A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 12 ....... an engraved silver cup 1917

Continuing the  story of Chorlton in just a paragraph. They are in no particular order, and have been selected purely at random.

Presented to the Wesleyan Church by the Wounded Soldiers of the Wesleyan School Hospital Xmas 1917.  I doubt whether many people know that during the Great War we had two voluntary hospitals here in Chorlton.   One was in the Methodist Sunday school building on Manchester Road and the other in the Sunday School of the MacLaren Memorial Baptist Church on the corner of Wilbraham and Sibson Road.  Sadly little has survived in the form of records.  We have a few newspaper references, letters from some of the medical staff and patients, and a contemporary account in a Red Cross book of the work undertaken to care for the recovering soldiers. So this silver engraved cup is an important object recording not only the gratitude of the soldiers but the voluntary efforts of the people of Chorlton.






Picture; courtesy of Philip Lloyd

A family mystery from the Great War

Now this metal notebook holder has been in the family for as long as I can remember.

It is small but quite heavy and  I am ashamed to say has suffered from being in the cellar.

Its metal exterior has been attacked by rust and I am looking at how best to restore it.

It carries the German Imperial Cross with the letter W and the date 1914, and given that my grandmother was German I assumed it belonged to one of her family.

But now I am not so sure.
The name inscribed on the front is not one I recognise.

Of course that doesn’t prove it is not one of our family but allows for some doubt.

Alternatively it could have been picked up on the Western Front by either my grandfather or great uncle Jack.

Both served in the British Army and both were in France.

Whatever its origins I do know that it passed to my uncle who served in the RAF and whose name, serial number and the words RAF were inscribed inside.

Uncle Roger enlisted in 1938 aged 16 and saw action in Greece, and Iraq before being captured by the Japanese in 1942 and died in a prisoner of war camp the following year aged just 21.

And that offers up a second mystery because it remained in our possession.  I very much doubt that had it headed out to the Far East with him it would have returned.

I am of course totally prepared to accept the commonsense explanation that he just left it behind for anyone of a number of reasons.

The German side of our family is the one that we have not explored and when we do we might find the answer to its original owner.

Sadly there is no one left to ask and had we not decided to clear out the middle cellar I suspect it would have been many more years before I came across it.

All of which is a lesson in how to look after family objects.  All too often because we have grown up with them we take the item for granted, and that can lead to neglect and eventually to the loss of the object.

So that is it.  The search has begun.  Leaving me only to reflect on the irony of the fact that it passed to my uncle who was in the RAF but like my mother had been born in Cologne.

Picture; metal notebook holder, circa 1914, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A quiet day in Hallaton with a war memorial

This is the war memorial in the village of Hallaton.

The memorial, 2024

We came across it on a hot sunny day as we made our way through Leicestershire to the Cotswolds.

It was one of half a dozen we encountered, and the sheer number in what was a short journey reinforced that simple fact of how many young men died during the Great War.

Such was the suffering and profound sense of loss along with the wish to remember their sacrifice that war memorials were erected by local subscription across the country.

They come in different designs and sizes, but all reinforce the magnitude of the deaths.

More so when you compare the number killed with the size of the communities who built them.  

The 45 Sentinels, 2024

I have yet to find out the population of Hallaton in 1918, but I guess it will be a tad smaller than the 594 who were here in 2011, and that is telling given that the war memorial records the names of 41 men who from the Great War and 4 from the Second World War.

And as if to underline that loss we saw just four people on a day when nothing else stirred, save the occasional passing car and the work of a stone mason repairing the church wall.

But the community has not forgotten the men, because close by was an information board to “The 45 Sentinels” which records the site of 45 trees planted around the village for each of the fallen. “Each tree has an engraved plaque with the man’s name, regiment and date of death”. And those details are replicated again on the information board.

Location; Hallaton

Pictures; the war memorials, 2024, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Christmas from the Western Front .......

Christmas is supposed to be the season of goodwill but war has a habit of twisting the message.

This Christmas card was sent by my uncle to my father on December 12th 1918. The Great War had ended just a month before and uncle Fergus and his battalion of the Black Watch were in Cologne, relieved no doubt that the fighting was over.

On that Thursday in December he wrote that “Cologne was a lovely city with some fine cinemas” but they were prohibited from fraternizing with the civilians which for a young man of just 21 was a bit of a bore given the attractive young women he came across.

But duty was never far away and preparations were a foot because “we are crossing the Rhine tomorrow” and there was a determination “to show the rest of the division the way as we proved to be the finest marchers during the trek to Germany.”


Picture; With Best wishes for a Happy Christmas and a Victorious New Year, December 1918 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Gambling on the popularity of a German Christmas card in the December of 1912

Now had I been a shop keeper in the run up to the Christmas of 1912 I might well have bought in to a few sets of Tuck and Sons “A Winter Campaign.”

The series showed a group of snowman in slightly different poses riding wooden horses.

The artist was Wally Fialkowska who was Austrian and the cards were produced in Bavaria and so naturally enough the snowman are wearing German military caps.

They seem to have proved popular with Mr Bernard Butler   who sent one to Madam J. Wetter at 67 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square on December 24th wishing “you all a happy Xmas and a prosperous New Year.”

And also to “MRR” who on the back of another told Miss Halliday of Bridge Street, Banbridge, Co Down that the canary “was making such a row we had to banish him from the dining room and still he sings.”

Of course two years later and any that were still in stock would quietly have been thrown on the back of the fire, unless our shop keeper was optimistic enough to gamble on the war being “over by Christmas.”









Pictures; from “A WINTER CAMPAIGN” from the series, “A WINTER CAMPAIGN” 1912, marketed by Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/

Woolwich in 1915, a Manchester soldier and a love letter from Chorlton

The Herbert Hospital circa 1900

“Arrived safely today. No settled address at present.  Best wishes George.”

Now at first glance there isn’t anything special about George’s message to his wife Nellie even given that it was sent from Woolwich to 146 Bedford Street, Hulme in Manchester.

Thousands of young men every year leave the family home in search of work and until things are settled will not have a permanent address.

But what makes the card just a little more interesting is the date and time for George sent it on October 25th 1915 just in time for the late evening collection.

From George at Woolwich  to Nellie in Hulme, October 1915

He was in the Royal Artillery and over the course of the next three years was to serve in Ireland and on the Western Front where he was killed in the June of 1918.

I can’t yet establish when he enlisted but Woolwich may have been one of the first posting after he left Manchester.

And just four days after our post card he sent another to Nellie with the request not “to send any letters to Woolwich until further notice.  Expect leaving this weekend for unknown destination.”

During those few days be bought a number of cards depicting Woolwich but never sent them and they now form part of the George Davison collection.

In all there must be a hundred postcards, letters and official documents from 1915 till 1955.  Many are from George to Nellie and after his death there is correspondence from the War Office, the pensions department and his commanding officer.

Woolwich, 1915

There are also his school reports, details of his first job along with the social club he joined and his membership of the Independent Labour Party.

And if that was not enough there is a series of charming letters he wrote to young Nellie before they were married.

The first dates from 1904 when she was just 16 and talks of his recent proposal of marriage and his wish to meet her parents on the following day.

Others follow during the course of the next two years and are the usual love letters sent in the age before the telephone.

But it would be a full four years before they married and another three years before the birth of their son.

This is a wonderful collection of material spanning the last decades of the 19th century and well into the next.

And for me there is a very personal connection which links me to George.

During the years before he was married he lived just a few minute’s walk away at Barway House on Edge Lane here in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the first marital home was close by in Hulme and we shared a similar political outlook.

Royal Artillery Barracks, Woolwich circa 1900

All of which then just leaves Woolwich.  He was stationed there briefly in 1915 and I grew up close by separated by just forty years which in the great sweep of things is not much.

I suspect that the Woolwich he knew was still the one I was familiar with in the 1960s and which has now pretty much vanished.

I doubt that he would recognise Beresford Square or Wellington Street any more than I can today, and I am sure would be equally hard pressed to make sense of the area around the Arsenal or for that matter the water front.

Odd that two people separated by those four decades should still have more in common than I would have thought.

But then that is sometimes how history pans out, which is less by grand design and more by a series of hiccups.

Location; Woolwich, London


Pictures; from the collection of David Harrop

A tank, a souvenir, and the soldier far from home in Woolwich

Now the romantic in me would like to think that George Davison bought one of these as a souvenir for his wife Nellie and their son Duncan.

The Woolwich Tank, circa 1918

He was in the Royal Artillery and was stationed in Woolwich during the Great War, first in 1915 and then again in 1917, and 1918 while they were living in Manchester.

That said Nellie spent time with him in “digs” in Ireland and Woolwich so it is very possible that she would have come across this piece of crested china, and took it home from London.

Pieces like this were very popular during the Great War and were turned out in their thousands.

The coat of arms of Woolwich

The porcelain companies, seeing the potential of war souvenirs switched from models of Blackpool Tower and Ann Hathaway’s cottage to tanks, battleships and ambulances.

They turned out identical ones, with just the name of a different town or city and coat of arms to distinguish them.

Sometimes in their zeal to market across the country they got it wrong, so while you could have bought an ambulance or tank with Manchester’s coat of arms, you could also have bought a model battleship, despite the fact that there was no such ship in the Royal Navy during the conflict.

The Davison's, 1916

Our Woolwich tank is in perfect condition, and bears the name Shelley China, which was a Staffordshire pottery company founded in 1862, only ceasing as an independent business in 1966.

What I particularly like about this one is that it has been acquired by my old friend David Harrop, who is the also the custodian of the George Davison collection which is a fascinating archive of letters, personal documents and pictures, spanning the period from George’ birth in 1886, through to his war service and into the 1950s.

Mr Davison was killed on the Western Front in June 1918, but his wife continued to add to the collection throughout a big chunk of the century.

And what makes the collection just that bit personal for me, is that he appears in the book I wrote about Manchester and The Great War, but more than that he was at one point in 1918  living just down from our family home on Well Hall Road prior to embarkation for France.*

This I know because we have his will he made out in March 1918, witnessed by a Mr Drinkwater who lived on what is now the old Well Hall cinema.

And in a letter to Nellie he refers to her stay at the house which was just minutes from ours.

Nor does the connection end there, because before he married Nellie, he lived in Chorlton-cum-Hardy just a short walk from where we live now.

And while there, at Barway House on Edge Lane he wrote a series of courting letters to Nellie.

Shelley China

All of which makes the tank and the story very personal.

When David told me he had the tank the message just said “Tank coming home” and while it is not going back to Woolwich it will be joining the George Davison collection, and was  pride of place in a major exhibition to mark the end of the Great War, which was on show at Central Ref from in 2018.

Location; Woolwich, Manchester

Pictures; the Woolwich Tank, circa 1918, George Davison, his wife Nellie and son Duncan, 1916 from the collection of David Harrop

*Manchester Remembering 1914-18, Andrew Simpson, 2017, the History Press, 

https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-great-war-how-we-remember-it.html

Woolwich in 1915, a Manchester soldier and a love letter from Chorlton

The Great War is now over a century ago.

Royal Artilery Barracks, Woolwich

During the four years of war  Eltham like the rest of the country saw its men go off and fight and learned to cope with the adjustments to everyday life which followed.

But nothing I suppose could ease the loss of those who never returned.  Some of those who appear on our war memorial are being honoured all over again as work is done to research their lives.

So with that in mind I thought I would rerun some stories of the experiences of those who lived through the conflict, starting with George Davison who passed through Woolwich in 1915 and wrote to his wife,

Arrived safely today. No settled address at present.  Best wishes George.”

Now at first glance there isn’t anything special about George’s message to his wife Nellie even given that it was sent from Woolwich to 146 Bedford Street, Hulme in Manchester.

A post card home  from Woolwich to Manchester, 1915

Thousands of young men every year leave the family home in search of work and until things are settled will not have a permanent address.

But what makes the card just a little more interesting is the date and time for George sent it on October 25th 1915 just in time for the late evening collection.

He was in the Royal Artillery and over the course of the next three years was to serve in Ireland and on the Western Front where he was killed in the June of 1918.

I can’t yet establish when he enlisted but Woolwich may have been one of the first posting after he left Manchester.

And just four days after our post card he sent another to Nellie with the request not “to send any letters to Woolwich until further notice.  Expect leaving this weekend for unknown destination.”

During those few days be bought a number of cards depicting Woolwich but never sent them and they now form part of the George Davison collection.

In all there must be a hundred postcards, letters and official documents from 1915 till 1955.  Many are from George to Nellie and after his death there is correspondence from the War Office, the pensions department and his commanding officer.

In uniform in Wolowich, 1915

There are also his school reports, details of his first job along with the social club he joined and his membership of the Independent Labour Party.

And if that was not enough there is a series of charming letters he wrote to young Nellie before they were married.

The first dates from 1904 when she was just 16 and talks of his recent proposal of marriage and his wish to meet her parents on the following day.

Others follow during the course of the next two years and are the usual love letters sent in the age before the telephone.

But it would be a full four years before they married and another three years before the birth of their son.

This is a wonderful collection of material spanning the last decades of the 19th century and well into the next.

And for me there is a very personal connection which links me to George.

During the years before he was married he lived just a few minute’s walk away at Barway House on Edge Lane here in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the first marital home was close by in Hulme and we shared a similar political outlook.

All of which then just leaves Woolwich.  He was stationed there briefly in 1915 and I grew up close by separated by just forty years which in the great sweep of things is not much.

I suspect that the Woolwich he knew was still the one I was familiar with in the 1960s and which has now pretty much vanished.

The Royal Herbert

I doubt that he would recognise Beresford Square or Wellington Street any more than I can today, and I am sure would be equally hard pressed to make sense of the area around the Arsenal or for that matter the water front.

Odd that two people separated by those four decades should still have more in common than I would have thought.

But then that is sometimes how history pans out, which is less by grand design and more by a series of hiccups.


Pictures; from the collection of David Harrop

Those who went from Ancoats to serve in the Italian army in the Great War

Manchester Guardian, 1919

“Italians seem to be re-establishing themselves in Ancoats as fast as the military authorities will allow.”*

Now I have long been fascinated by Little Italy and the contribution made to the life of the city by the Italians who settled there in the late 19th century.**

And as you do just naively assumed that when the Great War broke out in 1914 some at least would enlist.

Now at present I have no way of knowing who and how many did but the real story comes in to its own eight months later when Italy joined the war on the side of the Allies.

Even then I just assumed they would join up locally, but being Italian nationals they chose to return to Italy.

To Our Italian Comrades, 1915-1918, Manchester, 2014

The Manchester Courier reported in August 1915 that 70 young men had already left and went on to reveal that many older men were also planning to leave.

As always behind such decisions are a wealth of stories like those men who made the long journey only to be found medically unfit.

Or the  “young Italian medical man resident in Manchester [who had] the misfortune to be born in Berlin was at the outbreak of the war placed in a concentration camp by the English authorities [and] while anxious to join his colours to fight the Germans had to fraternize with the enemy prisoners [until] he could return to Italy only to find his eyesight debarred his entering the army and so was on his way back to England.”***

And behind that decision to leave for home came the equally difficult choice of uprooting the whole family and taking them back as well. As the Manchester Guardian observed “many of the poorer men will be careful to take their families with them, so that the Italian Government my provide for their maintenance if the need should arrive.”****

But once the war was over “men have been coming back-in some cases whole families have come back-to Ancoats, mainly, it may be under the pressure of economic considerations, but not-without a certain pleasure  in the return.” 

The reporter might have also added that for some at least the decision to serve in the Italian army had been at considerable economic sacrifice.

One such case highlighted by the Manchester Courier in 1915, involved a successful Italian ice cream vendor who sold his business and furniture leaving his wife to find work in a local firm to support their children.

Outside Nazaren Bela's Ice Cream shop, Jersey Street, 1922

Of course many of the stories that appeared in the papers during 1915 were in part designed to bolster the mood for war which had gone off the boil in the eight months since the start of the conflict.

And much had been made of the spontaneous demonstrations by “a considerable number of Italian subjects living in Manchester and Salford for the war” including a “procession through the main streets of the city to the Town Hall” just days after Italy joined the war.

It was estimated that 300 men might eventually leave for Italy and given that there were about 1000 Italians in the twin cities with upwards of 500 in Ancoats this was a major contribution to the war.

All of which puts into context that newspaper story of the return of so many to Ancoats.

Pictures; The Manchester Guardian, September 6 1919, Memorial “To our Italian comrades, from the collection of Sally Dervan, 2014, and outside Nazaren Bella’s Ice Cream Shop on Jersey Street, 1922, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Italy in Ancoats, the Colony coming back after the war, Manchester Guardian, September 6 1919

**Little Italy, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Little%20Italy

***Manchester Courier, August 1915

****The Italian Colony, Excitement in Ancoats, Manchester Guardian, May 26 1915

In Mousehole ….. remembering those who never came home

 When the sums were finally done the cost of the Great War was horrendous.

In Mousehole, 2025

They included 887,858 military deaths, 16,829 civilian deaths, a huge number of wounded from the battlefields, which amounted to between 1.9% and 2.22% of the total population.

Figures which will have had their own powerful and personal impact on families and communities.

No where more so than in the tiny villages and hamlets across the country.  Statisticians might argue that the loss was no greater than in the great cities and towns, but in the small communities of rural Britain it might have felt so.

And I was struck by that thought last week as we explored the fishing villages along the eastern coast of Cornwall.

From Mousehole where we stayed through Newlyn and Penzance and inland through small villages and hamlets all of which each had their own monument to those who fought and those who never came back.

Of course, statistics often gloss over the detail, so while the loss was great, it was not so everywhere.  

Six members of our family went to war, including my great grandfather who returned to the colours, my grandfather, his two brothers and my uncles George and Fergus, and all returned.  As well as my two German great uncles which underlines that simple observation that for my family the conflict was a civil war as well as a clash of nations.

But in Mousehole using the 1901 census because the data is more accessible than either 1911 or 1921 and projecting forward to 1914-1918 the 36 who died during the war amounted to roughly 12% of the male population who might have been eligible for military service.

Sharing the view with the war memorial, 2025

It's a calculation fraught with the potential for mistakes, but there were 206 males out of a total population of 969 who during the Great War might have volunteered or been called up.

And yes the figures and calculations do need revisiting. 

Nor is  that all because my old friend Lois reminded me "You know, of course, of the 'thankful' villages, where no men were lost during the war, and the "double thankful" places where every man who served returned home from both World Wars. 

I always think there must have been some feelings of guilt for those who returned , that they did come home, but many of them would have been grievously wounded - in body and mind".

Location; Mousehole, Cornwall

Picture; Remembering those who left Mousehole for two world wars, 2025, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Letters from the Western Front

Mr and Mrs Davison and their son, date unknown

I am rereading the letters of George Davison.*

It has been a moving experience and one that has taken me from his first letters and postcards to his death on the Western Front just five months before the end of that war.

And taken me to Woolwich, Ireland and finally France.

But the collection is bigger than even this because it starts with his school records, includes the letters he sent to his future wife and finishes with the terse official correspondence from the War Office and along with all these is a series of further documents taking us into the 1950s.

They cover his enlistment in Manchester, his time in Woolwich and Ireland before his arrival in France and also reveal the changing addresses of his family.

I have yet to read them in detail but as I move to scan the last letters of May and early June I know that I will soon record his last letter because he was killed on June 17 1918.

And nothing quite prepares you for the knowledge that soon there will be no more letters from George and that the link with his wife of seven years will be severed.

His final letters talk of the irritations of moving around the Front including the loss of personal equipment and the varying quality of the accommodation and on June 15 wrote

The last letter from George to his wife, June 15, 1918

“You would be surprised to see some of our living places – at present we have an excellent dug out about 20 feet below the surface. 

It has however two drawbacks – poor ventilation and only artificial (candle) light.  

Compared to some it is a Palace.”

And this was where he died on June 17 when the dugout received a direct.  All three men in the dug out were “killed instantly” and according to the Royal Engineers who inspected the position “it was not considered safe to recover the bodies.

The dug out was then filled in and is marked as the resting place of your brother in law and his comrade. ”**

Now I have read and reread those last few letters and they still have the power to move me.

I was prepared for the fact that he was killed but you can never quite shake off either the manner of the death or that the description in the letter of July 6.

And that I think is all that needs to be said.

Picture; of George and Nellie Davison and additional material courtesy of David Harrop

*George Davison, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/George%20Davison

*extract of the letter sent to Bdn W.F.Evans, R.A.F, July 6 1918

The Red Cross hospitals of Chorlton during the Great War

G.B.Simpson and friends, circa 1918

The Great War has now passed from living memory. 

A conflict which claimed ten million dead, blighted the lives of millions more, and which is commemorated in towns and villages across the country has now really become a piece of history.

 Here in Chorlton there are a number of war memorials including one in the grounds of the Methodist Church on Manchester Road another in the parish church and a few more including that in Southern Cemetery. 

There are familiar local names and in some cases more than one member of the same family.

Few however now know of the contribution that was made by people in the township to those young men who were wounded and were cared for in Chorlton and Whalley Range.

 Soon after the war began the Sunday school halls at the McLaren Baptist Church on Edge Lane and the Methodist Church on Manchester Road were turned over to convalescent hospitals.

The story of the first year of the military hospital in the Sunday school of the MacLaren Memorial Baptist Church on the corner of Wilbraham and Sibson Road was written up by the East Lancashire Branch of the British Red Cross as part of “An Illustrated Account of the Work of the Branch During the First Year of the War.”*

The McLaren Memorial Church circa 1920

It represented a massive commitment on the part of the 16,000 Chorlton people.

The number of voluntary nurses and orderlies ran to 89 and another 70 worked at some point in the kitchen. 

There were also regular fund raising activities, loans of equipment and twice weekly ward concerts.

 More than anything it shows the level to which the war effort was supported and funded by voluntary actions.

 Like many churches of the period it had a large Sunday school and it was this which was converted into the hospital in November 1914.

 “a ward of 31 beds, kitchens, mess room, bath room, dispensary, pack stores, linen rooms, matrons’ room and office” all of which were on the ground floor.

The building was large enough to accommodate

The Sunday School to the left, converted into a hospital

The original plan had been for 25 beds but in May 1915 an extra six beds were added.

What is astounding is that the cost of equipping the hospital which came to £140 was met by public subscription after an appeal for funds from the local Red Cross, and that this was “in addition to the liberal amount of hospital appurtenances so freely furnished on loan by the public.”

Nor did the generosity stop there. For while the War Office allowance for each man per day was 2 shillings [10p], the average cost for the upkeep per bed was 25 shillings [£1.25p]which again was met by the public through “subscriptions, donations and the proceeds of entertainments.”

Uknown soldier

During that first year of the war 159 volunteers worked at the hospital and all but four came from the township.

There are many familiar names, some whose families had been in the township for generations.

Ann Higginbotham aged 22 was the daughter of Alfred and Emily whose family had farmed by the green since the 1840’s.

There were also newer names like H. F. Dawson and A. H. Dawson or the Kemps. Miss Kemp worked in the kitchen while Harry her father was on the committee. He had two chemists’ shops and would be remembered for over half a century by Kemp’s Corner.

*Chorlton-cum-Hardy Red Cross Hospital, East Lancashire Branch of the British Red Cross Society Sherratt & Hughes, 1916

Pictures; The McLaren Memorial Baptist Church, Edge Lane, from the Lloyd Collection, G.B.Simpson, and friends circa 1918 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

"We shall be pleased to see you” ……. stories and mysteries from Lewisham

Now I know I will find answers to the mysteries behind this picture post card, but not just yet.

It was sent in the June of 1916 to Miss E. Hibberd who was a nurse at Lewisham Military Hospital.

And by the time it was sent it was already a historical anachronism, because some of the faces of those “Commanders of the Allied Armies, 1914" will have changed by the time it was posted.

Finding their identity will be easy, less easy has been the search for Miss E. Hibbert who has proved illusory in the census record.

Equally the Charity I. S. & S. H. S., at 122 Brompton Road, still sits in the shadows, but it’s success in helping over 200,000 deserving cases as witnessed by its record posted on the reverse of the card should make it easy to track down.

The one certainty is the Lewisham Military Hospital which provided 24 beds for officers and 838 for service men including 190 for prisoners of war.  Before the war this had been the Lewisham Union Workhouse and was situated at 390 High Street in Lewisham.

In 1929 the building became the Lewisham Hospital.  The hospital has been largely rebuilt, though some original buildings are still in use”. *

And despite living my entire childhood close to Lewisham, I never knew of its existence.  But given that Peckham where I spent the early years, and Well Hall where we moved to, were both served by excellent hospitals, there is no reason why I should.

Added to which the hospital is not in that bit of Lewisham I would pass through on the bus from Eltham.

Its existence as a war time hospital is a reminder of just how many official buildings along with church halls and private residences were handed over to the war effort.

The card was been acquired by my old friend David Harrop who has managed to source a wartime picture of the hospital, which will be a nice contrast to its appearance today, leaving me just to appeal for any contemporary copyright free image of the building today, along with any photographs of a memorial to its time caring for the servicemen of the Great War.

Location; Lewisham

Picture; postcard, 1916, from the collection of David Harrop

*Wartime Memories Project, Lewisham Military
Hospital,  https://wartimememoriesproject.com/greatwar/hospitals/hospital.php?pid=13732

William Eric Lunt a soldier of the Great War

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

What did you collect in the Great War?

It is of course a play on that recruitment poster from 1915 where a child asks her father “Daddy what did you do in the Great War?”*

Daddy looks in the distance with a thoughtful expression which you can interpret as guilt at failing “to do his bit” or reflecting on what he saw and did in the service of his country.

Either way the authorities were quick to exploit that tendency of kids and even grown ups to collect stamps and cigarette cards to further interest in the war.

Not that this is an original observation just an introduction into a 1915 album of 126 stamps which feature some of the leading personalities of the period.

So here are the King and Queen, a collection of soldiers, sailors, politicians and foreign statemen.

Some are from Britain and others from the former British Empire.

Amongst the lot there are not only Lord Roberts who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, but also the New Zealand Corporal Cyril Bassett who was awarded the VC in 1915 and the nurse Edith Cavell who had been executed by the German army in the same year.

The album was acquired by my old friend David “Posty” Harrop who has a huge collection of memorabilia from both world wars along with a heap of material charting the history of the Post Office.

And as so often happens mixed up with the acquisition was a letter from Lord Roberts to the Reverend A.T. Humphreys of Cromford.

It was dated September 1914 and thanked the Reverend for making a contribution to the “appeal for field glasses [which] will be of the greatest possible service to our Non-Commissioned Officers in the Field”.

I am always surprised at just how much almost all armies in conflicts are reliant on the public for support whether it be “comforts” or in this case essential war equipment.

The letter is also slightly poignant given that Lord Roberts died just two months later of pneumonia at St Omer, France, while visiting Indian troops fighting at the Front.

Just what the Reverend A.T. Humphreys of Cromford thought of his letter is lost and nor do we know who carefully collected the stamps or what conclusions they drew from the collection.

But together they are two of those tiny bits that make up the story of the Great War.

Pictures; from an album of stamps, circa 1915, the letter from Lord Roberts, 1914 and that poster,  from the collection of David Harrop, and Daddy what did you do in the Great War?”1915, Imperial War Museum, Art.IWM PST 031

*“Daddy what did you do in the Great War?” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddy,_What_Did_You_Do_in_the_Great_War%3F#:~:text=a%20commercial%20product.-,%22Daddy%2C%20What%20Did%20You%20Do%20in%20the%20Great%20War%3F,less%20direct%20in%20its%20messaging.

Snapshots of the Great War nu 4 .............. the Gala in Alexandra Park that never happened and thoughts on the “massacres” yet to come

It was going to be the third of a series of Galas “to be held under the auspices of the Educational Committee” of the Manchester & Salford Co-op and was planned for August 15 1914 in Alexandra Park.

M&S Co-operative Herald, July 1914

There had been two earlier events one at Yates’ Field in Fallowfield and the other in Broadheath with “RACES, MAYPOLE DANCES, SPOON AND BOOT CLEANING COMPETITIONS”  as  well as a “FANCY DRESS COMPEITION” with tickets for refreshments at 3d for adults and 2d for children.

The earlier two had been scheduled of July 11 and July 25, but the Alex Park gala was planned for August 15 just eleven days after Britain became involved in the Great War.

The secretary of the Educational Committee wrote that “at their first meeting, held 10th August, [it was] "most regretfully decided to postpone the gala.

All arrangements had been completed, but it was felt not to be a time for festivities when the nation, without the slightest warning was involved in a Continental War.

Had we not lived through the few days which have just elapsed it would have been discredited that so much could have transpired in so short a time.  August 1914 has become a landmark in history.  

We knew that on the Continent of Europe things were not quite comfortable owing to the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, but that by the fourth day Britain would be involved in war was unthinkable.  

M&S Co-operative Herald, September 1914

We went on our holidays and gave ourselves to to the enjoyment, for was it not the last bank holiday before the winter?”

The letter is revealing in so many ways not least because the Co-op movement was founded on the principles of co-operation which extended across national borders and yet here was the secretary reflecting on how unthinkable it was for Britain to be involved in a general war but matching much of the nation in believing that

“Britain has had this unholy war thrust upon her, and since it must be, the nation, a whole and undivided nation, has risen as one man to bear the burden, whether to face the enemy on the field of battle, or to minister to the wants of those left behind.”

Of course not all in the Labour Movement shared that view.   Kier Hardie argued against the war and continued to do so till his death in 1915.  Nor was he alone.

Unknown unit, date unknown

But the mood of the country was more with the secretary of the Educational Committee who concluded that “Let us all hope and pray that never again shall it be possible for such an atrocity as war to be embarked upon by any nation, and to that end let every aid and encouragement be extended to our rulers when the end has arrived and saner councils can be held.

No country should ever again have such a preponderance of power to plunge nations into war.  

Horrible as the massacres are to contemplate, if war is ever to be abolished good will have come out of evil.  God save the Allies.”

This is not the often paraded pro war sentiment of the early months of the conflict but a more measured and sober approach as befitting an organisation based on co-operation.

Pictures; of the Manchester and Salford Co-operative Hearld, July & September 1914, courtesy of the National Co-op archive, and unkown unit from the collection of David Harrop

The National Co-op Archive, http://www.archive.coop/
 Located in central Manchester, the National Co-operative Archive is home to a wide array of records relating to the history of the worldwide co-operative movement. The collections include rare books, periodicals, manuscripts, films, photographs and oral histories, and provide researchers with an unrivalled resource for the development of the co-operative movement, from the initial ideas of the eighteenth century to the present day.

Reflecting on the lives of those who lived through the Great War

Uncle George Seaforth Highlanders1918

This is my uncle George in the last years of the Great War.

Now I suspect it cannot be before 1917 given that he was born in 1899.

And it is an image that will be familiar to us all. 

Similar pictures appear all the time in books and programmes about the First World War and most families will have one photograph of a young man ready to leave for the Front or at home on leave.

These young men stare back at us in their ill fitting uniforms in individual poses or with friends and family and along with those images of the battlefields they pretty much shape our idea of that war.

More recently we have come to see that generation and those who fought in the Second World War as frail men and women with faltering voices and walking sticks who were venerated as the last of their generation.

We forget the majority of them lived full productive lives, contributed to their community getting on with the daily demands of work family and holidays.

ThomasAlan Simpson, 1963

This I know because I grew up with them, and when I was growing up they were still just in their 50s and early 60s, and were no older than I am now, still vital, still working and many as yet still waiting to be grandparents.

Not that I thought much of any of that until a few days ago when I watched a series of interviews made in 1963 and 64 for the BBC series The Great War.*

None of these interviews made it into the final programmes but watching the men and women talk about the war in strong commanding voices was like listening to my father, my uncles and grandfather.

Dad was just a little too young for that war but two of his brothers one of who was my Uncle Fergus served in France and participated in crossing the Rhine and occupying Germany in the month after the war ended.

And my maternal grandfather courted and married my German grandmother while serving in the same occupying forces in Cologne.

Unknown friend of my uncle, circa 1918

So those young men in their ill fitting uniforms along with the frail men and women with faltering voices are not the only way to remember that generation.

This of course is no original observation but I suspect is one that will get a little overlooked in the coming months as historians and television producers plunder and pour over the archives of the Great War presenting us with what we already know.

It is all too easy to walk away with the neat, easy to understand presentations which confirm our assumption that they were the lost and betrayed young generation who grew old without also thinking of them as people who had a whole life ahead of them.

This in no way underestimates what many of whom went through and the painful loss of friends and relatives.

 None of my family spoke of the war and I never asked them.

Father, and Uncles Fergus, Charles and aunt Lilla, 1973

I guess it was that simple combination of personal preferences.  

For them it was something they had done, remembered with a mix of emotions but sat along side getting married, having children and a succession of jobs, holidays and much else.

For me aged just fourteen when the BBC documentary was made the Great War was that one before the last conflict.  

I was born just four years after the end of the Second World War, when the bomb sites were places I played on and the stirring films of the Battle of Britain, the Dam Busters and the Eighth Army filled the cinemas.

Uncle Fergus, Black Watch, date unknown

People still referred to that war while the earlier one was less well mentioned and I suppose it wasn't till the publication of the book The Donkeys by Alan Clark in 1961 and the staging of the musical Oh What a Lovely War two years later that it became a reality to me.

Unknown friend of my uncle, circa 1918

And by the time I got round to seeing a production of Oh What a Lovely War in 1967 I had absorbed the conventional interpretation of the conflict.

Now I have followed the recent debates on the causes of the war, the revaluation of its cost in lives and treasure and will fall like most people on the centenary events but I will now give more thought to those young men and women who got on with their lives and were still just a tad past middle age in 1964.

*The Great War, commissioned in August 1963 and shown from May to November 1964 in 26 episodes each lasting 40 minutes.

Location; 1914-18

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson