The Memorial in Lancaster Town Hall Memorial Garden, unveiled in 1924. (ING)
The previous chapter discussed some of the major military events of the First World War that involved the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. While the King’s Own was based in Lancaster, and the 1st/5th Battalion in particular recruited heavily from the town, many of the men who served and died with the King’s Own were not Lancastrians and, similarly, many Lancastrians who served and died did so with units other than the King’s Own. Even identifying how many Lancastrians died in the war is difficult. The city’s main war memorial, next to the Town Hall (below) lists 1,010 names. The Reveille website offers details on 1,055 individuals, as it includes everyone on the war memorial plus some additional people who, for example, had obituaries in the local papers but whose names do not appear on the memorial. This gives us two possible numbers of Lancastrians who died, but neither is definitive.
The Memorial in Lancaster Town Hall Memorial Garden, unveiled in 1924. (ING)
The difficulties are twofold: who is, and is not, a Lancastrian; and how do we define ‘killed in the war’? The first of these problems is illustrated by the fact that Reveille lists twenty-three Canadians, three Australians, a New Zealander and a South African among its records. Albert Lamb, killed in France with the British Columbia Regiment in June 1918, provides an example of a Canadian Lancastrian. He was born in Burnley but moved to 18 Prospect Street, Lancaster as a child when he also attended Bowerham School. Around the age of 15 he moved to Canada with his parents. After he was killed, aged 21, it is likely that his uncle, Mr S. Foster who lived at 74 Edward Street, was responsible both for his obituary appearing in the Lancaster Guardian and his name subsequently appearing on the war memorial. Thus someone who was born in Burnley and died as a Canadian is remember as one of the ‘Men of Lancaster who gave their lives in the Great War’ to quote the war memorial. It is interesting to speculate how many other men with similar life histories may not appear in Lancaster’s historical record because they did not have an uncle, or other relative, to preserve their connection with the local area.
At least one Lancastrian died on 507 different days during the war – approximately one day in every three for over four years. There were nine days in which ten or more men died and 327 days with only one death.
The second definition of who was killed in the war is simpler but more arbitrary and, strangely, does not necessarily mean killed in the war at all. The war memorial lists all men who died while serving in the military. Most of these were killed at the front, but others were not: Thomas Tite, of 4 Trafalgar Road, Bowerham, died in a training ground accident; Percy Saul, of 9 Springfield Street, died of pneumonia while stationed near Cambridge; George Nicholas Wilkinson, of 34 Aldcliffe Road, was killed by a snake in India and died on 20 April, 1918; and John Hewartson, of 14 Albion Street, was killed by a train near Reading with the 1st/5th while guarding the Great Western Railway. All appear on the memorial, as does the unfortunate Henry Broe of 8 Vincent Street, Primrose, who was ‘shot whilst drunk by a friend at Westgate-on-Sea’. Deaths continue to be recorded sometime after the war. The last in the Reveille database was Alfred Tyldesley, of 39 Perth Street, who died on 18 August 1921, probably of wounds sustained in July 1916. Most of those who died soon after the war would be included because they died of wounds sustained during the war. In reality men would have continued to die of wounds, and other war-related conditions, for many years afterwards. These deaths are not included because the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) used 31 August 1921 as an arbitrary cut-off date for deaths in the war.
While including anyone who died while serving in the military between the outbreak of the War and the end of August 1921 may seem broad, it excludes many people, most obviously civilians. Reveille includes one civilian, James Butterworth, who died of grief in 1916 after three of his sons were killed (see Chapter 7). While exceptional, it is unlikely that his was the only death where grief was a contributory factor. Civilians who died in accidents, including the White Lund disaster or industrial diseases are also excluded, a group that would include large numbers of women, as would those killed in accidents and disease brought on by the war.
The Roll of Honour of Storey Brothers (now lost) shows a preponderance of employees serving with the King’s Own, then the 2nd West Lancashire Royal Field Artillery 10th Battery and a further smattering in a variety of other regiments including the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Bantam Battalion. One served with the Royal Navy. (KOM)
So who were the 1,055 men who appear as Lancaster’s war dead in Reveille? Overwhelmingly they were from the army. Some 967 are recorded as being in the army, 97 per cent of those whose service is known. Of the remainder, eighteen were in the Royal Navy, seven in the Royal Marines, four in the Royal Flying Corps and one in the South African Police. This is perhaps unsurprising given Lancaster’s importance as an army town. As can be seen from table 5.1, the bulk of the deaths were from the King’s Own. As discussed in the previous chapters, the 5th Battalion, which became the 1st/5th, recruited heavily from Lancaster and, while the town never had a formal ‘Pals’ battalion, this unit is the closest to it. As table 5.1 shows, it also had by far the largest number of Lancastrian casualties.
Unit |
Deaths |
King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment: Total |
425 |
KORL 1st Battalion |
42 |
KORL 2nd Battalion |
27 |
KORL 1st/4th Battalion |
34* |
KORL 1st/5th Battalion |
198** |
KORL 2nd/5th Battalion |
48 |
KORL 8th Battalion |
32 |
Royal Field Artillery |
36 |
Seaforth Highlanders |
31 |
King’s Liverpool Regiment |
29 |
Lancashire Fusiliers |
29 |
Border Regiment |
25 |
Table 5.1 Lancastrian deaths by unit.
KORL: King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. Only units with 25 or more deaths are shown. *includes 2 deaths recorded as 4th Battalion. **includes 14 deaths recorded as 5th Battalion. Within the King’s Own: 4 other Lancastrians died with the 3rd Battalion; 3 with the 3rd/5th; 19 with the 6th; 7 with the 7th; and 4 with the 9th. The 7 other deaths are unknown.
Only 4 per cent of Lancastrians who died were officers, a far lower percentage than for the army as a whole. This perhaps suggests that Lancaster was a strongly working class town and, thus, few officers were recruited. Almost 75 per cent were privates or the equivalent ranks of gunner, sapper, rifleman, guardsman or trooper.
In popular memory the First World War is associated with large attacks that achieved little except mass casualties. The Battle of the Somme, in the summer and autumn of 1916, is a classic example of this, along with Gallipoli (spring 1915) and Passchendaele (spring 1917). The graph below shows the numbers of Lancastrians killed in each month of the war. It suggests that the Somme did have serious consequences for the town, for July and August 1916 saw 80 deaths in total, but the autumn of 1917 was also bad due, in particular, to the Battle of Cambrai. 1918 saw very heavy casualties due to the German Spring Offensive that was launched by Berlin in an effort to win the war after Russia capitulated, and the subsequent allied Hundred Days offensive in the autumn which finally broke German resistance. The worst period of the war was, however, the spring of 1915 when 121 Lancastrians were killed in around six weeks. This was not, however, due to Gallipoli, but instead was largely due to the almost forgotten Second Battle of Ypres, some of the experiences of which are described in Chapter 4. This battle does not fit the futile attack of popular memory, but instead was a major German attack which saw the first use of gas on the Western Front, although few Lancastrians were killed by it in this attack. Of the Lancastrian deaths at Second Ypres, eighty-nine were from the King’s Own 1st/5th Battalion with nine more from the 2nd Battalion.
Lancastrian deaths by month.
For the 1st/5th this was their first major experience of fighting as they had not long arrived in France. Three days, in particular, stand out as having heavy casualties: 23 and 27 April and 8 May 1915. 23 April was when the battalion was part of the major counterattack, described in Chapter 4, that attempted to push back the initial German breakthrough. It resulted in the deaths of twelve Lancastrians. On 27 April the battalion formed up for another counterattack. This attack was cancelled but the battalion was heavily shelled including one shell that killed thirteen men. Sixteen Lancastrians died that day. 8 May, with nineteen deaths, was the equal worst day of the war for the town although, as we will see below, it was also a lucky day. As described in Chapter 4, the 2nd Battalion had recently relieved the 1st/5th near Frezenburg. On 8 May the Germans overran the 2nd Battalion’s positions causing heavy casualties. The 1st/5th was then involved in an unsuccessful counterattack to retake them. In total, nineteen Lancastrians died that day including seven from the 1st/5th and nine from the 2nd. All but one died near Ypres. The other was Henry Botham, from Skerton, who was killed with the Border Regiment at Gallipoli.
According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, over 300 members of 2nd Battalion were killed that day. This shows us two things: that the 2nd Battalion did not recruit heavily from Lancaster as the battalion’s 300 dead only included nine Lancastrians; and the decision to withdraw the 1st/5th and replace them with the 2nd was very fortunate for Lancaster as the 1st/5th recruited heavily from the town. Over the period of Second Ypres about 60 per cent of the men killed from the 1st/5th were Lancastrians. Had the 300 casualties taken by the 2nd Battalion been taken by the 1st/5th the city would have had around 200 soldiers killed in a single day rather than the (still horrendous) nineteen it actually experienced. Other towns in north-west England did experience days with casualties of this magnitude, for example Accrington, when the Accrington Pals (11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment) suffered 584 casualties killed, wounded or missing on the first day of the Somme, around half of whom are likely to have been from Accrington itself, with many of the remainder from Burnley, Chorley and Blackburn.
Soldiers of the 1st/5th Battalion, King’s Own, with the first issue of gas masks, Belgium, June 1915. (KOM)
September 1915 saw twenty-six Lancastrians killed. Of itself this would be unremarkable given what had happened in the spring and was to happen in many later months, although 25 September again saw nineteen Lancastrians killed on a single day, most of them at the Battle of Loos. Loos does perhaps fit the ‘futile attack’ memory of the First World War. It was the British Army’s first attempt at a major attack which resulted in nearly 60,000 casualties for very limited gains. Twelve of these Lancastrians were from the 8th Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders: a battalion that lost 502 men at the battle. They were involved in the initial attack on the first day of the assault and suffered casualties on a scale similar to those experienced on the first day of the Somme. Other Lancastrian deaths were in the Cameron Highlanders and the Border and Loyal North Lancashire regiments. Other fighting that day near Ypres killed four other men, three with the King’s Shropshire Regiment and one from the Durham Light Infantry. These were probably as a result of subsidiary attacks to support the main Loos offensive. As table 5.1 showed, more Lancastrians died in the Seaforth Highlanders than any other infantry regiment (other than the King’s Own). This is because the Seaforth Highlanders put considerable effort into recruiting from towns in northern England, possibly to compensate for the relative lack of population near their own base.
The Battle of the Somme in the summer and autumn of 1916 has come to exemplify the First World War, especially the First Day of the Somme, 1 July, the worst day in the history of the British Army with over 50,000 casualties. As table 5.2 shows, this was a bad period for Lancaster, although the Somme’s effects were less severe than Second Ypres and arguably Loos. Lancaster’s experience of the Somme was again different from what might be expected given popular narratives of the war. The First Day of the Somme was bad for the town with ten men killed, but the worst day of the campaign was actually 15 August when twelve were killed. The differences between these two days are interesting. Table 5.2 shows that the ten Lancastrians killed on the first day of the Somme came from seven different battalions, six of which took heavy casualties that day. What this shows is that large numbers of battalions went into action that day and took heavy casualties, with the result that Lancastrians spread around multiple units were killed. Mercifully for the town, however, the 1st/5th was not involved as it was in reserve near Arras, with the result that Lancaster escaped a fate similar to Accrington’s. The 1st Battalion of the King’s Own was in action that day and suffered heavy casualties but, thanks to the vagaries of recruiting, only three of these were from Lancaster. By the end of July the 1st/5th had arrived in the Somme sector and the twelve deaths on 15 August were all from this unit. These did not, however, occur in a major attack in the manner of 1 July. Instead, part of the battalion had been ordered to dig trenches near German lines when they came under heavy rifle and machine gun fire which resulted in seventeen deaths and thirty-four men being wounded.
Battalion |
Lancastrians killed |
Total Killed |
1st Battalion King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment |
3 |
119 |
1st Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers |
2 |
125 |
Tyneside Scottish Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers |
1 |
161 |
16th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers |
1 |
131 |
2nd Battalion Border Regiment |
1 |
87 |
2nd Battalion Yorkshire Regiment |
1 |
66 |
9th Battalion Cheshire Regiment |
1 |
5 |
Table 5.2 The First Day of the Somme: Lancastrians killed by battalion.
Source: ‘Total killed’ taken from Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, www.cwgc.org
1917 was the worst year of the war for Lancaster with 264 men killed. As the graph above shows, other years saw major peaks in deaths due to battles such as Second Ypres, Loos, the Somme, or the 1918 offensives. By contrast, 1917 was relentless with every month except January having at least ten casualties. The worst month was November with thirty-nine deaths of which fourteen were on the 30th – Lancaster’s fourth worst day of the war. This was during the Battle of Cambrai, the first allied offensive in which tanks were extensively used. The 1st/5th’s involvement in this battle was again important with eight Lancastrians from the 1st/5th killed on the 30th alone. Seven more Lancastrians died at Cambrai serving with the 1st/4th, all but one on 20 November, the opening day of the battle. As Cambrai started, the Battle of Passchendaele, which had started in July, was drawing to a close. A further eight Lancastrians died in this battle in November, two of whom were from the 2nd/5th which, by then, had changed from being a training battalion to being in active service.
On 21 March 1918, the Germans launched Operation Michael, the first campaign of their Spring Offensive. The offensive was successful in breaking through allied lines and ended the stalemate of trench warfare that had persisted since 1914, leading to desperate allied defence. Eighty-three Lancastrians were killed in this fighting before the end of May. April alone had forty-one casualties making it the fourth equal worst month of the war. After a lull in early summer, the allies launched their own offensive on 8 August. This became known as the Hundred Days Offensive and led to the war ending on 11 November. Again, casualties were high: ninety-six Lancastrians were killed in this fighting, including forty-one in September, making it equal with April for deaths.
Three Lancastrian soldiers died on 6 November 1918: James Booth, of 7 Anne Street; Alfred Morgan, of 45 Aldren’s Lane, Skerton; and William Smallshaw, of 26 Bradshaw Street, Primrose. James Booth died of influenza serving in India with the 6th Battalion, King’s Own. Alfred Morgan and William Smallshaw were both killed in action in France. They were the last two Lancastrians to be killed in action, although, as described earlier, they were far from the last Lancastrians to die as a result of the war.
The discussion above points to the worst periods of the war for Lancaster and shows that deaths among men of the town rarely occurred in the stereotypical First World War attack with large numbers of men going ‘over the top’ in major offensives. Even this account overstates this type of action. During the course of the war there were nine days in which ten or more men from Lancaster died. A total of 125 men died on these days, which tend to be the days that have become significant in popular memory. By contrast, 327 men who were killed, roughly a third of the total, were the only Lancastrian men who died that day. Rather than major offensives killing large numbers of people, this points to a steady stream being killed or dying in a wide range of situations.
The global nature of the war is evident in the location of the graves of Lancaster’s fallen: 501 Lancastrians are buried in France; 307 in Belgium; 99 in the UK; 16 each in Greece and Turkey; and 15 in modern Iraq. Others are buried in (modern-day) Canada, Egypt, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Malta, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, Syria and Tanzania.
One conception of the war that is supported by Lancaster’s experience is that, despite being a world war, most deaths took place on the Western Front: 80 per cent of these are found in France or Belgium, with a further 9 per cent being in the UK. Of these UK graves, seventy-four are in Lancaster: sixty-two in Lancaster Cemetery; and six each in Skerton and Scotforth Cemeteries. The remaining grave and memorial sites are interesting because they again confirm some of our impressions of the war and challenge others. Sixteen soldiers have their grave or memorial in Turkey as a result of the Gallipoli campaign. Sixteen others are found in Greece and fifteen in Iraq as a result of campaigns that have been all but forgotten. The graves in Greece are a result of a campaign to support Greek and Romanian forces in their struggle with Bulgaria. The front line of the Salonika Campaign stretched from Albania to the mouth of the River Struma in Greece. Most of the casualties were from the 2nd or 9th battalions of the King’s Own who were involved in the Struma Offensive in August 1916 and the Third Battle of Doiran in September 1918. Most of the Mesopotamian deaths were members of the King’s Own’s 6th Battalion which had been sent to Basra after Gallipoli. In April 1916 five Lancastrians died in Mesopotamia, probably in the unsuccessful attempt to relieve the siege of Kut-al-Amara. This town, 120 miles south of Baghdad, had been besieged by the Ottomans and finally fell on 29 April with over 13,000 soldiers being taken captive. At the time this was considered to be one of the most humiliating defeats ever suffered by the British Army, although it has since been largely forgotten. Six more Lancastrians died between January and March 1917 in the offensive that captured Baghdad and drove the Ottomans out of southern Mesopotamia.
Following the 2nd Battalion, King’s Own, raid on the Bulgarian lines at Bursuk on the 25 February 1918, a soldier looks after two donkeys and machine gun equipment captured in the raid. (KOM)
Soldiers of the 9th Battalion, King’s Own, in Daldi Ravine, Salonika, building a dugout. The terrain is in stark contrast to that experienced by soldiers on the Western Front in France and Belgium. Conditions were far harsher with the winters being very cold and the summers very hot, and many soldiers suffered from disease such as malaria. (KOM)
The picture below shows the grave and memorial sites in northern France and Belgium at which Lancastrians are remembered. The biggest of these sites for Lancastrians is the Menin Gate in Ypres (see also Chapter 8) where 133 Lancastrians are memorialised. The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme is second with sixty-two. A straight line between these two sites is 56 miles long, running approximately north to south. In total 606 Lancastrians are buried or memorialised within 10 miles of this line: three-quarters of those killed in France and Belgium; and nearly two-thirds of all Lancastrian casualties. Despite the First World War being a global conflict, for Lancaster at least, much of the dying took place in a remarkably small area. Totalling up the names on graves and memorials, the Ypres area has the largest number of casualties with 307; there are 150 in the Somme area; 91 near Arras; and 51 near Cambrai. These figures underestimate the numbers killed in these places: the grave sites behind the lines and at channel ports show the locations where men, wounded at the front, died of their injuries. More returned to Britain and died there as the number of graves in Lancaster’s cemeteries testifies.
Grave and memorial sites in France and Belgium (numbers refer to the number of Lancastrians buried or memorialised there).
The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing (designed by Reginald Blomfeld) was erected to commemorate the missing of the battlefield area of the Ypres Salient. It bears the names of over 54,000 officers and men from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth (except New Zealand and Newfoundland) who fell before 16 August 1917 and have no known grave. When the body of William Butterworth was discovered in 2009 near Lille, his name was removed from the Menin Gate.
The thing we remember most about the First World War is the large numbers of men in uniform who died. In rightly remembering these men, we tend to overlook the fact that many other people – both men and women – also died in the war who were not in uniform. We also tend to assume that the men in uniform died fighting. This is not always the case, for some died in accidents, of disease, or of misadventure.
Popular imagination has a very clear impression of deaths in the First World War, moulded by the first day of the Somme: that of large numbers of men being killed together in huge attacks from one set of trenches to another. Lancaster’s experience does little to support this. Most of the men who died were the only men from the town killed that day. Even the major battles tend not to conform to this stereotype. Lancaster’s worst experience was the Second Battle of Ypres: a defensive battle which has been largely forgotten. At the Somme, the worst experience was on 15 August 1916 in an operation to dig trenches, rather than 1 July. The spring and autumn of 1918 saw mass casualties, but by this point the war had become far more mobile than the trench warfare that we tend to remember. The deaths away from the Western Front follow the same pattern. Roughly the same number of Lancastrians died in Turkey (Gallipoli), Mesopotamia and Greece. The Gallipoli campaign is seared in popular memory while the Greek and, at least until recently, Mesopotamian campaigns had been almost completely forgotten. There is, of course, a significant amount of luck in the odds of death. Around 40 per cent of Lancastrians killed were in the King’s Own, and nearly half of these were in its 1st/5th Battalion; the locations of these units at crucial moments would have a major impact on the pattern of casualties. Nevertheless, this does indicate that the First World War was a far more complex event than we tend to remember and our memories and histories of it tend to be very selective, focusing on some stories and forgetting others. Focussing on one town’s experience reveals this complexity.
With the emphasis on mass death, it is easy to forget the men who came home from the war. The King’s Own Royal Regiment Museum holds papers of some such men. John Welch, for example, was a Lancaster solicitor. Having joined the Officer Training Corps in January 1915, he was commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant 4th (T.) Battalion King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, June 13, 1915, and promoted to captain in July 1917. His bills, receipts and letters suggest the challenges of an officer seeking to be appropriately clad and shod, equipped, transported, fed and watered. In January 1916 he went shopping for military supplies, purchasing a lamp, a torch, a battery, a bulb, a trench dagger, a water sterilizer, a revolver lanyard, a steel mirror, a sleeping bag, a tabloid case, a waterproof wallet, a cooker, a water bucket and a skin waistcoat. He also looked after his men: in October 1915, for example, buying ‘drinks and smokes for the troops’.
He served in France from January to August 1916, and again from May 1917 to April 1919. He was wounded during the Battle of the Somme on 8 August 1916; the King’s Own Regiment Museum holding equipment labels on which ‘deceased officer’s kit’ has been amended to ‘wounded’. His letters to his aunt at home reveal a powerful use of understatement: ‘It is rather disconcerting to be talking to a man who suddenly shows you the bottom of his boots’ (22 December 1916).
A solicitor, John Welch retired early to pursue his community interests and became a county councillor. As Chairman of the Lancashire Education Committee he was very committed to education at both school and university level. His supporting role in the establishment of the new Lancaster University in 1964 is commemorated by the ‘John Welch Room’ at the University. He married Margaret Flora Joy Lane in 1925 and had two children. His family recalls that, although he recovered from his physical injuries, he had nightmares from time to time for the rest of his life and would never talk about the war. His post-war life reminds us of the potential of the lives lost to war.
A receipt to John Welch, from C. E. Barrow, a tailor for many years on New Street, only recently closed. For ‘tunic, breeches and British Warm’. (KOM)