland Museum, supported by the Tennyson Charitable Trust. Written and produced by Laura Skerritt and hosted by me, Teresa Cowie. Sound design by Sara O'Brien, with production support from Annabel Walker. Production was from Connect Content. Thanks to our guests, Gail Romano, Isabelle Pilarowski, Laurent Weir, Joe Hollander and Sue Baker Wilson. To find out more about this incredible feat, visit the links in our show notes.