William Eric Lunt, was born here in 1895, and died of wounds in the 36th Casualty Clearing Station at the Somme on October 14th 1916.
This was the story I had decided to tell, but sometimes the stories just tumble out, crossing time and connecting the Chorlton of the early 20th century with that rural township I have come to know so well.
And this is what has happened today. The Lunt family lived in Chorlton and made their living from farming for all of the 19th century. In 1845 they rented two acres of land off Moss Lane* from the Egerton estate and were market gardeners growing a variety of food for the Manchester markets.
His smallholding was mostly orchard, stretching back from Moss Lane to Rough Leach Gutter and was a smallish amount of land, and like many of our market gardeners Lunt may also have had other jobs as well. And we know that he paid 4s. 7d a week in rent and in that cottage he and his wife brought up six children.
Above; The Lunt home and land on field numbered 18.
Not only this but we can follow him through his activities in the local Methodist church and his participation in our first brass band which started up sometime in the 1820s.
And the Lunt family perfectly reflect the changing nature of Chorlton. As the 19th century came to a close more and more of the agricultural land was given over to housing. Perhaps the Lunt’s saw it coming and while they may have retained their land they had by 1901 opened a shop at number 60 Sandy Lane selling fruit and young William had chosen to work as a warehouseman apprentice.
Which brings me to where I had intended to start. William was just 19 when he joined up on September 5th 1914; just one month after the war had broken out. He was a fit young man weighing 129 lbs and was 5’ 11 inches. His army records describe his complexion as sallow, his eyes brown and his hair dark, and that at present is all we know of his physical appearance.
In fact that is about all we have, for though there are eighteen military documents, as well his birth certificate and two census returns, none of them shed any light on who he really was, his likes and dislikes, or whether he was serious, humorous or like most of us a bit of both.
He was to become part of that new Kitchener’s army of young idealistic volunteers many of who were to die at the battle of the Somme. I wish there was more. I know he had joined up at Ardwick, was assigned to the 8th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment and remained in Britain until the summer of 1916 when he embarked at Folkestone landing on July 27 at Boulogne.
It should be possible to piece together the next few months from the official history of the regiment and from the war diary the unit filled in for every day of the conflict. But at present perhaps all I can say is that he was caught up in the Battle of the Somme, was wounded on October 12th and died two days later of his wounds.
“The 36th Casualty Clearing Station was at Heilly from April 1916. It was joined in May by the 38th, and in July by the 2/2nd London, but these hospitals had all moved on by early June 1917. ....... There are now 2,890 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in this cemetery. Only 12 of the burials are unidentified and special memorials are erected to 21 casualties whose graves in the cemetery could not be exactly located. The cemetery also contains 83 German graves. The burials in this cemetery were carried out under extreme pressure and many of the graves are either too close together to be marked individually, or they contain multiple burials. Some headstones carry as many as three sets of casualty details, and in these cases, regimental badges have had to be omitted. Instead, these badges, 117 in all, have been carved on a cloister wall on the north side of the cemetery. The cemetery was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Mericourt-l'Abbe is a village approximately 19 kilometres north-east of Amiens and 10 kilometres south-west of Albert. Heilly Station Cemetery is about 2 kilometres south-west of Mericourt-l'Abbe, on the south side of the road to Corbie.”**
It is not much of a record for what had been a young life with promise and a future. And I suppose that is the point. After almost a century the grief of the death of so many has faded but not I think the sadness that so little is left of who this young man was.
*Sandy Lane
**http://ww1cemeteries.com/ww1frenchcemeteries/heillystation.htm
Pictures; Allied Victory Medal, awarded to servicemen and women who had served between August 1914 and November 1918,detail from the tithe map of 1845 showing the cottage and land of the Lunt’s courtesy of Philip Lloyd, and the Heilly Station Cemetery, Mericourt-l@ Abbe Somme, courtesy of WW1 Cemetries.com http://ww1cemeteries.com/index.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment