by Richard Taylor
When
regulars at the popular Golden Cup in Masbrough Street,
Rotherham, ordered their pints in the 1920s from landlord Edmund Cliff
they were talking to a man who had fought natives in Africa and had rubbed
shoulders with royalty.
And in nearly 27 years with the Royal Navy
he had seen plenty of the world, too, usually from the decks of ships
which were far less comfortable than the royal yacht in which he served
for more than two years from February 1902.
Edmund was born on 8 February
1867 at Bramley, the son of 29-year-old tailor William Cliff and his wife
Emma. About three years later the family moved to Masbrough but Edmund was
still at Bramley when he joined the local village school. His name can
still be found in the admissions register now held in Rotherham’s local
studies library.
After he left school he trained as a
blacksmith, a trade presumably not to his liking because by the time he
was 18 he had joined the navy to whom he had been less that honest about
his age. He pretended his was two years younger so that he could enlist as
a boy entrant. Then only 5ft 32
ins tall, with blue eyes and light hair, he survived the hard life of the
navy’s training ships until he became an Ordinary Seaman in 1887.
HMS Active, commodore’s ship
in the squadron that was still used for sail training. He was soon
promoted to Able Seaman and in April 1888 was sent to another corvette,
HMS Boadicea, then the
flagship on the navy’s East India station.
Edmund’s training continued. In May 1890 he
qualified as a seaman gunner and he went on to hold gunnery ratings for
almost all his time afloat. These were skills which were soon to be put to
the test in one of those minor clashes against natives which were so often
a feature of shore actions during the days of Queen
Victoria’s navy.
In September 1890 nine German traders were
murdered in Witu, a small state 230 miles north of Zanzibar
in what is now Kenya, apparently on the orders of the sultan, Fumo Bakari.
A few months earlier Germany had transferred the protectorate to Britain
and now, after talks between the two countries, Vice-Adm Sir Edmund
Fremantle, C-in-C of the East India station, mounted a punitive expedition
to avenge the crime.
On October 20, 1890, the
Boadicea and the rest of her
squadron arrived at the port of Lamu on the East Africa coast. The force
which went ashore consisted of nearly 800 sailors and marines, with 150
Indian police from the Imperial British East Africa Company, 200 Zanzibari
troops and more than 250 ‘seedies’
n native
shipboard workers. Each armed man carried 80 rounds of ammunition.
Five days later the
Boadicea and nine other
warships assembled at the mouth of the River Ozz, only 14 miles from the
sultan. Here a force consisting mainly of seamen and marines prepared for
a direct advance inland. Progress was slow because of the heat and thick
bush and they had to drive off furious attacks by natives. At daybreak the
next day the final advance began and the town of Witu and
the sultan’s residence were soon taken. In all, only a dozen British were
wounded but many more suffered from sun stroke.
For his part in the action, Edmund was
awarded to East and West Africa Medal. Some of the
Boadicea’s muzzle-loading guns
which were taken ashore still stand outside the museum at Lamu. Admiralty
records, as is so often the case, hold no clue to Edmund’s work ashore,
but as he was a gunner it is very likely he was manning one of these
weapons, artillery which was not available to the native troops which
faced them.
In 1891 Edmund returned to
England for further gunnery and torpedo training at Portsmouth and by 1893
he had been promoted to Petty Officer 2nd Class. Throughout this time his
family were in Sarah Street where his father continued his trade as a
tailor. Altogether, 11 of them were living at No 23.
After postings to various shore
establishments at Portsmouth, in October 1895 Edmund was
sent out to the Pacific to join another steam corvette,
HMS Comus. Here was placed in
charge of one of the guns, possibly one of the four 6in guns which formed
her main armament.
South America had long been a
hotbed of revolution and in spring the following year there was
considerable unrest in Nicaragua. The
Comus, together with an American cruiser, put ashore a
detachment of bluejackets at Corinto to protect the lives of European and
US nationals; at the end of the third day it was clear they were not
longer needed so the men were withdrawn to their ships.
Early in May 1897 Edmund, by now back at
Portsmouth, was promoted to Petty Officer 1st Class and in October was
sent to the battleship HMS Colossus,
then serving as coastguard ship at Holyhead. In less than a year he
returned to Portsmouth where he signed up for another 12
years. He was selected for further training and in 1900 became a gunnery
instructor.
The navy clearly continued to hold him in
high regard. Only the most reliable men were chosen for service in the
royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert,
which was where Edmund was posted in February 1902
n just a
few months before the scheduled date of King Edward VII’s coronation on 26
June 1902. Only two days before the event it was announced that the king
had been taken ill with appendicitis and had had to have an operation. The
king convalesced on board the 4,700-ton yacht in the Solent and in July it
was announced that the coronation would take place on August 9.
It was an exceptionally busy time for the
Victoria and Albert’s crew.
On August 16 she was used by the king to review the fleet at Spithead and a week later she left for a cruise along the west
coast of Scotland, making a number of calls before putting in at
Invergordon on September 8. The king wrote that it was ‘a most successful
cruise... in perfect weather’.
It was at about this time that Edmund
received his bronze Coronation Medal, with its red, white and navy blue
ribbon. He had it engraved on the reverse
n entirely unofficially
n
‘Presented to E Cliff PO1 by HM King Edward VII’, indicating that he
received it personally from the king, probably on board the
Victoria and Albert.
The yacht was very popular with King
Edward. He was on board her in the summer of 1903 for a yachting tour
round the west coast of Ireland and had earlier used her for
his first foreign tour as king. Accompanied by the cruisers
Venus and
Minerva,
the Victoria and Albert
visited Lisbon before sailing on to Gibraltar and Malta. The yacht then
arrived at Naples escorted by eight battleships, four cruisers and eight
destroyers. Despite this, the king tried to go ashore incognito at a
tourist!
In January 1904, Edward was awarded his
Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, providing another memento of his
royal service. It is inscribed on the rim with his own name and that of
the ship in which he was serving
n
HMY Victoria and Albert.
The last trip Edmund took in the yacht was
in June 1904 when she carried the king to Kiel, accompanied
by four cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers. Here King Edward was
entertained on the German royal yacht by the Kaiser.
Edmund eventually left the
Victoria and Albert in July
1904 and had a series of postings until he was pensioned out of the navy
in March 1907. Three years later he had taken over the licence of the Red
Bull in Holmes Lane, Masbrough, but within a year or so had
retired to live in Barlow, south of Sheffield in Derbyshire. The Red Bull
was renamed Laynie’s in 1984 when it was run by former Rotherham United
footballer David Layne. It became the Tivoli Inn in 1988, named after the
nearby football ground’s Tivoli End or possibly the former Tivoli Picture
Palace.
Edmund obviously could not settle into a
life in retirement. Just before the First World War, he took over the
Norfolk Arms in Attercliffe Road, Sheffield, and during the
war, when he was recalled for service in the navy, his wife Beatrice was
listed as licensee. Edmund’s first wife, Caroline, had died at the age of
39 in 1912.
In 1914 Edmund served in the
Aquitania, a new Cunard
liner which had been taken over for conversion to an armed merchant
cruiser. In the end it was decided that at more than 45,000 tons she was
simply too big for that role so she eventually became a hospital ship and
troop carrier. Towards the end of August, this vast floating hotel was in
collision with another steamer and she had to return to Liverpool for
repairs.
Edmund never went back to her. Instead he
was posted to the cruiser HMS Hermoine,
then serving as a depot ship for patrol vessels at
Southampton. Subsequently he was with the old torpedo boat
TB065, a small boom defence
vessel serving in the Solent, which was where Edmund remained for most of
the war.
He was demobbed in February 1919 and in
1922 became landlord of the Golden Cup, known affectionately as the ‘Tin
Pot’. Here Edmund remained until his death at the age of 63 in 1930. It
was the end of a life of tremendous variety, but not the end of the
family’s association with Rotherham’s pubs. Edmund’s widow,
Beatrice, continued as licensee of the Golden Cup until 1939. Now, sadly,
even the pub no longer exists, long since demolished to make way for road
improvements.
This article first appeared in Medal News in February 2002
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