Courtesy of Roy Field, the retired Shropshire county librarian, I have received a copy of the Free Trail Guide ‘Walk in the Footsteps of Wilfred Owen in Scarborough’. Roy also took some photographs for this piece. After his discharge from Craiglockhart and a short spell of leave, Owen re-joined his unit (the 3/5th Bn the […]
In August 1914, as the German army advanced, and the Belgian army prepared a defensive line, 20 year old Marie Van Eylen escaped her small village near Louvain in Belgium. With her mother and stepfather, with only the belongings they could carry, she travelled to Antwerp, and from there to London. After a few weeks […]
The family were tanners in Kingsland, Shrewsbury. Adeline and James Cock had three daughters and two sons spread over seventeen years. They were affluent with four female servants; cook, kitchen-maid, parlour-maid and housemaid. When they named the last child, a son, had they anticipated that he would have to live up to that name? Geoffrey […]
Straddling the border, near Whitchurch in Shropshire and Wrexham in Wales, lies one of the biggest and best raised bogs in Britain. Fenn’s, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses were to play a key part in the First World War. Some 1.7m soldiers from the UK were wounded in the course of the First World War. When […]
Who would have guessed that barbed wire would prove the inspiration for Shropshire’s own war poet Wilfred Owen? At the opening of Exposure he draws upon those years walking from their home in Cherry Orchard, Shrewsbury along the Severn. Exposure Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . . Wearied we keep […]
To mark the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele, the Dept for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the advice of Historic England has up-graded Shrewsbury War Memorial, from Grade II to Grade II* Due to its scupltural, architectural and historic interest: as an eloquent witness to the tragic impact of world events on the […]
In the town cemetery in Market Drayton there is a civilian grave to a man who died towards the end of the First World War. He is buried here as he met his death in the skies over the town. Cuthbert Everard Brisley was born into the officer class. At public school, Lancing College, he […]
The biggest single influx of refugees in the history of this country was the product of the opening months of the First World War, as Belgian refugees fled their own country (95% occupied by the German armies) via the Channel ports to Britain. For the volunteers scouring contemporary accounts in local newspapers and the resources […]
The 21st May 2017 will mark the Centenary of the Imperial War Graves Commission. Now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) it was created by Royal Charter with the Prince of Wales as its first President. CWGC marks its Centenary with the launch of a series of projects aimed at promoting wider awareness of its […]
Did even the Government in 1914 believe ‘it would be over by Christmas’? For two years it lamentably failed to address our greatest strategic vulnerability – the dependence on imported food for 60% of the nation’s diet. In 1914 we produced 19% of our wheat (today 83%). The Germans had imposed duties of 33% on cereals […]
