The Roll of Honour for the First World War of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland is now ready and will be dedicated at the service at Downpatrick on Sunday, 18th November at 3.00 pm.
Everyone is welcome at the service which will also commemorate the centenary of the end of the First World War.
The Roll contains an introduction and two sections. The first is a list, by congregation, of all the men and women, with their service details where known, who are known to have served in the First World War. The second part is an alphabetical list of all those who gave their lives in the Great War. The book runs to 50 pages and everyone who attends the service at Downpatrick will receive a complimentary copy. Thereafter the book will be available for purchase at a cost of £5 (postage not included). All profits from sales of the book will go to the Poppy Appeal and Help for Heroes.
Front Cover
Back Cover
Service to Commemorate the Centenary
of the end of the First World War and
Dedication of the Roll of Honour
in memory of all the men and women of the
Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland
who served or gave their lives in the Great War
Sunday, 18th November 3.00 pm
at the
First Presbyterian (Non-Subscribing) Church, Stream Street, Downpatrick
On this Remembrance Day, the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, I conducted Remembrance services at Clough and Downpatrick and was pleased to take part in the district Remembrance Service at the War Memorial in Downpatrick.
Faith and Freedom/Hibbert Trust Podcasts
I was also sent just today this information and links by Rev Kate Dean:
Discover the story of Emma Duffin, a Unitarian from Belfast who served as a voluntary nurse during the First World War. Thanks to her detailed Diaries we have a fascinating insight into her experiences. ‘Their Sister in Both Senses’ is written by Trevor Parkhill and the recording has been made with the support of The Hibbert Trust. The article originally appeared in the Unitarian publication Faith and Freedom. You can listen to the podcast on the Hibbert Trust SoundCloud channel, which also includes a recording about Unitarians in WWI, written and read by Alan Ruston.
The text of the original article (and Alan Ruston’s articles about Unitarians and the First World War) can be read on the Faith and Freedom Great War Project website here:
With the centenary of the end of the First World War in mind one of the things I read this morning in church was the poem ‘Aftermath’ by Siegfried Sassoon, written in 1919:
Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same – and War’s a bloody game… Have you forgotten yet?… Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz –
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack –
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads -those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?… Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.
Another curious detail of the First World War Roll of Honour of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland is the high proportion of servicemen who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Out of the 588 names on the Roll a fair number served in overseas regiments including Australia (6), New Zealand (2), and South Africa (1). In addition there were four soldiers who served in the Indian Army and three joined up in the US Army. But by far the largest category for overseas service was the Canadian armed forces which totalled 27 personnel. Of these men 11 were killed during the war.
The congregations of All Souls’, the Domestic Mission, Mountpottinger, Belfast First Church, Clough, Downpatrick, Dromore, Glenarm, Holywood, Killinchy, Larne, Newry, Rademon and Templepatrick all number Canadian servicemen amongst those who joined up. Young men who had left their homes to begin a new life in a new country answered the call to return to Europe to fight in the war. As a Dominion Canada declared war on Germany in conjunction with Great Britain and a high proportion of the early volunteers in the Canadian army were men who had emigrated originally from Britain or Ireland.
One feature of the Canadian – and also Australian and New Zealand servicemen – is the online availability of their full military records. It is quite simple to call up their records and follow their careers from enlistment onwards in some detail. It is painfully sad to read of young men killed in France or Flanders and the Canadian authorities making arrangements to send a widows’ pension to their wife perhaps in Winnipeg or perhaps in county Down. It is frequently sad to read the records of those who survived the war. Few came through the years of conflict without a wound or some experience of disease or illness. Many must have suffered for the rest of their lives.
Extract from the attestation papers of Belfast born Hugh Hanna, a member of Mountpottinger congregation who was killed serving with the 3rd Battalion Canadian Infantry. (At the top of the page can be seen part of the enlistment papers of Robert Black, a member of Downpatrick, originally from Hollymount, Ballydugan who served with the 20th Battalion Canadian Infantry but who survived the war and was discharged in January 1919).
When the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian magazine published its second collection of names of men and women who had joined up after the start of the First World War in March 1915 the entry for Ballee congregation contained one name:
Captain Wm. Crymble, RAMC. Interned at Magdeburg since Mons.
William Crymble was a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. His father was the principal of the school at Ballee and the whole family belonged to the congregation. He had trained to be a doctor in Belfast and Dublin, following his studies with positions at the Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast, Down District Asylum and Beckett Street Infirmary Leeds. Before the war he had joined the reserve of the RAMC and had been promoted to Captain on 13th July 1914. His skills were very necessary once war broke out and in August 1914 he went with the British Expeditionary Force to France.
Captain William Crymble RAMC
Attached to the 14th Field Ambulance he was amongst those taken prisoner at Le Cateau on 26th August 1914. The story of his initial capture makes for grim reading with accusations of brutality against the enemy. The medical officers were said to be prevented from attending to the wounds of the injured, they were transported in cattle trucks to the internment centre at Torgau in Germany, with little ventilation and frequently no water.
He was interned not just in Magdeburg but in a total of four camps. Magdeburg was the first and reportedly the worst with officers being thrown in prison for failing to salute a German officer, property being confiscated and the keeping of diaries forbidden. All this was reported in the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian and based on With French in France and Flanders by Rev O. S. Watkins, an army chaplain. Sanitation was poor, facilities for exercise limited and rigid discipline enforced. At one camp prisoners from different nations were split up and separated out of national groups in an effort to break down their resistance to camp discipline. Remarkably though, over the summer of 1915, William Crymble was able to return home in an exchange of prisoners. He was returned to Holywood Barracks where he declared he felt like a “fish out of water” until he could get back to the front.
He soon got his wish and was sent to Egypt to be part of the war effort with the Mediterranean Force. But here tragedy struck. On 12th October 1916 he died of enteric fever in Alexandria. One of his colleagues and a former fellow student at Queen’s said:
“On the day on which the sad news of his death was made known to the patients he had attended, the medical officer on duty was sharing the distress which was visible among the patients and could not always trust himself to speak. But the sorrow that could not find adequate personal expression was manifested on Sunday the 22nd.”
The Non-Subscribing Presbyterian reported that “Rev J.H. Bibby made touching reference to his death on the Sunday succeeding the receipt of the sad news in Ballee.”
He is buried at the Suez War Memorial Cemetery in Egypt.
On the 102nd anniversary of the beginning of the battle of the Somme in 1916 I thought I should publish on this site my appeal for any information about members of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland who served in the First World War.
I am currently in the process of compiling a full of Roll of Honour of all the men and women of the denomination who served in the Great War. This will be published at a service held at Downpatrick on Sunday, 18th November at 3.00 pm. To date I have identified over 500 men and women who served in the Great War and the names of over 80 men who gave their lives. Having issued an appeal to all churches for information I have received a great deal of help, however, I am also anxious to hear from any church members who had relatives who served in the First World War and were Non-Subscribers.
The number of people who joined up varies from one congregation to another, generally it would be larger in city or town congregations, but the numbers that have so far come to light in some places are almost certainly not complete. So I would appreciate it especially if church officers could make a check of their records and minute books just to see if there are any additional names which may have been overlooked, particularly in those churches where the numbers are currently low.
Also anyone who had a relative involved in the Great War or knows of anyone who served in the First World War and belonged to the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland can contact me on editor@faithandfreedom.org.uk to let me know their name and service record.
So far these are the numbers that I have for each congregation (with the number of people who were killed in action or died of wounds shown in brackets):
The photograph at the top of the page (taken by Baird of Belfast) is of Second-Lieutenant Percival Godding. Originally from Wandsworth he was minister of Ballyclare Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church in 1917 and was commissioned in the Royal Irish Rifles in that year. He spent six months in a German prisoner of war camp but returned home safely at the end of the war.
At the annual service of harvest thanksgiving at Downpatrick on Sunday, 2nd October we also launched a colour leaflet that commemorates the sacrifice of the three members of the congregation who were killed in the First World War. This has been carefully put together by Mary Stewart, the church secretary, and includes pictures of two of the men as well photographs of the various graveyards and memorials in which they are commemorated.
Of the three who were killed one – Captain Craig Nelson – was a professional soldier from long before the war. Craig Nelson was the grandson of the minister of the church, the Rev S.C. Nelson, and had joined the Royal Irish Rifles and served in the Boer War before transferring to the Indian Army. He was an officer of the 3rd Brahman regiment and attached to the 69th Punjabis when he was killed on the western front on 25th September 1915.
Rifleman John Hayes had joined the 1st battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles at the start of the war and was killed at the battle of the Somme on 31st October 1916. Sergeant Francis McMurray served with the 7th battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and was killed in France on 9th March 1916.
All three men are recorded on the church war memorial, however, the name only of Captain Nelson is inscribed on the town memorial and it seems very strange that the names of the other two were never added since they were both born and lived in Downpatrick before their war service.
At the harvest service two windows were decorated to commemorate those who served in the First World War with memorabilia being provided by members of the congregation and also including the commemorative certificates issued by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the three members who were killed. Most of the men who joined up in the locality would have served in the 36th (Ulster) Division, but in this case of those who died in the congregation one soldier (John Hayes) was with the Ulster Division, one (Craig Nelson) with the 7th (Meerut) Division of the Indian Expeditionary Force and one (Francis McMurray) was with the 16th (Irish) Division.
John Hayes’s niece Thelma Lowry is a member of the church and she kindly provided the photograph of her uncle for the leaflet and loaned a ceramic poppy which had been part of the notable art installation at the Tower of London in 2014 – Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red.
After the service with the leaflets: Rev Dr David Steers (minister), Mrs Thelma Lowry and Mrs Lorna Thompson (nieces of Private John Hayes), Miss Mary Stewart (church secretary) and Rev Dr John Nelson visiting preacher at the church harvest.
We don’t have a picture of Sergeant McMurray and would be very pleased to hear from anyone who is related to him or who has a picture of him.
The Downpatrick leaflet will also be uploaded to the Faith and Freedom Great War Project which can be seen here:
In my previous post on Platt Chapel (https://velvethummingbee.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/platt-chapel-rusholme/) I asked what happened to the ancient silver communion plate that belonged to the chapel and included a silver porringer dated to 1641. Both Len Smith and Ann Peart tell me that they think this was deposited in the Treasury at York Minster, which is very encouraging to know.
Len also tells me that his record of the clapper falling from the bell cote as the bell was rung for worship one night happened in his presence. In those days the chapel was used as a placement for students and it was during his time as a student at the Unitarian College that the old bell finally lost its clapper, narrowly missing the heads of those arriving for worship.
The bell, without its clapper, still hangs above the chapel, so far as I know. It is not clear what happened to the many memorials that were situated in the chapel, including Worsley family hatchments. Part of the chapel was separated to form what was known as the Worsley Chapel and here some of that family had been buried. This was later screened off and must still be there, possibly still with memorials but certainly complete with tombs.
Another piece of information which I received from Len is entirely new to me. Edwin Swindells’ history of 1959 mentions the unveiling of a memorial to a chapel member who was killed in the First World War in 1919. The memorial took the form of a stained glass window and he records it as follows:
In 1919, the memorial window to the late Lieut. Siegfried Herford, only son of Professor and Mrs. C. H. Herford, who was killed in the war, was placed in the chapel by some of his friends.
Len Smith has sent me a picture of this very fine window, taken when it was still in the chapel but which, he tells me, is now at the Eskdale Outward Bound Centre:
Memorial window in Platt Chapel (Photo: Len Smith)
The window includes the inscription:‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help’, Psalm 121:1
The Herford family were very prominent Unitarians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A number of them were ministers and many of them were educationalists or academics of very great achievement.
“Professor and Mrs. C. H. Herford” were Charles Harold Herford (who has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and his wife Marie (née Betge). C.H. Herford was a highly respected literary scholar and in the course of his distinguished academic career was professor of English Literature at Manchester University from 1901 to 1921. In this time he might have been expected to attend Cross Street Chapel where his family had many connections and his maternal grandfather (John Gooch Robberds) had been minister. However, they seem to have had a connection with Platt Chapel and following the death of their only son in France in January 1916 a memorial window was erected in Platt Chapel in his memory.
Edwin Swindells describes Siegfried Herford as Lieutenant but this seems to be a mistake. Although he was a member of the Manchester University Officer Training Corps from 1909 to 1913 and applied for a commission at the outbreak of war eventually he enlisted in the 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers (Sportsmen’s Battalion) in February 1915 and was sent to France soon after where he was killed at Bethune on 28th January 1916.
Much of this detail comes from the Manchester University Roll of Honour (http://www.ww1.manchester.ac.uk/roll-of-honour/) where he features and which also notes that he graduated from Manchester in 1912 with a first class BSc before going on to complete a thesis for his MSc which was never awarded following the onset of the war. This is a very useful site, although not free of error, it mentions the memorial window as being “believed to have been rescued from a chapel in Didsbury that was demolished,” but it does have some good detail about his German background (which is claimed on some websites as being the reason for him not being commissioned) – he had a German mother and spent part of his education in Germany. It may have been here that he developed his love of mountains and climbing which was an area in which he came to excel in his short life.
He was a very notable person in climbing circles and despite being killed at the age of just 24 has a degree of fame in those circles that has lasted to this day. The short biography of him on the site of the Mountain Heritage Trust describes him as being “widely credited with being the first rock-climber in the ‘modern’ twentieth century idiom (he is celebrated for the ascent of the first ever ‘Hard Very Severe’ rock climb: Scafell’s Central Buttress)” and any internet search throws up dramatic photographs of him perched on the top of ledges or ridges or in the company of such luminaries as George Mallory. He has been the subject of films and a full length biography by Keith Treacher (Siegfried Herford: An Edwardian Rock-Climber) was published in 2000.
He was buried in the Brown’s Road Military Cemetery, Festubert, Pas de Calais, France (http://www.everymanremembered.org/profiles/soldier/188954/) but was included on the University of Manchester War Memorial in the main quadrangle, the bronze Fell and Rock Climbing Club memorial to those of its members killed in the First World War and situated on the summit of Great Gable in the Lake District, and some of his friends paid for the stained glass window depicting him climbing which was unveiled in Platt Chapel in 1919 and later moved to the Eskdale Outward Bound Centre.
How it came to be moved from Platt Chapel is detailed in a short article by Muriel Files in the 1974 (No 64 Volume XXII No II) issue of ‘The Fell and Rock Journal’:
The existence of the window came to the notice of the committee after Siegfried Herford’s sister, Mrs. Braunholtz, wrote to the Secretary about her anxiety as to its future because she had heard that Platt (Unitarian) Chapel in Manchester, where the window is situated, was threatened with demolition…In fact, there proved to be no immediate threat to the window although the chapel is indeed no longer needed by the Unitarian Church and the Trustees are seeking a suitable purchaser.
At the time the intention seemed to be to move the window to UCM, although this clearly never happened. Muriel Files goes on to say something more about the window:
The window was given in memory of Siegfried Herford by C. E. Montague of the Guardian, known to some mountaineers for his essay ‘In Hanging Garden Gully’, surely one of the most entertaining climbing tales ever written. Of the figure representing her brother Mrs. Braunholtz writes: ‘It was based on a photograph taken by a fellow climber and is a very good likeness of my brother, even to the shock of fair hair described by Geoffrey Winthrop Young. The window makes his face look a little more bony than it actually did—after all he was only 24 and still had a boyish look’.
We will add the photograph of the memorial window in Platt Chapel depicting Siegfried Herford to the Faith and Freedom Great War Project (http://www.faithandfreedom.org.uk/GWindex.htm).
(Top photograph on this page, Scafell Pike, Wikimedia Commons)
The edition of Christian Life published to celebrate the centenary of the Trinity Act never fails to provide something of interest. Leafing through its pages the other day looking for something else I chanced upon the half page or so celebrating Willaston School. As with everything else in the whole issue it gives a celebratory account of the institution in question. I notice that the regular Sunday services were conducted by the headmaster or the Unitarian minister in Nantwich and that religious teaching in the school consisted of “instruction in the Bible, and in the history of liberal thought and religion”. The fees were £63 per annum although bursaries were available for the sons of ministers. It paints a positive picture of music, the classics, cricket etc. with every boy cultivating his own allotment in the twenty-four acres of grounds and “a resident staff of university men”. It provided “a public school education on modern lines”. For those who could afford it, it was a golden age, the last days of the old order before everything was changed utterly by the First World War.
One of the things the recently published book Willaston School Nantwich edited by Andrew Lamberton and published by Willaston and District History Group brings out is how heavily militarised the school became after the war started. There is nothing unusual in that but nearly every boy and member of staff became a member of the Army Cadet Corps and many of them were to be killed at the front in a matter of years, a great many of them decorated for bravery as I have already noticed in the previous post. At least one founding pupil took a different view though. Although I have mentioned him in the forthcoming review of the book that will appear in the 2016 issue of the Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society I didn’t mention him in the previous post. William Mellor joined the school in 1900 and went on to Exeter College, Oxford. He was a prefect and a captain of cricket and football. He ended up as editor of the Daily Herald and the Tribune and during the First World War was a conscientious objector. His career was not without significance in the development of the Labour party. William Mellor shared radical socialist views with his brother, the Rev Stanley Mellor, minister at Hope Street Church, Liverpool. William and Stanley were the sons of Rev William Mellor, Unitarian minister at Huddersfield before the First World War. I am grateful to Andrew Mellor, grandson of the William in the photograph below, for this family information.
But one other short passage from the Willaston book stuck in my mind. In the chapter on 1914-1924 short passages illustrating the activities of the Cadets are given, taken from the school magazine, including this one on page 45:
In April 1918, “We have only had one lecture this term; that was a most interesting one from Captain Kitchen, (Old Willastonian) Assistant Instructor at the Command Gas School Aldershot. Besides the description of the uses of gas, various specimens of gas masks displayed, practical demonstrations were given of tear-gas and smoke bombs.”
This must have been R.T. Kitchen who was at the school from 1903 to 1908. The first use of gas by British troops came at the battle of Loos in 1915. It was not a success, the wind blew the gas back into the British trenches. Later in the war the allies also utilised mustard gas. A grim job indeed to be assistant instructor at the Gas Command School.
Willaston School Football XI 1908. With thanks to Andrew Lamberton
In one of the many images in the Willaston School Nantwich book there is a picture of the Football XI in 1908 (page 60). There they sit, the first eleven, a confident looking W. Mellor (captain) seated in the centre. To his left is Norman Ebbutt who served in the RNVS throughout the First World War, and who later became The Times correspondent in Berlin until he was expelled by Goebbels. To William Mellor’s right is a young R.T. Kitchen.
Founder Philip Barker and a view of the school from the ‘Christian Life’ 1913
The First World War cast an enormous shadow over the past century. It had a cataclysmic effect on all aspects of society, no one was left untouched by it – homes, families, schools, factories, businesses, and, of course, churches. There are many ways in which the centenary of the Great War is being marked and most churches are spending some time over the current period reflecting on the conflict, its impact and its legacy. Faith and Freedom is establishing a special section of its website to reflect upon the conflict from the point of view of the churches and other faith groups. The website will be developed in a number of different ways. It will contain scholarly and thoughtful articles on the Great War, particularly in relation to churches and their participation in the War. The first three articles to go online are Unitarian Attitudes to the First World War, by Alan Ruston, The Centenary of the First World War and the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, by David Steers; and ‘Their sister in both senses’. The memoirs of Emma Duffin V.A.D. nurse in the First World War by Trevor Parkhill. Trevor is editor of The First World War Diaries of Emma Duffin, Belfast Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2014) and his article gives an intensely moving account of the First World War experiences in hospitals at the front of Belfast-born Unitarian Emma Duffin (a direct descendant of William Drennan, the founder of the United Irishmen and a cousin of Thomas Andrews designer of the Titanic) who volunteered to serve as a nurse and spent three harrowing years tending the wounded.
The second section will contain accounts of commemorations and acts of remembrance made during the current centenary period and readers are very much encouraged to send in reports of their events. The first example is a thoughtful and intensely moving service held at Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the War. We are also seeking to record the names and details of church members who served in the First World War and we begin with a very full account of the contribution and service, with pictures, of members of the Great Meeting, Hinckley.
Private Stanley Jennings of Hinckley, of the 15th Battalion Durham Light Infantry. Killed in France 3rd May 1917, aged 29
We also aim to build up a database of images of First World War memorials. Does your church have a memorial to its members who served in the First World War? If it does then please send a digital picture to go on the website. We are also actively seeking images and details of memorials that were placed in churches that are now closed, which may now be lost or which may have been put in a different location.
Memorial to Lieutenant R.L. Neill, Holywood co. Down. Killed at the battle fo the Somme
We also hope to include material – including photographs, sermons, writings, printed ephemera etc that date from the time of the War which can then be studied on our site.
A postcard sent to members of Great George Street Congregational Chapel, Liverpool serving at the front. Featuring a picture of the minister and his wife and a written message. P.S.A. stands for Pleasant Sunday Afternoon, a popular form of church entertainment at the time
We might also eventually include complete Rolls of Honour – for individual congregations and denominations. The whereabouts of the Roll of Honour relating to the churches that are now part of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches has been a matter of some discussion recently. If we had the full list of names we could add it to the site. The Roll of Honour of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland also seems to have been begun but not completed. It would be good to see that completed and available online. With the co-operation of readers the site will be built up over time. If you would like to participate please contact the editor at editor@faithandfreedom.org.uk To view the website go to: http://www.faithandfreedom.org.uk/GWindex.htm
velvethummingbee 