Introduction
Memorials
The aftermath of the Great War saw tens of thousands of monuments built to honour the dead in what remains Britain’s biggest-ever wave of public commemoration. Most cities, towns and villages chose to build permanent stone memorials inscribed with the names of the fallen. Winchester is unusual in that no such monument was ever erected. This is not to say that the city authorities never considered commissioning one. Various plans – including a Temple of Honour on St Giles Hill and a memorial roadway to be called the Scared Way, running from the cathedral to Southgate Street – were discussed but rejected on cost grounds. The memorial that was eventually erected at the west end of the cathedral on 31 October 1921 remembered the fallen from the county, from the Hampshire Regiment and from Winchester but, crucially, the individual names of the fallen were not commemorated.
By contrast, the memorials at St Paul’s Church, Fulflood, and St Matthew’s Church, Weeke, are inscribed with the names of many, although not all, of the men associated with the parish who died in the war. The oak Memorial Board at St Paul’s commemorates 91 men who gave their lives – 78 from Fulflood and 13 from Weeke. The red, leather-bound Memorial Book held in St Matthew’s lists 90 men.
Both memorials are representative of a complex national response to the trauma of the Great War. The sheer scale of the public’s involvement inevitably fed into this response when the war ended. For the first time in a major conflict, volunteers and conscripts had vastly outnumbered professional soldiers and so memorials needed to cater for the wishes of the civilian population as well as the military.
The parish memorials therefore served an important purpose in the years after the Great War. Many of those who died once worshipped at the churches and the memorials would have provided a tangible focus for their loved ones’ grief. However, as the years passed, and those surviving relatives also slipped into memory then so the names on the memorials became less familiar. Today, other than on Remembrance Sunday, it is unlikely they receive a second glance from visitors or congregation.
That is why in 2015 two people, Geraldine Buchanan and Josephine Coleman, began working on the Great War Dead of Fulflood and Weeke (GWDFW). By 2016, two people had become six. As Britain marked the centenary of the conflict, the painstaking task of researching the 91 names on the two memorials carried on. The aim was to uncover the ‘lost’ stories behind those names and bring them together in a book and on the group’s website (www.greatwardeadwinchesterfulfloodweeke.com) compiled by Steve Jarvis. The stories are, of course, deeply poignant but they also provide a fascinating snapshot of life in the early days of the modern parish.
The men listed on the memorials came from different socio-economic backgrounds which largely reflected the class division between the two halves of the parish. The population in 1914 stood at around 4,800, the great majority of whom lived in Fulflood. However, Weeke was more well-heeled. As Barrie Brinkman shows A History of Weeke, the late 19th Century exodus of middle-class residents from Winchester’s increasingly crowded city centre led to the establishment of a prosperous new community in Weeke, centred on Bereweeke Road, Chilbolton Avenue and upper Cheriton Road. The Weeke men remembered on the memorials are therefore overwhelmingly officers, many of whom – like 2nd Lieutenant Henry Gould, son of parish rector Charles Gould - had been educated at public school.
In Fulflood, the late Victorian and Edwardian period had seen development on both sides of the Stockbridge Road. In terms of the scale of building and the type of housing, this half of the parish was the Badger Farm of its day and home to teachers, clerks, railway workers, soldiers and sailors, builders, gardeners and many more. An address in Fulflood may not have carried the same cachet as one in Bereweeke Road, but with its solid middle class and aspirational working-class residents who believed in self-help, the family and individual responsibility, the area was overwhelmingly God-fearing and respectable.
Of the 13 men listed on the memorials who had addresses in Weeke, nine were commissioned officers, reflecting the area’s higher social status. Of course, several of the Fulflood fallen did serve as officers but the majority did so as rank and file or NCOs. This did not make them lesser fighting men. Henry Churcher, a gardener from Avenue Road who enlisted in 1914 at the age of 23, proved to be a natural soldier and leader of men, winning promotion to Company Sergeant Major and the Military Medal for gallantry.
Breaking the men down by individual services, 82 served in the British Army, of whom 15 were officers and 68 ‘rank and file’ (Privates and NCOs). Five men served in the Royal Navy and Mercantile Marine and four in the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service. Together, they fought in most of the principal theatres of war – the Western Front, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), Egypt, Palestine, Persia, East Africa and even Russia.
Men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and East Africa with family connections to the parish, volunteered to fight for the ‘Mother Country’ and they, too, are remembered on the memorials. One of these, James Dennistoun, had been on Captain Scott’s expedition to Antarctica in 1912. He survived that only to die in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
Researching the project
The men’s stories were compiled using a range of sources. The websites www.ancestry.co.uk and www.findmypast.co.uk give access to the decennial census records of 1841 to 1911 which provide details such as family relationships, ages, addresses and occupations. Other records available through the websites include registers of births, marriages and deaths, electoral rolls, school rolls, details of wills and probate, trade union membership and emigration and immigration, to name but a few. The websites also provide information on the men’s military service – enlistment and military pension records, medal entitlement, casualty and prisoner-of-war lists and the official War Office publication Soldiers Died in the Great War 1914-1919. However, the destruction of many soldiers’ records during the Blitz in 1940 remains a major stumbling block to researchers.
One important local source was the Winchester War Service Register (WWSR) of 1921. Published by the city authorities to commemorate those men from the city who served in the armed forces ‘from the Declaration of War to the Signing of the Armistice’, it contains 3,454 names, including some 770 men from Fulflood and Weeke. It also identifies 459 city men who were killed or died, of whom about 20 per cent came from the parish. Although one of the criteria for inclusion in the WWSR was that the man had to have lived in Winchester in 1914, this was not followed to the letter. The aforementioned James Dennistoun, for example, was living in New Zealand running his parents’ sheep station when the Great War began. James’s family clearly pulled strings with the compilers of the Register to get his name included.
The WWSR gives each man’s name and address (although these are sometimes misleading) together with his rank, date of enlistment, the branch of the forces and unit(s) in which he served and details of where he served. It also lists any medals awarded for gallantry and whether he was wounded. If the man was killed, then details of where and when he died are also given.
The WWSR undoubtedly contains the names of the great majority of Winchester men who served in the Great War, but it is not a complete list. Several of those listed on the memorials at St Matthew’s and St Paul’s do not appear in the Register – Charles Goodwin, Leopold Sothcott and Charles Hawker to name but three. In fact, it is the belief of Steve Jarvis, who has spent many years compiling a database of Hampshire war memorials, that there are 108 additional men listed on surviving Great War memorials across Winchester who do not appear in the WWSR.
Debt of Honour, by Jen Best and Tom Beaumont James, fleshes out the basic facts given in the WWSR by providing more information on the 459 city dead, including most of those researched for this book. However, while extremely useful, the amount of detailed information given on each man is still limited. The aim of the GWDFW project has been to provide a fuller, more rounded biography of each of the 91 men and in the process bring to life a defining period in the history of Fulflood and Weeke. To that end, we made use of other primary sources such as local newspapers, street directories and regimental archives and war diaries. We also spoke to several of the men’s descendants whose recollections and photographs enriched those biographies immeasurably.
Editorial method
In preparing each biography we have endeavoured to give the address that the man was living at when he went to war or his last address before he was killed. However, correctly identifying where the men lived has not always proved straightforward. Fulflood and Weeke were both expanding in this period and there were frequent changes to house numbering and road names. For example, both the WWSR and Debt of Honour (which uses the same addresses as the WWSR) record Andrew Bogie living at 2, St Paul’s Terrace, an address which is 20, St Paul’s Hill today.
Moreover, the addresses in the WWSR are sometimes different from those given in earlier census records. Often, this was because by 1921, when the WWSR was published, families had moved from the homes they had occupied when their menfolk went to war. For example, the WWSR gives Francis Forder’s address as 75, Parchment Street (his mother’s address from 1918) whereas in 1914, when he enlisted with the 4th Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, he was living with his mother and grandmother at 30, North View in Fulflood.
To help readers, this book gives the man’s original wartime address and the modern address if it has changed. We have indicated this in the title piece introducing each biography by listing the modern address in brackets after the original address. Likewise, if a property is no longer standing then that is also indicated in brackets.
Each man’s rank (the highest shown in the various records) is also given together with his service number - or numbers – and the military unit in which he served. In the case of soldiers this is his battalion and regiment and for sailors the ship on which he was serving when he was killed. Details of the men’s medal entitlement are listed together with their place of burial or commemoration plus any wording that appears on their grave or memorial.
The biographies differ in length and detail according to the amount of information uncovered. Some men proved extraordinarily difficult to research – Charles Goodwin and William Mitchell, for example. Indeed, Goodwin is the only name of the 91 listed on the memorials for whom a Fulflood or Weeke connection has yet to be discovered.
In several cases the chronology of a man’s military service has been difficult to unravel. Often this was because he had transferred between battalions or regiments on unspecified dates. Signaller Jack Fifield, for example, served with three battalions of the Hampshire Regiment (the 1st, 14th and 15th) between 1916 and 1918 but no record has been found showing when he moved from one to the other. Without these details it has occasionally been necessary to employ a degree of educated guesswork to try to reconstruct what happened to individual men during the war.
In general, the military backgrounds of those men who served as officers proved easier to research as they figure more frequently in battalion war diary reports, regimental journals and newspaper reports. The wealth of material relating to Brigadier-General Ronald Maclachlan and Major Harold Forster enabled us to produce detailed biographies of both men. By contrast, far less could be gleaned about Lance-Corporal Frederick White who consequently remains a more shadowy figure.
There are, of course, exceptions to the above rule. Those men of the 4th Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment who died in Turkish captivity after the siege of Kut-al-Amara are well documented in the Comforts Fund ledgers of Mrs Esme Bowker, widow of the battalion’s CO. These fascinating records, and many others, are now held at the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum.
The parish response to war
Fulflood and Weeke’s response to the outbreak of war in August 1914 was determined by many factors but, initially at least, by Winchester’s status as a garrison city. While most Britons did not discover that the country was at war until the morning of 5 August 1914 (and much later in remote areas), the situation in Winchester was different. Reservists for the Hampshire Regiment and the two Rifles regiments began to arrive at the city’s Army depots on 4 August, even before Britain’s ultimatum to Germany had expired. By the following day, the depots were packed. The Hampshire Chronicle reported that:
... [t]he Royal Proclamation to mobilise the Army has had an extraordinary effect upon the military forces. On Wednesday [5 August] there were scenes of such enthusiasm as have rarely accompanied military preparations in this country. Battalions gave way from time to time to their feelings by vociferous cheering, and as one passed barrack-rooms the vocal evidence of satisfaction were volleyed out of the windows in unmistakeable fashion. The spirit of the Army has shown itself to be magnificent, and the contrast from the quiet, strained demeanour... during the days of suspense was most remarkable. Probably never before has the Army mobilised with such evidence of rejoicing.
Over the following weeks, the ‘militarisation’ of Winchester continued as troops mobilised on the downs surrounding the city and there were soon 20,000 men – equivalent almost to Winchester’s entire population – living in makeshift camps. A number of men from Fulflood and Weeke, almost certainly caught up in the excitement of the moment, enlisted at this time, helping to make August 1914 the parish’s peak recruitment month of the entire war rather than September which had the highest rate nationally.
Different factors influenced the men who joined up in September. The initial surge of enthusiasm had by then given way to a more sober mood, described by the Hampshire Chronicle as one ‘of grim determination, of the calm that comes to men with minds made up to see a thing through’. The pages of the Chronicle clearly show that most people, shocked by the invasion of Belgium and reports of German atrocities there, regarded Britain’s cause as just.
Overlaid on this was a strong sense of duty, particularly evident among men who enlisted immediately after the publication of the Amiens Dispatch in The Times on 29 August. This laid bare the scale of the British Army’s defeat at the Battle of Mons a few days earlier and its subsequent retreat. In the six days between 30 August and 5 September 1914 nearly 175,000 across Britain volunteered for military service. This compared to 100,000 who had done so in the three weeks between 4 and 22 August. These slightly later volunteers therefore enlisted not at the moment of greatest jingoistic enthusiasm but when it appeared that Britain might be about to lose the war.
Men were also motivated by other factors, especially a belief in the justness of Britain’s cause, a growing hatred of Germany, a desire to be seen to be behaving appropriately and a sense of duty. There was also an intense social pressure to enlist, particularly among friends. This helps to explain why no fewer than 17 of the 91 names (nearly 1 in 5) on the parish memorials are men who served in the 4th Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment.
The 4th Hampshires were Winchester’s equivalent of a Pals’ Battalion. Several men had joined as Territorials in the pre-war years – among them Andrew Bogie, Frank Coles and Eric Rule - and in August and September 1914 the 4th Hampshires became the ‘go to’ battalion for even more. William Hooker, of 71, Western Road (a house later renumbered and now in Cheriton Road), wrote later about how he came to enlist with the 4th Hampshires on 5 September 1914:
The daily papers were calling out for recruits to join the forces. I was just 18 and considered it was my duty to go. I talked it over with my father who said he would put nothing in my way. Some of my friends had joined the local Territorial [battalion] in Winchester so I went along and became a soldier.
A sense of duty, establishment pressure via the newspapers and social pressure from his friends – William Hooker was a very typical volunteer in 1914.
Although money was a motivating factor in more deprived areas of Britain, there is little evidence it played an important role in Fulflood and Weeke where unemployment was low, and most families were either solid working class or lower middle class. The list of occupations among the fallen from the 4th Hampshires shows that the recruits were overwhelmingly ‘respectable’ – Andrew Bogie, for example, was a schoolteacher, Eric Rule an auctioneer’s clerk, Leslie Jacob an apprentice dentist, Cecil Shefferd a council clerk, Frank Coles a printer’s compositor and Frank Chapman a legal clerk. These men did not volunteer for the money, but rather because it was the ‘right thing to do’.
The human cost of war
Calculating the percentage of serving men from Fulflood and Weeke’s who died is tricky. The 91 men listed on the memorials do not represent the total parish death toll as the WWSR includes at least another seven men who died and had lived in the parish and there may well be more. (See Missing Men). Nor, as we have seen, does the WWSR include everyone with a strong Winchester connection who served. However, it is estimated that around 12 per cent of those parish men listed on the memorials were killed or died from wounds or illnesses whilst still in the Army (91 deaths out of about approximately 770 parish names in the WWSR). This is higher than the national average of 11.5 per cent but lower than the overall Winchester figure of 13.2 per cent. However, if one adds the parish men who died but who are not included on the memorials – at least seven - then the figure is approaching the same as the Winchester average.
Of course, this figure only represents the dead; the great majority of men who served in the forces came home at the end of the war. Looking through the WWSR, one is struck by the number of men from the parish who enlisted. In some streets virtually every household had a family member serving at home or overseas. One might expect this to be the case after the introduction of conscription in early 1916, but what is significant about Fulflood and Weeke (and Winchester in general) is just how many men volunteered in 1914 and 1915. In fact, between August and December 1914 alone, voluntary recruitment in Winchester exceeded that in all of 1916, the most successful recruiting year under conscription.
Many households in the parish sent two, three or more men to serve. For example, five Soffe brothers fought in theatres as far afield as France, Salonika and Mesopotamia. Four lived – or had lived – with their parents at 17, St Paul’s Hill (8, Upper Stockbridge Road before the road was renamed and renumbered) while the other brother lived at 22, North View. Two of the brothers, George and Henry, were killed and both are mentioned on the parish memorials. The Stroud family of 7, Western Road also lost two sons, Bertram and George, as did James Wedge, of 8, Andover Road, whose sons Charles and James were killed. Other families were more fortunate: all six Snow brothers, of 41, Fairfield Road, served and survived.
Several schools attended by the fallen still exist. Many went as infants to Western School, then in Elm Road, and from there to St Thomas Church of England Elementary School in Mews Lane, which was eventually amalgamated into Kings’ School. There, they are remembered on the St Thomas School Memorial Board. Some attended Peter Symonds Grammar School, now the Sixth Form College, and they too have a memorial board. Others went to prep schools and public schools such as Winchester College, whose dead are remembered on a magnificent War Cloister. A handful trained to be teachers at the Winchester Diocesan Training College, whose buildings now form part of Winchester University.
Although parish men joined Army regiments from across Britain – and, indeed, the Empire – many enlisted with those based in Winchester, namely The Rifle Brigade, The King’s Royal Rifle Corps and The Hampshire Regiment. No fewer than 30 of the 91 men commemorated on the memorials served with the Hampshires and the first of the book’s four appendices examines the role of the regiment’s 4th Battalion in Mesopotamia in 1915 and 1916, particularly at the siege of Kut and during its tragic aftermath.
The second appendix provides a chronology of the major British offensives on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918. By this stage of the war the British Expeditionary Force numbered more than two million men, up from just 75,000 in 1914, and was mounting increasingly complex, multi-phase campaigns lasting several months. The Somme Offensive, fought between 1 July and 18 November 1916, is usually described as a single battle whereas it comprised 12 battles and three distinct phases. Rather than simply state that a man ‘was killed at the Battle of the Somme’ we have tried, wherever possible, to identify the specific military action he was fighting in at the time of his death. Readers can then use the appendix to place that action within the context of the whole campaign.
The battles of 1914 and 1915 do not feature in the appendix. This is not to belittle their importance but simply a recognition that these were smaller operations, usually comprising a single phase. They are covered – as are the Battle of Jutland and the Gallipoli campaign - in the biographies of the men who died fighting in them.
The third appendix provides a guide to the structure of the British Army during the war, including the composition of the various units and who commanded them. There is also a short section on the role of the battalion which, along with the regiment, was regarded by soldiers as their military ‘home’.
A list of the men from the parish who died in the war but who are not mentioned on either of the church memorials is included.
We hope that the book will be read by local historians as well as by those in the parish, and wider Winchester, who want to learn more about a defining period of our recent history. We particularly hope that it will prove a valuable resource for local schools where the Great War continues to be an important component of the history curriculum.
Inevitably, the book will contain errors and the authors have worked hard to keep them to the minimum, checking and re-checking sources. There can be errors in the original documents and even on memorials. As more and more records are put online and more cross-referencing can be done, it will be possible gradually to reduce the amount of error. More information about these men will become available and for those particularly interested in an individual there could already be more material to be found online. We welcome any corrections and amendments or new information that adds to their story. Let us know via our email address: greatwardeadwinchesterfulfloodweeke@outlook.com
The project’s website www.greatwardeadwinchesterfulfloodweeke.com contains all the men’s biographies. Additions and amendments will be included in the website.
The project has opened a window on a different world. We would probably recognise the streets and buildings of the parish 100 years ago, but so much else would be unfamiliar – the importance of Christian faith and patriotism, the way in which several generations of a family lived together in often cramped conditions and above all, perhaps, the proximity of death. Antibiotics and mass immunisation programmes did not exist and diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria and enteritis wreaked havoc, particularly among young children. Many of the families researched for this book lost one or more children to disease only to be visited by tragedy once more in the Great War.
The book does not seek to glorify war. However, it does recognise that the men of Fulflood and Weeke, like millions more across Britain, answered the call to arms in the full knowledge of what it might ultimately cost. It is for that selflessness that we remember them.
Derek Whitfield
Geraldine Buchanan
Josephine Coleman
Cheryl Davis
Steve Jarvis
Jenny Watson
Spring 2021