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Charles Arnott SHALLCRASS was born on 9 July 1896 at Bluff, the eldest son of Charles Edward and Eliza Elsie (née NICHOL) SHALLCRASS. After his mother died in 1934, his father married Lucy Mary BOWIE who had served as a nurse in World War I.

A letter by another wounded soldier, Private Edward Arscott, spoke highly of Lieutenant Shallcrass. It was published in the Timaru Herald on 29 December 1917, and the relevant portion reported:

"I will give you a bit of an idea of the fight. We moved up to the assembly trench at 11 o'clock on the night before we 'went over the bags', we had shell holes for trenches and Lieutenant Shallcrass a Timaru soldier had charged of our platoon. We had to wait in the assembly trench till kick off time, which was at six in the morning. The whole of that seven hours wait Fritz was dropping shells all round us. Albie Hanson got it through the foot at midnight and two others were also hit. They therefore took no part in the stunt. They were lucky. After we had been nearly frozen for seven hours, six o'clock came. All the guns behind us opened out, and away we went. On our sector Auckland had to take the first objective and Canterbury the final objective. The first was dead easy. All the Germans threw down their rifles and came running towards us. The final objective was the hardest. The Germans had concrete 'pill-boxes' they are about 15 feet square inside and the walls are about four feet thick. They have four or five machine guns inside each pill-boc, and they can pick off our boys, I can tell you. Once we got to within about thirty yards all round them, and the inmates ran out with their hands up...

It was a race with our crowd to see who could get the prisoners first. We were after souvenirs. I got a decent watch and chain from one of the Huns. At one part of the advance, we were in our own barrage, the boys were that eager. It will take too long to tell you of all the ducking and diving we did. We went over the top at six o'clock and it was 8.45 when we took the last objective. We had started to dig in when I got a bullet through the left arm. We had started with 32 men and when I left after being wounded there were only nine. It was slaughter out and out I have been reading the papers and they say that the casualties were small... You can judge for yourself. Our platoon was not the only one in which there were big lists of killed and wounded. I was talking to an English Tommy and he told me that out of four platoons of 50 men each in his company there were only enough to make one platoon.

If you see Mr Shallcrass you can tell him that if the boys who went into that fight with his son leading have to go into another fight they want nobody better than Lieutenant Shallcrass to lead them again. He was as game as anybody on the field. He kept his nut and kept his men together all the time. Some of the platoons there were full of Tommies, Australians, and New Zealanders all mixed up. That was just the fault of the officers but young "Shally" as we call him kept his lot together all the time. He also kept together the men in another platoon that had lost its leader. The fight was simply hell let loose and there were some awful sights but now that I am out of it all, I would not have missed if for anything ..."

Sources

Auckland War Memorial Museum Cenotaph Database [24 June 2016]; NZ Defence Force Personnel Records (Archives ref. AABK 18805 W5553 0103361) [21 October 2016], NZ Defence Force Personnel Records (Archives ref. AABK 18805 W5568 0136412) [21 October 2016]; NZ Birth Registration (South Canterbury Branch microfiche collection) [24 June 2016]; "Private E.W. Arscott : Letter to his father" in the Timaru Herald 29 December 1917, courtesy of papers past at www.https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/ [4 February 2022]

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