ORIGIN OF TOMMY ATKINS

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 November 1944, Page 6

ORIGIN OF TOMMY ATKINS

HERO OF 1794

All the world knows the British soldier as “Tommy,” short for Thomas Atkins. But not all the world. remembers the source of the familiar and affectionate nickname. Here is the story (as told in a recent letter to “The Times” by Colonel Pi. N. Beadon), of the original Thomas Atkins, a hero of the past, who died at Boxtel, a few miles north-west of Eindhoven where the Second Army fought so bravely last month to relieve the heroes of the British, airborne division.

“ft was in September, 1794,” writes Colonel Beadon, “that General Abercrombie’s brigade, which included the 33rd Foot under Arthur Wellesley (afterwards Duke of Wellington), was retiring under the pressure of the French and had just repelled a specially savage attack, when Thomas Atkins, a soldier of 20 years’ service and the right-hand man of a grenadier company, was left lying with a bayonet wound in his chest and a bullet in his lungs, and his course almost run. He asked that the stretcher-bearers should not move him but allow him to die in peace. Touched by the sight, his commanding officer moved to the side of the dying soldier who, seeing the grief in his young colonel’s face, gasped out, ‘lt’s all right, sir. “It’s all in the day’s work.’ “Half a century later the aged Duke of Wellington stood on the ramparts of Walmer Castle with an officer who had come down from Whitehall with papers for the signature of the Com-mander-In-Chief, among w'hich was a new document relating to soldiers’ pay which was, as a matter of courtesy, to be referred to the Duke with a request for a name typical of the common soldier to be Inserted as a specimen. signature. “The Duke moved forward towards the ramparts and stood for some time in silence gazing out to sea. What a panorama must have passed before those dimming eyes as he looked back beyond the blood-drenched slopes of Waterloo, the broken mountains of the Pyrenees, the tawny woods of Spain, the olive groves and the cork woods of Portugal and the torrid flat lands of India. But it was on none of these that his memory lingered. His mind went back to his early days of campaigning as the minds of old soldiers so often do. Then he turned to his interlocutor and replied ‘Private Thomas Atkins.’ ”