In memory of those who survived...

…as well as those who fell.

I have my lovely brother to thank for this wonderful bit of research. There was a family story that our local newspaper had carried an article about four brothers who were fighting France in WWI. We assumed that one of the brothers was my grandfather, Sam. He had run away to join the fighting early in 1916 while he was still only 15 years old. So we had looked for articles between 1916 and 1918.

In preparation for the WWI commemorations next year, local volunteers have been cataloguing references to soldiers in local newspapers from 1914 to 1918. My brother spotted a reference to four different Whalleys in one edition in late 1915. It was this article, and turned out to be about four of my grandfather’s older brothers. All four brothers had enlisted at the outbreak of war and gone off to fight in France. By late 1915, three of them were still there, while one had been injured and taken back to a hospital in Scotland.

In 1916, my grandfather worked in France as a stable lad, looking after the officers’ horses, until he was old enough to join up as a private in the Royal Fusiliers. He spoke about WWI rarely, but I remember him talking about the Battle of the Somme (late 1916), and he suffered all his life from the after-effects of mustard gas in the trenches at the Battle of Passchendaele (late 1917) near Ypres (which he delighted in pronouncing “wipers”).

The miraculous thing is that all five brothers survived, came back to civilian life, married, had children, and lived to a ripe old age!