William Hackett
Acts of supreme bravery were performed everywhere during the First Word War. We have already seen heroism of the highest order on land, at sea and in the air. Courage was also required deep beneath the ground in some of the most dangerous and claustrophobic conditions of the war.
William Hackett was born in 1873 in Nottingham, England. By the time the First World War erupted in 1914, he had been working as a miner for twenty-three years in the Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire areas and was married. Like millions of other men in Britain, he volunteered for the armed forces, but his army regiment of choice, the York and Lancaster Regiment, rejected him for being, in his early forties, too old to serve. Hackett persisted, however, and on October 25, 1915, presumably when the military authorities had relaxed their recruitment criteria after astounding losses in the war so far, he was accepted into the British Army, despite being diagnosed with a condition of the heart.
Hackett’s many years’ experience as a miner was valuable. On the Western Front, both sides reached a stalemate of two fiercely opposing networks of trenches with neither side immediately able to overcome the other. At numerous points along the front line, both the German and Allied Armies dug deep tunnels underground, packed them full of explosives and blew them up in the hope of creating a gap in the enemy trenches wide enough for infantry forces (and later tanks) to pour through. Once his training was complete, Hackett, now 43, became a Sapper in the 172nd Tunneling Company and then the 254th Tunneling Company of the British Army. It was not long before he was deployed to the front in Northern France where he performed the brave deed for which he is still remembered today.
On June 22, 1916, Hackett and four other miners were working on a tunnel around thirty-five feet under the front line in the Givenchy sector of the front. A single shaft led down to the tunnel from the surface, known as the “Shaftesbury Shaft”. Hackett and his comrades worked for hours in conditions of intense darkness, heat and claustrophobia. They had to be as quiet as they could in case their subterranean efforts were overheard by German soldiers digging tunnels back towards the British line.
At just before 3am in the morning of June 23, a German mine exploded nearby and cut Hackett and four other men off from the shaft down to the tunnel and safety. On the surface, a rescue party instantly set out about trying to get the trapped miners out. They worked tirelessly for two days and eventually reached Hackett and the others through a hole they had burrowed into the earth. Hackett assisted three of the men to the surface. Then, in an act of immense selflessness, he decided to return from the surface and work to rescue his fourth colleague, 22 year-old Thomas Collins, who was seriously injured and still trapped. As he turned to climb back into the earth, he is reported to have said to the men around him: “I am a tunneler, I must look after the others first.” The rescue party worked on, but German shelling in the area made it more and more dangerous and the tunnel shaft more treacherous. Ultimately, the tunnel collapsed and entombed both Hackett and Collins under the ground, where they still lie today.
Hackett was awarded a Victoria Cross for his supreme act of self-sacrifice. At Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée today, the Tunneler’s Memorial commemorates the action in which Hackett died. It stands where the entrance to the Shaftesbury Shaft once was for all posterity.