FUSILIER PHOEBE

Evening Star, Issue 21623, 19 January 1934, Page 1

FUSILIER PHOEBE

CENTEHARIAN'S CAREER Phoebe Hessel] had a greater claim to noteworthiness than that of mere longevity (writes a contributor in the London 'Sunday times'). In the record of the Northumberland Fusiliers, the " Fighting Fifth," she figures proudly as " Fusilier Phoebe," the woman private soldier, and one of the few of her sex actually to have served in action with the British Army. Phoebe was Cockney-bred, having be«n born in Stepney in 1713, and she commenced her adventures by falling in love at the age of fifteen with Sam Golding, a private in the 2nd Foot (now the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment). In 1728 Sam went abroad •with his 3'egiment to the West Indies, and the disconsolate Phoebe cut her hair short, dressed herself in boy's clothes, and presented herself for enlistment in the Fifth, which was then under orders to follow the second to Jamaica. - The medical examination of those happy-go-lucky days was merely nominal, and in due course Phoebe, a fine upstanding recruit, sailed with the regiment for the Spanish Main—in the very year, curiously enough, in which Gay published his " Polly " (a sequel to "The Beggar's Opera"), of which the motif was identical with Phoebe's exploit. But it was not until some time had elapsed that Phoebe's regiment and that of her boy's were quartered together; and it was in Gibraltar that the lovers were at last

united. MARRIED AT LAST Shortly afterwards Sam was invalided home after being wounded in a skirmish with the Spaniards; and Phoebe, for whom lie had promised to wait, continued her soldiering with the Fifth (her sex, apparently, being still a regimental secret) in various campaigns on the continent of Europe until she succeeded in obtaining her discharge. She then returned nonie, and was happily married to her faithful Sam. with whom she lived quietly until his death some twenty years later. Determined not to remain a childless widow for longer than she could help, she soon afterwards married William -Hessell. a Brighton fisherman; and her second wifehood lasted ufttil he, too, died in 1792. But Phoebe lived on, a conspicuous figure among the Brighton fisherfolk, and an object of interest and charity even to George Prince Regent, while her old corps was winning fame in the Peninsular at Busaco, Ciudad Roderigo,, Badajos, Salamanca, and Vittoria, under the great commander whose special appreciation then earned it the nick-name of " The Duke of Wellington's Bodyguard," and who first gave ft its glorious title of "The Fighting Fifth." In 1813 Phoebe attained her hundredth birthday, and lived on through Waterloo times, and till six years after; for it was not until 1821 that she died at the partriarchal age of 108, pathetically complaining that everyone seemed to be able to die except herself ! On her tombstone in the churchyard of St. Nicholas's at Brighton (one feels that she' would have preferred it to have been St. George's, the patron Saint of the Fifth Fusiliers) they carved a record of her long and remarkable life, which every recruit now learns in his first week at the Fifth Depot at Newcastle. Even though she was a South-coun-try-woman, to the young and ardent

“ Geordie ” .Joan of Arc and Hippolyta are very “ small potatoes ” compared with, “ Fusilier Phoebe.”