Peter Parka
Well-Known Member
Nice to read good stories from the war. Amazing to think how the wars affected everyone in the country. Only 14 places out of thousands in this country who didn't lose someone fighting in two wars.
[h=1]Thankful villages: The places where everyone came back from the wars[/h]The mass slaughter of 1914-18 robbed the UK of a million lives, leaving no part of the country untouched. But there was a tiny handful of settlements where all those who served returned home. With its rows of ramshackle yellow stone cottages, set amid undulating Cotswold hills, the village of Upper Slaughter belies the violence of its name.
In hazy autumn sunlight, this corner of Gloucestershire might well have been rendered in watercolour. All the components of tourist-brochure Britain are here - the red phone box, the winding lanes, the wisteria draped around the windows.
But one normally ubiquitous feature is missing. Unlike the overwhelming majority of British settlements, Upper Slaughter has no war memorial.
Instead, tucked away in the village hall are two modest wooden plaques. They celebrate the men, and one woman, from the village who served in both world wars and, in every case, returned home.
For it is not only its postcard charm that offers pacific contrast to the name Upper Slaughter. It is that rarest of British locations, a "thankful village" - the term coined in the 1930s by the writer Arthur Mee to describe the handful of communities which suffered no military fatalities in World War I.
Mee identified 32 such places, a figure that has been revised upwards in recent years to 52. Of these, just 14 have, like Upper Slaughter, come to be known as doubly thankful - also losing no-one from WWII.
Somehow, these rare outposts - as disparate and evocative-sounding as Nether Kellet, Lancashire; Woolley, Somerset; and Herbrandston, Pembrokeshire - were shielded from the worst ravages of the first half of the 20th Century. Some of those they sent to fight may have returned home badly injured or deeply traumatised, but all came back alive.
The scale of their good fortune is extraordinary. A million British lives were lost from 1914-18 in Europe's first experience of industrialised, total warfare. No Scottish community appears to have been left unscathed, and no thankful villages have been identified in Ireland, all of which was still part of the UK during WWI. In England and Wales, the 52 so far singled out are dwarfed by over 16,000 which paid the highest sacrifice.
In terms of the UK's collective memory of 1914-18, they represent a striking anomaly. Through history lessons, war poetry and popular culture, the abiding modern portrayal of WWI is as a devastating event of industrial-scale carnage.
And yet this handful of communities, whose sons emerged alive from the horrors of the trenches, offers a unique insight into the experience which shattered the pre-WWI order and, in turn, transformed society irrevocably.
One man who understands this is Tony Collett, an energetic 80-year-old who has lived and worked in and around Upper Slaughter all his life. Tony was too young to have served in either world war. But after WWII he hand-painted the lettering on the plaque celebrating the 36 men from the village who came home safely.
Standing in the village hall, he looks up, pauses, and places a hand on the wooden sign, before telling its story.
It was erected in 1946 alongside a similar marker put up to give thanks for the 24 men and one woman of Upper Slaughter who returned in 1918. Both the WWI and WWII versions included the name of Tony's father, Francis George Collett, the village's resident handyman, universally known by his middle name. Born in 1895, George had the rare distinction of serving in two world wars.
After enlisting at the age of 19, he was sent to Mesopotamia, now Iraq, where 92,000 of the 410,000 Commonwealth troops died. As a member of the Territorial Army, Sgt Collett was one of the first to be called up in 1939, coming under fire before long as an anti-aircraft gunner with the Royal Artillery on the home front.
But it was not only those in uniform like George whose lives were at risk. On 4 February 1944, Upper Slaughter faced an attack from the sky, with incendiary bombs raining down on the village.
"I saw it through the skylight," recalls Tony, who was 14 at the time and sharing a room with his sister. "The first thing we did was dive down under the blankets.
"We came out and saw all these flames. We were dodging fires all the way down the road."
It was 05:30 GMT, and the village was burning. Several cottages and barns had been hit. But the people of the village quickly assembled, gathering water and sand to douse the flames. Though the damage was severe, Upper Slaughter's luck held - no-one was killed.
In 1946, it seemed natural to put up another plaque. The village hall had been acquired by the local Witts family after WWI to mark the armistice. Newly demobilised George, the village's odd-job man, church sexton and occasional undertaker, was given the task of creating a second marker to give thanks for the men who had just come back.
With his son assisting, George carved the wooden plaque, styling it to match that from 1914-18. Tony then carefully painted the 36 fortunate names.
Another sign, on the other side of the hall, was fashioned from brass to commemorate the "distinguished conduct and promptitude" shown by Upper Slaughter's residents on the night of the incendiary bomb raid.
Every time they passed the building, the people of the village were reminded of their incredible luck. And yet amid the wreckage of make-do-and-mend austerity Britain, with so many communities shattered and families destroyed, it felt unseemly to discuss this.
After all, during the first half of the 20th Century, Upper Slaughter was very much the exception. While people in this corner of the Cotswolds were quietly grateful for what they had escaped, the vast majority of their compatriots were adjusting to the most profound of losses.
For every village like Upper Slaughter there was another like Wadhurst, East Sussex - a place of just over 3,500 people which lost 649 men in WWI, according to research by the historian Paul Reed, author of Great War Lives.
On a single day in 1915 at the Battle of Aubers, 25 men from Wadhurst were killed - just under 80% of all those who went forward into no-man's land, and almost certainly the heaviest per capita casualties of any community in the UK for one day's battle. The majority of the fallen had no known grave.
Indeed, according to the WWI historian Dan Snow, it was often small communities, villages and hamlets in which the psychological burden of the carnage's aftermath was most painfully felt.
Largely to blame for this, Snow believes, was the system of Pals Battalions - units of friends, work colleagues and relatives who had been promised they could fight alongside each other when they enlisted amid the patriotic fervour of 1914.
The battalions were a useful recruiting tool for War Secretary Lord Kitchener, who believed that mobilising large numbers of enthusiastic recruits quickly was the best method of winning the war.
But the reality of the trenches, where thousands of men could be wiped out in a single day, meant that small communities could face disproportionate levels of bloodshed within a matter of hours.
Of about 700 "pals" from Accrington, Lancashire who participated in the Somme offensive, some 235 were killed and 350 wounded within just 20 minutes. By the end of the first hour, 1,700 men from Bradford were dead or injured. Some 93 of the approximately 175 Chorley men who went over the top at the same time died.
It was a pattern repeated many times - and on each occasion, a town or village was deeply wounded, instantly. The "pals" system was phased out in 1917, but not before it left an indelible mark on the British consciousness.
"They had to stop that practice because it was so unbelievably destructive," says Snow, whose great-grandfather Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow was a general at the Somme.
"When you let brothers serve together, it can be devastating for a whole community. It was a war that touched everybody in the British Isles. That's what total war means."
The enormous toll of battles like the Somme transformed the UK, many historians argue
The UK may have lost 2.2% of its population, but in other belligerent nations the toll was even higher. France lost 1.4 million, some 4.3% of its citizens.
The French equivalent of a thankful village is even more extraordinary. Thierville in Normandy has not lost any service personnel in France's last five wars - the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, World Wars I and II, Indochina, and Algeria.
[h=1]Thankful villages: The places where everyone came back from the wars[/h]The mass slaughter of 1914-18 robbed the UK of a million lives, leaving no part of the country untouched. But there was a tiny handful of settlements where all those who served returned home. With its rows of ramshackle yellow stone cottages, set amid undulating Cotswold hills, the village of Upper Slaughter belies the violence of its name.
In hazy autumn sunlight, this corner of Gloucestershire might well have been rendered in watercolour. All the components of tourist-brochure Britain are here - the red phone box, the winding lanes, the wisteria draped around the windows.
But one normally ubiquitous feature is missing. Unlike the overwhelming majority of British settlements, Upper Slaughter has no war memorial.
Instead, tucked away in the village hall are two modest wooden plaques. They celebrate the men, and one woman, from the village who served in both world wars and, in every case, returned home.
For it is not only its postcard charm that offers pacific contrast to the name Upper Slaughter. It is that rarest of British locations, a "thankful village" - the term coined in the 1930s by the writer Arthur Mee to describe the handful of communities which suffered no military fatalities in World War I.
Mee identified 32 such places, a figure that has been revised upwards in recent years to 52. Of these, just 14 have, like Upper Slaughter, come to be known as doubly thankful - also losing no-one from WWII.
Somehow, these rare outposts - as disparate and evocative-sounding as Nether Kellet, Lancashire; Woolley, Somerset; and Herbrandston, Pembrokeshire - were shielded from the worst ravages of the first half of the 20th Century. Some of those they sent to fight may have returned home badly injured or deeply traumatised, but all came back alive.
The scale of their good fortune is extraordinary. A million British lives were lost from 1914-18 in Europe's first experience of industrialised, total warfare. No Scottish community appears to have been left unscathed, and no thankful villages have been identified in Ireland, all of which was still part of the UK during WWI. In England and Wales, the 52 so far singled out are dwarfed by over 16,000 which paid the highest sacrifice.
In terms of the UK's collective memory of 1914-18, they represent a striking anomaly. Through history lessons, war poetry and popular culture, the abiding modern portrayal of WWI is as a devastating event of industrial-scale carnage.
And yet this handful of communities, whose sons emerged alive from the horrors of the trenches, offers a unique insight into the experience which shattered the pre-WWI order and, in turn, transformed society irrevocably.
One man who understands this is Tony Collett, an energetic 80-year-old who has lived and worked in and around Upper Slaughter all his life. Tony was too young to have served in either world war. But after WWII he hand-painted the lettering on the plaque celebrating the 36 men from the village who came home safely.
Standing in the village hall, he looks up, pauses, and places a hand on the wooden sign, before telling its story.
It was erected in 1946 alongside a similar marker put up to give thanks for the 24 men and one woman of Upper Slaughter who returned in 1918. Both the WWI and WWII versions included the name of Tony's father, Francis George Collett, the village's resident handyman, universally known by his middle name. Born in 1895, George had the rare distinction of serving in two world wars.
After enlisting at the age of 19, he was sent to Mesopotamia, now Iraq, where 92,000 of the 410,000 Commonwealth troops died. As a member of the Territorial Army, Sgt Collett was one of the first to be called up in 1939, coming under fire before long as an anti-aircraft gunner with the Royal Artillery on the home front.
But it was not only those in uniform like George whose lives were at risk. On 4 February 1944, Upper Slaughter faced an attack from the sky, with incendiary bombs raining down on the village.
"I saw it through the skylight," recalls Tony, who was 14 at the time and sharing a room with his sister. "The first thing we did was dive down under the blankets.
"We came out and saw all these flames. We were dodging fires all the way down the road."
It was 05:30 GMT, and the village was burning. Several cottages and barns had been hit. But the people of the village quickly assembled, gathering water and sand to douse the flames. Though the damage was severe, Upper Slaughter's luck held - no-one was killed.
In 1946, it seemed natural to put up another plaque. The village hall had been acquired by the local Witts family after WWI to mark the armistice. Newly demobilised George, the village's odd-job man, church sexton and occasional undertaker, was given the task of creating a second marker to give thanks for the men who had just come back.
With his son assisting, George carved the wooden plaque, styling it to match that from 1914-18. Tony then carefully painted the 36 fortunate names.
Another sign, on the other side of the hall, was fashioned from brass to commemorate the "distinguished conduct and promptitude" shown by Upper Slaughter's residents on the night of the incendiary bomb raid.
Every time they passed the building, the people of the village were reminded of their incredible luck. And yet amid the wreckage of make-do-and-mend austerity Britain, with so many communities shattered and families destroyed, it felt unseemly to discuss this.
After all, during the first half of the 20th Century, Upper Slaughter was very much the exception. While people in this corner of the Cotswolds were quietly grateful for what they had escaped, the vast majority of their compatriots were adjusting to the most profound of losses.
For every village like Upper Slaughter there was another like Wadhurst, East Sussex - a place of just over 3,500 people which lost 649 men in WWI, according to research by the historian Paul Reed, author of Great War Lives.
On a single day in 1915 at the Battle of Aubers, 25 men from Wadhurst were killed - just under 80% of all those who went forward into no-man's land, and almost certainly the heaviest per capita casualties of any community in the UK for one day's battle. The majority of the fallen had no known grave.
Indeed, according to the WWI historian Dan Snow, it was often small communities, villages and hamlets in which the psychological burden of the carnage's aftermath was most painfully felt.
Largely to blame for this, Snow believes, was the system of Pals Battalions - units of friends, work colleagues and relatives who had been promised they could fight alongside each other when they enlisted amid the patriotic fervour of 1914.
The battalions were a useful recruiting tool for War Secretary Lord Kitchener, who believed that mobilising large numbers of enthusiastic recruits quickly was the best method of winning the war.
But the reality of the trenches, where thousands of men could be wiped out in a single day, meant that small communities could face disproportionate levels of bloodshed within a matter of hours.
Of about 700 "pals" from Accrington, Lancashire who participated in the Somme offensive, some 235 were killed and 350 wounded within just 20 minutes. By the end of the first hour, 1,700 men from Bradford were dead or injured. Some 93 of the approximately 175 Chorley men who went over the top at the same time died.
It was a pattern repeated many times - and on each occasion, a town or village was deeply wounded, instantly. The "pals" system was phased out in 1917, but not before it left an indelible mark on the British consciousness.
"They had to stop that practice because it was so unbelievably destructive," says Snow, whose great-grandfather Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow was a general at the Somme.
"When you let brothers serve together, it can be devastating for a whole community. It was a war that touched everybody in the British Isles. That's what total war means."
The enormous toll of battles like the Somme transformed the UK, many historians argue
The UK may have lost 2.2% of its population, but in other belligerent nations the toll was even higher. France lost 1.4 million, some 4.3% of its citizens.
The French equivalent of a thankful village is even more extraordinary. Thierville in Normandy has not lost any service personnel in France's last five wars - the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, World Wars I and II, Indochina, and Algeria.
