The First World War has become a byword for death and destruction, with whole towns and villages obliterated and millions of lives lost during the conflict, which lasted from 1914 to 1918. Yet many men escaped the destruction, and in the UK’s so-called Thankful Villages, all of those who went to fight returned, though not all of them came back unscathed.
First World War: Casualties
The vast numbers of men (and women) involved in the war, along with problems with data and the loss of some military records during the war of 1939-45, mean that the true scale of casualties resulting from the First World War cannot be given with any accuracy. Figures quoted by the Ministry of Defence/Royal British Legion on the Roll of Honour website suggest a figure of approximately 13 million combatants killed: many others died alongside them.
British Empire forces (including Australian, New Zealand, Indian and Canadian forces, among many other nationalities) totalled almost 9.5 million, of whom 947,000 were killed and a further 2,120,000 were wounded. Most of the Empire’s enlisted men were, unsurprisingly, from the United Kingdom, from where almost five million went to fight as volunteers or conscripts.
The Thankful Villages
With the massive scale of mobilisation in Great Britain (almost 25% of the male population was affected) no part of the country was unaffected. Towns and cities raised large bodies of men (such as the famous McCrae’s battalion raised by supporters of Edinburgh’s Hearts football club) and men left their villages to fight and die together. With the ending of the war in 1918, towns and villages began building memorials to honour their dead.
Given the scale of the carnage, it is astonishing that a handful of villages whose menfolk went to war were able to welcome every one of their soldiers back alive. These were given the name of ‘Thankful Villages’ in the 1930s. There is some confusion about what qualifies a Thankful Village but in general it is accepted to be one where none of the residents died (rather than including all those who were born there).
Extensive research undertaken by Norman Thorpe, Tom Morgan and Rod Morris has produced a detailed listing of what they believe to be the Thankful Villages of the UK. They have identified 49 of these, along with shorter lists of other villages whose claims cannot be substantiated. While it’s true that many of these villages sent only a handful of soldiers, others saw 20 or 30 men leave for the front.
Of the Thankful Villages some are doubly blessed. Villages such as Herodsfoot in Cornwall and the ironically-named Upper Slaughter in Gloucestershire not only came through the First World War with their menfolk alive, but repeated the feat in the Second World War. And the village of Knowlton, in Kent, claims the title of the Bravest Village, after 12 of its population of 39 volunteered.
Memorials and Plaques of Thanks
Although many of these villages had no need for memorials to remember their dead in the aftermath of the Great War, several have plaques or memorials giving thanks for their deliverance, often naming those who served. At Catwick in Yorkshire, the local blacksmith nailed a coin for each serving soldier into a horseshoe on the door of his forge, repeating the action for 1939-45 (Catwick is another doubly Thankful Village).
It is only recently that some of the Thankful Villages acquired any memorial. In 2007, three villages in Somerset, Rodney Stoke, Stocklinch and Aisholt, were given plaques by Somerset County Council to recognise the contribution of their soldiers.
As a footnote, Morgan, Morris and Thorpe extended their search into Europe. What they discovered there was even more sobering and reflects the horrendous scale of the contact. In the whole of France they found only one Thankful Village, Thierville in Normandy. Thierville is not only doubly thankful but trebly so – having lost no-one in either world war or in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
Source:
Daily Telegraph “'Thankful Villages' finally get plaques” 10 November, 2007.
Ministry of Defence/Royal British Legion
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