Those from Chorlton who fought in the Great War

I have been thinking about the Great War and in particular the role of my own family in that conflict.

We sent six off to fight for King and Country.  There were two uncles, my grandfather, great grandfather and two great uncles, and because my grandmother was German we had relatives who joined the armies of the Kaiser.

But today I want to return to the impact the war had on our township here in Chorlton.  Now it is something I have written about in the past* when purely by accident I came across the work of the voluntary Red Cross Hospitals on Edge Lane and Manchester Road.

The stories cover only the first two years of the war but reveal the commitment of the community to the care of the wounded, and also reveal that darker side where patriotism tumbles over into hostility and deliberate misunderstanding.



I can remember thinking when I first began uncovering the stories that there is no central war memorial in the village, which is odd given that most places around the country however small erected a war cross or plinth with the names of the fallen as well as those who went and returned.  My own little board school in south east London still displayed in the 1950s the book listing all the students who had gone off to fight, red for those who went and survived and black for those who died.

But in our case the memorials are there, just spread across the township and apart from the one in Southern Cemetery they are associated with our churches.  So in the grounds of the Methodist Church on Manchester Road is a memorial to the fallen of both world wars while similar records exist in St Clements and St Ninian’s churches.  Sadly others have vanished.  My old friend Marjorie remembers a plaque in the MacFadyn’s building at the corner of Barlow Moor Road and Sandy Lane, but sometime during renovation it disappeared.

Many served with the Manchester Regiment but not all, and while most saw action on the Western Front others were at Gallipoli and in the campaigns in Egypt and Palestine.
For some there are a full set of military records which follow the recruit from the moment he joined up to his eventual discharge.  But for many others the record is fragmentary, consisting of his Attestation document, a medical file or letter to grieving parent and in some cases just a reference to the date and place of his death or the list of his medals.

Nevertheless there is enough to be able to write about many of our young men who went to fight and in some cases to die in battle or in a field hospital.  But here there is a dilemma and it is one I have never really been able to reconcile.  How far does writing about the lives and deaths of these young men become a grotesque intrusion?   Or by bringing their sacrifice out into the open are we not honouring them?  I am not sure I have the answer.

I suppose the easy way out is to write about them but not refer to their names.  This way the true sadness is there but there can be no danger of hurting a living relative. So I have in front of me the record of young man from Chorlton who joined aged 19 in the May of 1915, saw service in Egypt and then for the last two years of the war on the Western Front, where he was reported missing on March 23 1918 and died in hospital four months later of a skin infection while in a German POW camp.

But at the same time there is something a little dishonest in having the records, noting the fate of these young men but not naming them.  It plucks them out of a century of obscurity only to consign them again to oblivion.

And what is more in some cases I know the families, or at least I have researched them through the 19th century, and followed their lives on farms across the township while others are part of the new wave of people into Chorlton as it changed from rural community into a suburb of Manchester.

Harry Hotchen was one of these newcomers.  The family lived on Upper Chorlton Road and his father was a butcher. Ten years earlier they had lived on Brunswick Street in Chorlton on Medlock and before that in Salford where Harry had been born.

He had joined in the May of 1915 just three months short of his 19th birthday, saw service in the Middle East with the Cheshire and Essex regiments and was discharged in the February of 1919 after a spell in the Nell Lane Military Hospital after which I lose him, although there is a reference to a Harry Hotchen marrying in 1928 and dying in the June of 1954 in Chorley.

William Eric Lunt was by contrast from a family who had farmed the land since certainly the early 19th century.  There are Lunt’s buried in the parish church yard on the green and his parents and grandparents had lived in one of the farmhouses on Sandy Lane and were active in the Methodist community.  But his is an all the more darker and sadder story and I shall leave it for another time.

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%20and%20the%20Great%20War

Pictures; Allied Victory Medal, awarded to servicemen and women who had served between August 1914 and November 1918, detail of a letter published in the St Clement's Parish Church Magazine  1917, courtesy of Ida Bradshaw, The Manchester Regiment marching past the Town Hall, March 21st 1915, Thomas E Scholey, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, 1914-1915 Star, awarded for service between August 5th 1914 and December 31st 1915