Stories of the Charfield men who fell in the Great War.
HUGHES - Alax and Harry, aged 19 and 18 respectively, they had, in the words of a comrade, been "bowled over", in an attack by the 2nd Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, near Ypres on 10th May, 1915. Two of George and Annie's four sons, they had enlisted, fought, and died together and have no known grave.
The MILLARD family of Mill Lane, also lost two sons. The elder, JOE, a 32 year old gunner with the heavy artillery, got cramp when swimming in a river behind the lines on 26th May, 1917 and drowned. A keen member of the Tytherington football team, he had worked at the Quarry. His 17 year old brother, CHARLES, was wounded and went missing on 18th November, 1916, at the conclusion of the long drawn out and bloody Battle of the Somme, whilst serving as a Lewis gunner with the 8th Glosters. He was never seen again and was officially presumed dead in Marc, 1917. His name is now one of the 73,000 British soldiers from the Somme battles with no known grave, commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.
Amongst the early casualties were BERT RICHARDS and WILLIAM COLBORN. Bert, a 19 year old cavalry trooper, with the 9th Lancers, was wounded and captured in late October, 1914 and died of his wounds in Brussels on 3rd November, 1914. The son of the village postmaster and chairman of the Parish Council, his three brothers also served, one surviving being gassed and the other two as prisoners of war. William, aged 26, was with the 1st Glosters when captured and died as a prisoner on 23rd December, 1914.
ARTHUR FOWLER, of Wharf Road, was 20 and serving with the 10th Worcestershire Regiment, when wounded in the stomach at Neuve Chapelle, on 6th January, 1916. It was a serious "Blighty" wound and he spent months in various military hospitals in England. Sadly, he was never to recover fully and after discharge from the Army, in the middle of October, 1916, underwent yet another operation, at Bristol General Hospital. This was unsuccessful and on 25th November, 1916 he died, being laid to rest in the village church yard.
Arthur Fowler ~ Courtsey of Dave Hedges
On 2nd December, 1917, a Territorial battalion of the Glosters was resting by an ammunition dump, on the way to the front line. Without warning the dump blew up, the blast killing Lance Sergeant FRANCIS YOUNG. James and Eliza, his parents, received official notification of his death on Christmas Day, 1917. The former Tubbs Lewis & Co employee was buried where he fell and is commorated on the Memorial to the dead of the Battle of Cambrai, who have not known grave.
A shel falling on a trench at Monchy-le-Preux, near Arras, on 30th August, 1918, caused the death of ALBERT CLARKE aged 19, of 1st Somerset Light Infantry, a former railway worker. Young RODNEY (ROY) AYRES was called up from his work at Underwood Farm in the summer of 1918. He landed in France just before the Armistice, contracted diphtheria and died at Le Havre on 16th November, 1918.
For Eliza Jane Neal, the Great War had hardly started before tragedy had struck twice. Her husband, GEORGE, was a Leading Boatman on the old crusiser HMS Monmouth when it was sunk, with all hands, by a superior German force at the Battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile, on 1st November, 1914. Three months later, their son, Percy, aged four, died of illness.
Written by Graham Adams for Charfields - ChadraCopyright©CHADRA 2001 Contents with kind permission.