It’s the 11th day of the 11th month, a hundred years on from the start of the Great War, as they called it then, just afterwards, when it was supposed to end all wars and they didn’t realise we’d later call it the First World War to distinguish it from the Second World War. It seems appropriate to mention some relevant pages on this website. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how this year we’ve been part of a wider and more all-encompassing remembering.

The photo above is of a memorial window in the church at Hawnby, in North Yorkshire. I wrote about the church and its memorials on Remembrance Sunday a couple of years ago.

Isn’t it beautiful. Soul-stirring, a soldier with a face like an angel, lifting his eyes to heaven, on the battlefield. It is, I think, the kind of remembrance we prefer. We like our remembrance beautiful. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, this year.

Here’s the bigger picture, the other side of the window, which I mentioned when I wrote about it last time but didn’t include as an image.

Its strongly Christian theme is now obvious. I wonder, dear readers, if this makes you like it more, or less. Or if it changes your perception at all. Because of course religious imagery can be controversial. I’ve always been a little uncomfortable over the strong links between the church and the military, I don’t really understand it. But here I guess the message is supposed to be comforting. And the young soldier’s suffering brings him nearer to Christ.

The fighting parson of this church at Hawnby was keen for his sons to do their duty for king and country. He lost three sons in the war. Imagine that.

Every time I think about the fighting parson and his sons, I also think about the person who’s out of the picture in this heroic/manly story – the mother of those three young men. I’ve always wondered if she too was keen for her sons to go to war. I tend to imagine not. But then I think of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, which reminds us that things aren’t always as we’d imagine them to be. Some women of the time did of course hand out white feathers to men who weren’t out fighting at the front. Perhaps the parson’s wife wanted her sons to be ‘heroes’ and bore her grief heroically when they didn’t come back. We don’t know what the parson’s wife thought. But this is what Sassoon thought:

Glory Of Women

You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses–blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

A postcard, found in York

A much smaller memorial. Not a memorial at all, really. Just a card, not a particularly grand or elaborate one. A card sent home by just one man, among so many other men, writing home to his mother. A century later it found its way to me, via my mother. Flowers of France, from a couple of years ago.

From beautiful delicate coloured glass to a fragile card to this far more substantial and now rather famous memorial, remembrance in stone.

Waggoners memorial, Sledmere

The Waggoners memorial, in Sledmere, East Yorkshire. (Not a misspelling – on the memorial itself it’s ‘waggoners’, with two gs, an older variant of the now more common spelling of ‘wagon’.)

We went for a walk in Sledmere on a beautiful May morning in 2006. The light on the memorial highlighted its ‘curiously homely’ carving, and I spent a while taking photos of it. This website was then a less regularly updated thing, as so many personal websites were, and it appears to have taken me a whole year to get together a page about it.

The growing interest in that old website page reflects the growing interest in the war this memorial commemorates. The page was online for years, generally unnoticed, not much visited.

I don’t obsessively look at my website stats to see what’s popular, but I do notice any peculiar spikes where a page suddenly gets a lot of visitors. One evening in January 2012 there was a sudden surge in the number of visitors to that page. Not coming via a link from Facebook, which is usually what causes a surge, but apparently all coming from Google searches, all slightly different (‘waggoners Sledmere’, ‘waggoners memorial’, ‘wolds waggoners’, etc). Clearly people all over the country were for some reason searching for the same thing. And because my waggoners page had been online for five years it came top in Google search results, hence the visitor increase. But why the sudden interest?

I realised it must have been mentioned in a popular TV or radio programme and looked on the BBC site to see if there had been a special programme on the memorial itself. Couldn’t find anything. Meanwhile they were still coming in, all those visitors, from their separate Googlings.

It was one of those moments in the life of a website where you’re suddenly reminded, having taken it for granted most of the time, of what an amazing thing it is, the internet. I was quite moved. I was also really curious.

As a last resort I thought ‘I wonder if Twitter can help’. I’d signed up for a Twitter account the previous autumn, tweeted about three times, then lost interest and not bothered with it. That evening I thought I’d log on again and try a search. It worked. A Twitter user who lives near Sledmere had mentioned in a tweet that the BBC’s One Show had included an item on the memorial that evening. Clearly immediately after seeing it the nation had rushed to Google to find out more. I realised that Twitter was quite useful really, and have been using it almost daily since.

This year, because of the centenary of the start of the First World War, the waggoners page has become one of this website’s most visited. I’ve had more requests about using its photos than I’ve had for any other page on this site. The photos taken on that morning in May eight years ago have been used by English Heritage in an exhibition in London and by several web-based educational resources. The centenary commemorations this year mean more of us know about those men from the Yorkshire Wolds farms and the part they played in the First World War.

A powerful image

A couple of days ago, Remembrance Sunday, I was looking at Twitter and saw one of the most moving images of war I’ve ever seen, attached to a tweet.

The tweet had the added words ‘Remembering the sacrifice & suffering of soldiers sent to fight on our behalf. #RemembranceDay #LestWeForget’.

I found the photo so moving because it illustrates what war does to the people doing the fighting, because it shows that war can make tough grown men want to curl up and cry like a child, and mainly because of the way the other soldier is cradling his colleague’s head with the kind of tenderness men don’t often show to one another. And of course because of the contrast provided by the third person, coldly remote, carrying on as normal.

So it is, and will remain for me, one of the most powerful examples of war photography I’ve ever seen.

But I didn’t retweet it, as I might usually do,  because there was something not quite right.

Some of you will know already what the difficulty is. This isn’t an image of ‘our’ soldiers in the trenches in the First World War, or perhaps in the Second World War, as I think the person who tweeted it thought it was, as many seeing the photo maybe would think it was. These are US soldiers and this is an image from the Korean war.

It’s a photo by Al Chang, and it dates from 1950. It was well-known at the time. ‘The tableau of grief and comfort, taken in the Haktong-ni area of South Korea, became one of the enduring images of the Korean War’, states an article in the LA Times.

It took a while to trace this photo back to its source, and for that I have to thank the friend who managed to locate the original for me, as I couldn’t. I wanted to know the photographer’s name, and the context. I tried for some time to find it via a Google Images search, and saw many horrific images I wish I hadn’t. He managed to find the image on Flickr I’ve linked to above.

A good illustration of what happens all the time now to photographs online, cut and pasted away from any link with their original source and context, adrift from their creator. We wade our way through the muddied web, through misunderstandings and misinformation.

Does it matter? Maybe not. Interesting though. Perhaps, after all the commemoration this year, we now see all images like this as ‘in the trenches’.

This photo is one of those images reaching across from its particular time and its particular context. It does remind me of the sufferings of the men in the trenches of the First World War. To me, this is what war means. It isn’t just about those who died, it’s about what it did to the minds of those who lived. What it still does.

It reminds me that the First World War sent home a generation of men who were deeply damaged psychologically, who carried the horrors home with them but didn’t speak about it, who were always known to be ‘not quite right’ afterwards, carrying around that horror and distress in an age when men didn’t speak about these things.

Maybe men do now. I hope so. But that image to me is what war is, what it does to those who fight. It breaks people, in so many ways. Lest we forget.

And not just people. To close this rather long page, I want to bring it back home, to the local patch, with an image I’ve never forgotten. A photo I first saw many years back when browsing the online collection from the libraries and archives here in York. I’ve wanted to mention it many times over the years.

(c) City of York Council

It’s perhaps quite familiar now, maybe many people have seen it. Horses at what was the cattle market just outside the city walls, where the Barbican Centre now is. Horses rounded up to be sent to war. Poor dumb beasts, unaware.

When I first saw this photograph very few of us had thought about the role of horses in the war. I hadn’t. The focus on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has made us all more aware of many aspects of the conflict, educated us all in some way, and also embraced more widely than ever before all those caught up in that time of great suffering. Even the horses. At least we don’t send them off to war anymore.

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Dulce et decorum est …

Its stained glass windows are striking early 20th century designs, including this representation of a battlefield scene from the First World War. It’s not the kind of thing you normally see in stained glass windows. A young soldier in the foreground, in uniform. Behind him one of his comrades carried away on a stretcher.

The other side of the window, not shown on this photo, has a more conventional image of Christ on the cross. The young soldier is looking upwards to Christ.

The Yorkshire Herald of 23 October 1916 included a lengthy piece on this parish and its contribution to the war. The newspaper is framed and yellowing on a wall at the back of the church.

It’s something many of us find it difficult to understand, the way the Established Church appears to embrace armed conflict. A particularly enthusiastic fighter at the time of the First World War was the Revd William Hughes, ‘the fighting parson of Hawnby’, who had inspired 61 of his parishioners to sign up by 1916.

This included his own loved ones. He lost three sons in the conflict.

A detail from another of the church windows, one dedicated to the memory of Reverend William Hughes. It has an equally striking design, apparently by the same artist. Rural scenes are beautifully depicted, with rolling fields, birds and vegetation.

The church, right alongside the narrow, winding River Rye, is in what we’d call an ‘idyllic location’, though not so idyllic when the floods come. One of the many helpful pages of information provided in the church mentions the floods of June 2005. The flood left the church standing in 2ft of water, and knocked over many of the headstones in the churchyard.

Order had been restored by the time of our visit, and this was once again an idyllic rural scene, with worn headstones around the church, blending in to the landscape, covered in lichen. Inside, poetry, printed out and placed on the windowsills.

Like many remote Yorkshire churches, this tiny place said so much.

Footnote: a familiar name

The information provided in the church included a name I recognised. The ‘associate priest’ is the Reverend Michael Sinclair – a former Chairman of York City football club, fondly remembered by supporters.

Elsewhere on the web

Commonwealth War Graves Commission records:
George Augustus Hughes, ‘Son of the Rev. William Hughes and Mary Hughes, of Hawnby Rectory, York’
Harold Hughes, ‘Son of the Rev. William Hughes and Mary Hughes, of Hawnby Rectory, York’
William Hughes

(All three are included in this roll of honour)

Information on All Saints’ church, Hawnby

View of the church and churchyard – jmc4 Church Explorer, on flickr.com

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Once I paid proper attention to this rather overwhelming box of other people’s most precious things, I realised that this card probably dated from the First World War. Again, the power of the internet delivered the answer in seconds, as I found similar examples. Links are below.

This card has arrived with me, via so many hands, around 100 years after it was sent. I wish you could all see it, handle it, in real life too, but the next best thing is this digital version.

It’s a postcard, with a velvet flower and leaves stuck on to it, in between printed lettering. Many of these cards were made, and there are many variations. Some are beautifully elaborate. This seems to be one of the more simple designs.

Underneath the flower, in gold print: ‘Gathered for you’.

The printed version wasn’t personal enough – ‘My Mother’ is added underneath, underlined, in now very faded ink.

On the back:

‘To My Darling Mother
with fondest & dearest love
to you.
Your loving son,
Tom xxxxxx’

How much desperate love can a boy/man convey on a postcard.

I assume – as it doesn’t include an address – that the card must have had an envelope.

Tom perhaps came home. But maybe not. Maybe the ‘Flowers of France’ were the last ones he saw. Though of course we’re not living a century ago and absorbing this comforting propaganda, and we know that it’s more likely that poor Tom was wading around in the mud of the battlefields with not a flower in sight.

This card must have been cherished and carefully kept for the best part of a century. I don’t know how it got to York. I imagine if someone dies and no family survive them, or if the family who are connected to the deceased aren’t interested in boxes of old photos and papers, then such things end up being sold on or given away.

Tom’s card was with a bundle of other papers, at a car boot sale, where thoughtful people like my mum rescue lost photos and postcards and documents. Sometimes these lost photos and other printed documents have part of their history returned to them, through internet-based research and with the help of web-based communities. Occasionally they may be returned to the family, to a descendant.

I’ve not got much to go on here, with Tom. His heartfelt message home won’t be returned to a descendant, because he could be any Tom … any Tommy, you might say.

So I thought I should share Tom’s card to his mother, before that heartfelt message with its six kisses fades entirely.

More information

A similar card, on the Australian War Memorial website

And one for sale

An embroidered ‘Flowers of France’ postcard

An example with a known history

Guns and Grocers

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February 2011

In the churchyard of St Cuthbert’s on Peasholme Green is this interesting example of a local memorial to the casualties of the First World War. It has a beautifully weathered wooden cross at the top with a Latin motto, and then various inscriptions around the base. The side facing you as you approach the church door remembers the parishioners who died in the 1914-18 conflict.

Round the back, on the side facing the church wall, it reads:

The women and children did their part.

In so few words it sums up that very different age, being so obviously well-meaning, and presumably at the time it meant a lot to the women and children to get a special mention. Nowadays, its inscription looks anachronistic and rather patronising, and reminds us of a time when ‘women and children’ were grouped together – let off sinking ships first, not allowed to vote. While ‘men were men’, and considered it their duty to be manly and troop off to war without complaint.

The memorial records that 865 parishioners served in the war.

More information

The record for this monument on the UK National Inventory of War Memorials

The next major conflict saw women playing a more active role, and a more recognised one: WAAF memorial, Elvington

Latin motto – In hoc signo vinces – Wikipedia

For a wealth of information on York’s memorials to the First World War, see the local website York and The Great War. It includes an alphabetical list of honour, and photographs and transcriptions from local memorials, small and large, from York and surrounding villages.

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2007

This memorial is alongside the B1253 through Sledmere. It is a memorial to the men of the Waggoners Reserve, and it’s unlike any other memorial I’ve seen. Carvings that the Pevsner guide calls "curiously homely" depict the story of the corps, raised from the local farms.

The memorial was carved in 1919 by Carlo Magnoni, from designs by Sir Mark Sykes. Most of the photos below can be enlarged by clicking on the image.

Waggoners memorial – location – Google map

The Waggoners were an army transport unit, whose recruitment began before the war.

These men were intended to provide a core of trained wagon drivers to supply front line positions, and they joined the forces at the Western front during the First World War. The carvings around the circular body of the monument tell their story, in various scenes. The carvings above show the men working on the land, then apparently on their way to war, on the road (complete with a milestone showing the distances to York and Driffield).

Here, above left, they appear to be boarding the boat to cross the Channel. The panel above right presumably shows the enemy, engaged in barbaric acts. One soldier is torching a building, while the other is holding a kneeling woman by her hair.

More details from the memorial – a man on his horse, pulling a loaded wagon. Above right, the volunteer waggoner (with his bundle of possessions on the stick over his shoulder) with a man at a desk, who is pointing the way – presumably to the boarding point for the ship.

The monument isn’t tall and elegant like the nearby Eleanor Cross. It gives an impression of solidity, in its overall shape (kind of small and "dumpy") and in the carved figures, including the animal heads on the supporting columns. I can’t really find the words to describe why it’s so moving, when looked at in detail, so I hope the photos go some way to conveying this. For anyone who would like to read more about the Wolds Waggoners, links are given below.

The inscription on the monument reads: “LT. COL: SIR MARK SYKES. BART: M.P. DESIGNED THIS MONUMENT AND SET IT UP AS A REMEMBRANCE OF THE GALLANT SERVICES RENDERED IN THE GREAT WAR. 1914-1919 / BY THE WAGGONER’S RESERVE A CORPS OF 1000 DRIVERS RAISED BY HIM ON THE YORKSHIRE WOLD FARMS IN THE YEAR 1912 THOMAS SCOTT FOREMAN. CARLO MAGNONI SCULPTOR. ALFRED BARR MASON.”

Links to further information

Harry Pledger – Wolds Waggoner

A few years ago, the Wolds Waggoners’ story was covered on a BBC radio series Voices of the Powerless.

An accompanying page has accounts of the war from soldiers who served. The second of these, by Lance Corporal R H Temple of Driffield, is a moving description of looking around a Belgian village, destroyed by shells.

Yorkshirehistory.com has comprehensive information on the history of the Wolds Waggoners

The website also includes a collection of WW1 letters from the Driffield Times, collected by Della Petch. These contemporary sources are a fascinating insight into this period in our history. A letter from W J Maltby, writing to the newspaper on 5 Dec 1914, wants to encourage "those in Driffield to come and have a rub at the Kaiser’s half hearted lot." He describes the Waggoners already there: "men who have had no training of any description who are out here doing the same duty as others with years of training need some little praise for their work, which is done to perfection."

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