Overall: 51cm (20in) x 42cm (16.5in)
Watercolour on paper. Quarter length profile portrait of Lieutenant Roy Besch, Artists Rifles, smoking a pipe. Inscribed lower left ‘R.C.F. Besch’. Signed and dated ‘Alner W. Hall / 13/9/18’. Framed and glazed.
Roy Cressy Frederick Besch, MC (1896-1996) was born in London and enlisted in the Artists Rifles in September 1914, when, by his account, a £5 joining fee and university or public school background were prerequisites. He arrived in France with a draft of 1/28th Battalion London Regiment (Artists Rifles) in March 1915, and was put to work as a batman for pre-war Artists’ officer at GHQ at St Omer. Assigned to E Company, he witnessed the comings of goings of various VIPs including the Prince of Wales and George V. One day at the height of the Battle of Loos, Besch was on sentry duty when he was singled out by the C-in-C Sir John French accompanied by the éminence grise of day, Lord Esher. Esher inquired after Besch’s well being before returning to weighty matters of war.
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In view of the calibre of men serving in the Artists Rifles, the battalion served as an OTU and provided many junior officers for frontline units. Besch was duly commissioned in July 1916 and attached to a battalion of Liverpool Territorials in the line near Arras, where he experienced his first night patrol - ‘I can remember vividly putting one of my hands right through a corpse …’, and, later, when gathering the effects of his first casualty - ‘then I saw a gold ring on one of his fingers and tried to get it off - without success, but somehow I cut off his finger and feeling rather sick, put the ring with his other effects.’ Besch subsequently returned to the 1/28th Bn Artists Rifles shortly before they joined 190th Brigade, 63rd (Royal Naval) Division. He saw action in the Third Battle of Ypres (August ‒ November 1917) and during the German Spring Offensive of March 1918. He was awarded the Military Cross in the 1919 New Year’s Honours List. His 98 page war memoir is held on microfilm in the Imperial War Museum.
Besch, a keen cricketer both before and after the war, returned home to open for the Middlesex Amateurs in 1920, and marry his fiancé. He spent a year in Portugal 1922-23 and settled in London. He became General Manager of the Incorporated Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind. He was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in the Second World War, becoming temporary Major in 1943.
Alner Wilson Hall, MC (1884-1971) was commissioned into the Artists Rifles in 1911 and rose to become Lieutenant-Colonel, 1/28th Artists Rifles in 1919. He was an architect by profession and designed the Middlesex Hospital, Fitzrovia, London, (1926-35), and 35 Lincolns Inn Fields for the Royal College of Surgeons.