Fulfilling a promise

As the 90th anniversary of the armistice approaches this rather inadequate blog becomes especially poignant.

In the 1980s I put an article in the Manchester Evening News requesting information about the 16th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers - 2nd Salford Pals - the unit with which my Grandfather, James Arthur Wilkinson, was serving when he was killed on the night of May 28th 1918. I got a few replies informing me of the names and addresses of a few surviving veterans. One such was Bill Dutton formerly a Sergeant in the 15th Bn LFs, 1st Salfords. Aged about 94 he lived on a council estate in Salford, pretty much staying in his kitchen drinking tea, puffing on a broken old pipe and relying on neighbours for meals. He told lots of tales and also extracted a promise from me.

Bill had joined the 15th LFs in August 1914 with a bunch of pals. Among these was Percy Morrell Fensome, his best friend. They trained together through 1915 before going out to France at the back end of the year. In June of 1916 they had an argument and fell out. Then Percy was injured and went to hospital. However, on the night of June 30th as the Bn gathered in the front line trenches below Thiepval Ridge, Percy reappeared. He had wangled his way out of hospital to join his mates as they went over the top in 'The Big Push'. Making his way to the front line he looked out his best chum, Bill Dutton. In the previous week Bill's mother had written telling the pair of them to be friends. So there, in the trench looking out over no-mans-land, they hugged and made up.

Bill & Percy never met again. On the following morning, July 1st 1916, Percy was killed by machine gun fire while Bill spent the day in a shell hole before crawling to safety as night fell.

In 1923 Bill got on his bike in Salford and cycled to the Somme to try and find Percy's grave. He went back many times over succeeding years with the same purpose, finally giving up the search when he was approaching 70 years old. Percy's body was never identified; his name is on the Thiepval Memorial to The Missing of The Somme.

While we sat in that kitchen together in 1986 Bill, tears rolling down his cheeks, gave me this photo of his pal in his boy-scout uniform and I gave him my word that I would always do all I could to keep his old friend's memory alive.

So I have told the story again and now Percy is in cyberspace for the whole world to see.

My promise fulfilled.

A gem of a memorial

Memorials, specifically of the Great War, reflect perceptions of purpose. People agonised over designs and details when trying to decide how best to commemorate the men of a community who had served or died in defence of King and Country. In many there is a poignancy in their naive execution, whereas others are sophisticated things, professionally created by artists of high repute.

One such is this Roll of Honour in the county. It is a wonderful piece of work. When I first came across it I was astonished, a real discovery. It is signed Jessie Bayes, but who is she?

Jessie was the youngest of four children born to Alfred Walter Bayes R.A. (c.1832 - 1909) & his wife Emily (nee Fielden) of Todmorden. Alfred was an Etcher, Engraver & 'Painter in Oil Colours', specialising in portraits, biblical subjects, landscapes and angling scenes. Daydreams is one of his paintings.

 

Alfred & Emily's children were: Emmeline (born London, c.1868), Walter John (1869-1956), Gilbert William (1872-1953) and Jessie (1878-c.1940). Three became artists.

Walter studied at the City and Guilds Technical College, Finsbury 1886-1900 and then at Westminster School of Art, 1900-2. He was a founder member of the Camden Town Group and of the London Group of Artists. He married his model, Kitty Telfer, in 1904.
He was Art Critic of the Athenæum (1906-16), a highly regarded teacher as the Headmaster of Westminster School of Art (1918-1934) and Lecturer on perspective to the Royal Academy and Slade School and Director of Painting at Lancaster School of Art. During the Great War he painted many pictures of the conflict such as The Underworld. London Tube c1917.

Gilbert was primarily a sculptor in Bronze and an architectural and monumental designer. Studied at the City and Guilds College, Finsbury, the Royal Academy Schools, 1896-9 and in Paris. He married fellow sculpter, Gertrude Smith, in 1906. He designed many medals and trophies including the Great Seal of King George V and the Seagrave Trophy. Other work includes the Great Clock at Selfridges Department Store in London (1931), the stone relief of sporting figures (1934) outside Lord's Cricket ground, History of Pottery through the Ages for the headquarters of Doulton’s on Albert Embankment, London (1938) and History of Drama through the Ages for the Saville Theatre (now the MGM Cinema), Shaftesbury Avenue. In 1935 he designed a medal to commemorate the launching of the new Cunard ocean liner, the Queen Mary. 

From 1939-44, he served as President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

After the Great War Gilbert designed a number of War Memorials, notably that at Broadstone, Dorset (detail shown here).

Others can be seen at Holme Lacey, Herefordshire, Todmorden, Yorkshire and at Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Other work can be seen in St. Mary's Church, Hampstead, London and monuments in bronze can be seen in St. James Churchyard, Warter, Yorks, to G.V.Wilson (1909) and Lord Nunburnholme (1910). There is also a statue (with W.C.H.King) of philanthropic industrialist Robert Owen in Newtown, Powys. All of these can be found on the WWW.

And finally, Jessie

She was born at Hampstead, London and as her brothers established themselves as artists she went to work at the Prudential Insurance Company earning £40 per year. Rescued by her brother Gilbert who financed evening classes for her at the Central School of Arts & Crafts she soon made a name for herself as a miniature painter and designer in the Arts and Crafts style and was elected a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculpters and Gravers (RMS) in 1906. From 1908 she exhibited at the Royal Academy .

The roll which so impresses me is made on a wood base with plaster embellishment in the style of a vaguely late mediaeval altar piece or icon. The flanking columns have relief renaissancesque decoration and above and below the list of names there are figures of angels and St George slaying the dragon.

The angel figures are taken pretty much direct from works such as Fra Angelico's fresco, The Annunciation, of 1437.

 The detail of St George is delightful.

Above the list of names, arranged by Regiment, are the armorials of (probably) King George V and of the ancient Borough to which the long list of names of the men who served and died belonged.

I have taken some of the pics from an informative and comprehensive history of the Bayes family which can be found 

HERE

I apologise if I offended.

An empty grave

Scattered throughout the county are a number of what appear to be gravestones marking the last resting place of deceased servicemen. In this, however, they are misleading, for there is no body and they must be viewed as memorials.

One such rather neglected example is in the churchyard of St Thomas's Church, Kendal where a stone commemorates Captain Evelyn Henry Le Mesurier Sinkinson, 24th Punjabis. He 'Fell Heroically' near Nazirieh (Nasariyah), Mesopotamia (Iraq), on July 4th 1915, aged 33.

Why is the memorial here? The CWGC Debt of Honour register shows that his mother, Katharine Irene - the widow of Edward James Sinkinson of the Indian Civil Service, was remarried to a Mr Fisher by the time the Imperial War Graves Commision was gathering personal information in the early 1920s and living at 49 Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, London. Captain Evelyn was born in Allahabad. So, did they live in Kendal during the war years? Was Captain Evelyn married with a home in Kendal?

Since adding this posting I have received a message from http://ww1talk.co.uk/

The administrator of this WW1 chatroom/blog listed the posting and the following appeared;

Eldest surviving son of the late James Sinkinson, sometime Financial Secretary to the Supreme Government of India, and of his wife, Irene Sinkinson, now Mrs. Victor Fisher, and grandson of Colonel C. B. Le Mesurier, C.B., D.S.O., and of Contessa Zancarol. Godson of the late Lord Roberts.

Captain Sinkinson joined the Militia in 1901, and volunteered for active service in South Africa. He was gazetted to the Liverpool Regiment in 1902. During operations in the Transvaal he was severely injured in the leg and was unable to rejoin his Regiment until 1904: he received the Queen's Medal and three clasps. He then transferred to the Indian Army, and was gazetted Captain in 1911. While in India, during 1914, he was Recruiting Officer for the Sikhs and Dogras. His great ambition, however, was to see really active service, and this was gratified, when, in 1915, he was sent to Mesopotamia and succeeded in getting into the firing line, "where every keen soldier must desire to be," as he wrote home.

After the action of July 14th, 1915, he was reported as missing. Two months later a telegram was received saying, "Captain Sinkinson's dead body has been found and buried where he fell by the Regiment."

Major Cook-Young, of the Indian Expeditionary Force D, wrote;

"The Regiment as usual did magnificently, but were attacked by Arabs behind the Turkish position in front . . . the operation was mostly in deep water, up to the waist and higher. Captain Sinkinson was not at first wounded, and, it appears, tried to rally the men. What is so sad is that he could have got out of it, but refused, and sent two men back for ammunition. These two Sepoys were grand men and tried forcibly to carry Captain Sinkinson out of action he would not permit it. . . . On returning to the place where they had left him he was not there. The obvious thing was that he had been killed, and his body lost in deep water.
His loss to me is irreparable. I never had any affection for any individual in this world as I had for him, and I only wish I had been there to save him or to die with him."

A bit further with Denton Lee, Langdale

Just received an email from Agnes Ebrey about James Denton Lee's memorial stone in Busk Wood, Langdale. It was sent to her by a third party who continues to look into the stone's origins.

Apparently James' sister, who never married and became a successful hairdresser
in Blackpool, paid for a National Trust woodland to be planted and James'
memorial to be placed there. She also paid for a seat to be placed in his memory
at Trinity College Cambridge.

So probably more to come in due course. The next thing is clearly to email the archivist at Trinity College, Cambridge for info on James. Watch this space!

A statistic

When discussing the losses in the Great War, and specifically those suffered by the industrial communities of the north such as Accrington, the focus is invariably on the Pals Battalions; units raised in local neighbourhoods and often stripping whole streets or factories of young men. However, the appalling losses of such as the Accy Pals at Serre on July 1 1916, were often suffered by territorial units. Maybe not quite so bad, but bad enough.

The graph below shows when the men and boys listed on Ulverston's primary memorial were killed. (August 1914 to December 1918).

The most striking feature is the huge peak of July (14), August (25), September (8), 1916 when the lads were fighting on The Somme. Nothing approaching such a concentrated loss was experienced before or after. Nor should it be forgotten that for every man killed approx 3 would be wounded - thus, with 47 dead, 'Lile Oosten' probably suffered a total of some 200 casualties during this period. 20 of these men were killed in July/August fighting with the 1/4th King's Own, the local Territorial unit that recruited throughout Furness and Cartmel. Indeed in the whole three month period the unit lost 194 men killed and perhaps 500-600 wounded.

These casualties were largely a consequence of the attempt the break the second German line on The Somme at Guillemont. The men of Furness and Cartmel attacked a quarry to the north west of the village from a start line at Arrow Head copse just to the west of 'The Sunken Lane'. They were cut to pieces. A description of this place is contained in Ernst Junger's classic 'Storm of Steel'; as a young German soldier Junger was fighting in The Sunken Lane some weeks after the 1/4th attacked. Check out http://leoklein.com/itp/somme/texts/junger_1929.html . The pic show the site of Guillemont Station some 200 yds north of where the ulverston lads fought. This was a railway station! The village used to be on the horizon!

One of those killed, on 8 August, was John Burrow, Assistant Master in Dalton School. He is buried at Guillemont Rd Cemetery - close to Raymond Asquith, son of Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister in the early years of the war. Raymond's grave is just to the left of the entrance, seen here. John's is at the back of the cemetery.

John Burrow was an old boy of Ulverston Victoria Boy's Grammar and although his name is on the school's memorial his photograph does not seem to appear on the school's photographic roll.

Of all the guys killed in this three month period, July - Sept 1916 and named on Ulverston Cross, one died in Tanzania, one in Iraq, one at Ypres and two at home. The rest were killed on the Somme. 26 have no known grave and are commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to The Missing of the Somme.

The graph is interesting in other ways. The first peak of casualties (reading from the left) illustrates losses suffered at Festubert in the summer of 1915, shortly after the 1/4th went to France. Also the losses of 1918 (54) approached those of 1916 (69). Indeed for the country as a whole the casualties increased in each year of the war. It is only in small communities, such as Ulverston, that the losses are skewed by the involvement of a territorial or a Pal's Battalion.

Charney Hall, Grange over Sands?

One of the things I keep coming back to is the number of memorials that have either vanished or about which very little is known. A friend of mine recently came up with one at Silverdale, just outside the borders of Cumbria. A Roll of Honour of the men of a local church had at some time in the past been used as a backing board for another more recent picture. It only came to light a few months ago when the picture required cleaning and re-framing.

Another mystery is presented by this photo postcard I recently bought on ebay for a couple of pounds.

The picture clearly shows a building described as 'Charney Hall Memorial Hall'. But where is it? Until the 1970s (I think) there was in Grange over Sands a private preparatory school called Charney Hall. Sadly the entire school complex was subsequently demolished and is now a series of residential buildings.

During the early years of the last century the school was run by George Podmore, who describes himself on the 1901 census as MA Oxon, Private Schoolmaster, with the help of assistant master, George Antrobus . There were some 20 boarders including a number of the Wordsworth family. A number of local gentry families sent their sons here to prepare them for one of the greater public schools. In due course many of these joined the forces and it is thus no suprise to find in Grange parish church a memorial to old boys killed in the Boer War. Indeed, the church also holds the battlefield cross of Hubert Podmore, one of George's four sons, who was killed around Ypres in 1917. See this posting on the Great War discussion forum for exhaustive details of Podmore's carreer.

However, there is no memorial that I am aware of to the old boys who were killed in the Great War. I find that strange and thus wonder whether the above picture is in fact the school's Great War Memorial. A contemporary OS map shows an isolated building to the north east of the main house which seems to have the same shape and plan as the photo.

I have made some rather desultory enquiries in the town but no-one seems terribly interested or to have any memories of the school prior to its demise. But surely the school had a memorial?

A case of mistaken identity at Backbarrow?

Some time ago I had a phone call from a chap in Backbarrow to inform me of a memorial, marked on the Ordnance Survey map, that seemed not only to have disappeared but which nobody in the village had any knowledge of. In doing so he presented me with yet another mystery.

The words 'War Memorial' are quite clearly marked on the 1973 1:10,000 map covering South Lakes at SD 35555 54635.

However, on the First Edition Lancashire sheet 12.2 - 1:2,500 surveyed in 1888 and published in 1890 there is no indication of a memorial but there are the letters 'W.M', very close to where a memorial is indeed marked on the earlier map.

Online conversation with the Charles Close Society, a bunch of map enthusiasts, has confirmed that the letters 'WM' on an OS map normally signifies a weighing machine. But before accepting the fallibility of the Ordnance Survey and entirely abandoning the notion of a memorial it would be good to know what all the other editions of the OS survey of Backbarrow indicate. So if you have any old maps - check it out and let me know!