Lost lives Part One

For me one of the great advantages of the internet is not only the ease with which you can communicate with people but the opportunities it has opened up to trawl historical records which previously would be very difficult to access.

I have over the last year asked the advice of an expert in English rural history who works at the University of Auckland, discussed Manchester Chartists with a professor in Leeds and discussed the finer points of an Arnot stove with a chap from Kent.

At the same time I have trawled the sources of the Library and Archive Canada and downloaded out of print 19th books as well of course as visiting census returns, parish records, the Quarter sessions and tithe lists.

So I was pleased to respond to a request to help a fellow historian in the Netherlands track the life of Sgt Blatherwick and his family and so honour a young man who died on a bombing raid in July 1942.
Ruud Verhagen has been researching the British, and German servicemen who died in and near his village during the Second World War.

George Blatherwick was just 20 and a wireless operator and front gunner. His aircraft was intercepted by a German night fighter and shot down over Geffen. Along with the rest of the crew he was buried in the garden of the local parish priest and later reinterred in the Uden War Cemetery.

Ruud’s starting point was the brief biographical details that he was the son of George and Ellen Blatherwick of Clayton in Manchester, and that they had been married in Chorlton in 1918 and were both buried in Southern Cemetery.

A search of the parish marriage records drew a blank but then of course I reasoned he might be a Roman Catholic or Non Conformist. The census returns for 1911 were more revealing and there I found two George Blatherwicks’ one of whom lived here. However it was the other George who proved more promising. He was aged just 16 in 1911 and lived in east Manchester. Tracking earlier census returns it was clear the family had lived in the same area since the 1860s.

This George would have been called up for the Great War and sure enough his military records had survived. He served from 1915 till 1919 and amongst the documents was a reference to his marriage to Ellen Young in December 1918. They were married in a church which was close to his family home and which is still standing, although about to undergo conversion into flats.

Now Clayton is not far from the church and where the family had lived and a search of old telephone directories brought up an address in Clayton just off the Ashton New Road. Close by is the old Board School opened in 1900 and still in use today and it is more than possible that Sgt Blatherwick may well have attended here in the 1930s.

To be continued

Pictures; Sgt George Blatherwick, and his gravestone, from the collection of Rudd Verhagen