Missing volunteers & other men who served

The Farnhill WW1 Volunteers Project has very deliberately restricted its research efforts to the 68 men whose names appear on the Farnhill Parish Council Roll of Honour.

However during the course of the project we have come across names of other local men who served during WW1 whose stories deserve to be told.

The names fall into two categories:

• Local men who were volunteers and whose names were missed off the Roll when it was created in February 1916.
• Other local men, conscripted to serve in WW1.

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Some accounts of the Armistice

At 11am on 11th November 1918, fighting stopped all over the world and people began to wonder whether they might begin to hope that the war was finally over.

In an article we publish today, exactly 100 years after Armistice Day, we examine the thoughts of some of the people of Farnhill and Kildwick, including:

• Thomas Appleby, headmaster of Kildwick School
• Norman Green, one of the pupils at the school, whose brother, Eric, was a PoW
• William Whitham, of Bucklar Hill, whose brother, John Spencer Whitham, was one of the Farnhill WW1 Volunteers
• Percy Walmsley, another of the Farnhill WW1 Volunteers, who wrote home from hospital where he was recovering from his wounds

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Volunteers and their medals

After the war, the Farnhill WW1 Volunteers were awarded a range of campaign medals and awards.

This article looks at these medals, why they were awarded, and – insofar as we’ve been able to find out – which Volunteers received which medals.

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Arthur Turner – missed off the Roll by his own son

Compiling the Farnhill Parish Council Roll of Honour must have been a difficult job for the Clerk to the Council to carry out.  Particularly if you were just a young man in his teens, who had only taken on the Clerk’s job a few months previously.

So it was almost inevitable then that Tom Turner, the lad in question, missed the names of some of the men already serving in the forces off the list.

That’s understandable.  What’s a little more difficult to fathom is how Tom managed to forget to include the name of his own father !

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Percy Walmsley and the Anglia disaster

It is rare, even in wartime, for someone to be present on two ships sunk on the same day – and even rarer for that to happen to someone who is not in the Navy. But that was the fate of Percy Walmsley, a Private with 1/6 battalion Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) Regiment, on the 17th November 1915, when he was being brought home to England from France.

He survived and, while recovering in hospital, wrote about the experience in letters home.

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George Holliday the Farnhill milkman – and his assistant

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Volunteers who died during WW1

Our project is researching the lives of all the 68 men from the village of Farnhill who volunteered to serve prior to the introduction of mandatory conscription early in 1916.  Of these men, just seven died while on active service during the war.

In this article, published 99 years after the signing of the Armistice, we use Regimental war diaries and contemporary newspaper reports to examine these men’s military careers and look at how and when they died.

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A 1918 Soldier’s diary

Amongst the material made available to the Farnhill WW1 Volunteers project is a 1918 Soldiers’ Diary belonging to Private Harry Hargreaves, of 1/5 battalion West Riding Regiment.

The diary measures about 7 x 11cm – small enough to fit into the pocket of a military uniform; the cover is made of card and the inside pages of very thin paper.  The entries were written in pencil, in Harry’s own small (and sometimes, after 100 years, difficult to read) handwriting.  All are very concise and include an almost day-by-day account of the weather – even in the days immediately after he had been wounded.  It is entirely fitting that the final entry in the diary should be a comment on the weather.

The entries run from January 1^st to October 23^rd 1918 and record the final months of Harry Hargreaves’ service in France, which began in June 1916.

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Mary Sharpe – what a woman can do

Mary Sharpe lived at Kildwick Hall.  Between 1912 and 1916 her brother, W.A. Brigg, was mayor of Keighley and she was the mayoress.  At a recruitment meeting in 1914 she had striong words for men who wouldn’t volunteer to fight.  Later, she followed this up by taking on some serious war work of her own.

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