Animals at War

This was done by the Friday Feeling Youth Group for the Armistice Weekend. There were some amazing displays in the Chapel and Church a great deal of hard work has gone into the research of men in the village who were killed  and some who didn't live here but their families do now. Photos and history. The school children have also contributed, by making flags with poppies or sayings on them and they were hung in the churchyard maypole style from the trees and the Brownies had painted poppies on white stones. Ther was also displays about nurses in WW1 and even the nearby Barnbow Munitions factory which had a terrible loss of life in an explosion. see below

It was just after 10pm on Tuesday 5th December 1916, when several hundred women and girls had just begun their night shift. Their tasks that fateful evening consisted as they normally did, of filling, fusing, finishing off and packing 4½ inch shells. Room 42 was mainly used for the filling, and between 150 and 170 girls worked there. Shells were brought to the room already loaded with high explosive and all that remained was the insertion of the fuse and the screwing down of the cap. A girl inserted the fuse by hand, screwed it down and then it was taken and placed into a machine that revolved the shell and screwed the fuse down tightly.
At 10.27pm a violent explosion rocked the very foundations of Room 42 killing 35 women outright, maiming and injuring dozens more. In some cases identification was only possible by the identity disks worn around the necks of the workers. The machine where the explosion had occurred was completely destroyed. Steam pipes had burst open and covered the floor with a cocktail of blood and water.
Due to the censorship of that time, no account of the accident was made public; however in a special order of the day issued from the British HQ in France, Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haigh paid tribute to the devotion and sacrifice of the munitions workers. The only clue to a tragedy having happened was in the many death notices in the Yorkshire Evening Post that stated, “killed by accident”.
It was not until six years after the war that the public were told the facts for the first time. One story was that one worker was ill so her sister had taken her place that night and was killed, she never got over it.