World War One in Long Crendon
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WORLD WAR ONE IN LONG CRENDON Pat Mullan 2018 Lest we forget This piece of work all started when walking with my granddaughters between the park and the shop in search of ice cream. One of them noticed the war memorial. Reading a few of the names she said “who are all these people?” I explained they were men from the village who had died in a war nearly 100 years ago and their names were engraved in the stone so that they would always be remembered - but it started me thinking. Who were they really? Many of the names are familiar in the village but many are not. As a keen amateur genealogist, I started to research some of them and began to discover where these men died, what they did before the war, who their families were and their links to the village. I was hooked! Some were lost at sea, some died in battle and have no known grave, some died in action or of wounds in field hospitals and one of them died of an illness while on leave. Three men died after the Armistice, two of pneumonia (probably as a result of flu) and one of the complications of spinal injuries sustained in the Navy. These men served in France, Flanders, at sea and in the Middle East. They came from a range of backgrounds and many worked on the local farms. Descendants of a number of them live in the village to this day The War Memorial was unveiled on the 19th November 1920. The Ceremony was attended by Colonel F T Higgins-Bernard of the of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry What follows is a short chapter on each of the men named on the war memorial 1914 Frederick Organ 1917 Willis Janes George Newton John R. Ing John E. A. Hampton 1915 George Eadle William T. Hinton Bertram G. Ralph Edward E. C. Gomme William Towersey George Buckle George Hawkes Frederick Horton Reginald J. Culverwell William E. Gascoyne William Rush William Blows Walter Hawkes John Wyatt William Smith Arthur Peacock Frederick G. Warner Frank Shrimpton Ernest G. Lovell 1916 Ambrose Organ 1918 Frank Markham Victor Pearce George Mortemore John T. Warner Stephen A. Gomme John G. Ralph Charles Rutland Harry Smith Joseph Beckett Sidney A. Shrimpton Edward Nappin Edmund W.M. Burrows Fred J. Shurrock Frederick Shurrock Ralph W. Stone Ernest A. Hayward Walter Shrimpton William T. Cadle Walter J. Warner George Munday Maurice Dorsett Frederick Beckett Francis J. Cadle William J. Markham James B. Bass 1914 On the 4th August 1914 Britain declared war on Germany following the invasion of Belgium. Europe had been spiralling towards this point since the assassination in June, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, who was killed in Sarajevo along with his wife. The first British forces arrived in France 3 days later, on the 7th August, and were immediately involved in fighting on the Western Front. The first two men from the village to die in WW1, and commemorated on the war memorial, were serving in the Royal Navy. George Harry Newton was the first to die, on 15th October 1914. He was born in July 1884 and was an Able Seaman in the Royal Navy. He was born in Long Crendon to Caleb Newton and his wife Sarah (nee Briscoe), the youngest of six children. The family lived at Drakes Farm and Caleb, who was born and died in the village, was an agricultural labourer. In the 1901 census George was a bricklayer’s labourer. His naval records (below) show that he joined the Navy in June 1905, on a five-year term, ending on 1st July 1910. He was promoted to Able Seaman and served on several ships. On discharge he was transferred to the Royal Naval Reserve at Chatham. In 1911 George was a Police Constable in London, living in the Police Station, Union Grove, Clapham. At the outbreak of war, he must have been recalled and was immediately posted, in August 1914. His ship, the Hawke was sunk by a submarine in the North Sea and his body was never recovered. For whatever reason, George seems to have left the village behind him when he joined the Navy. In his war grave record George is said to be a “native” of Mitcham, Surrey and his next of kin is a friend, Daisy Clothier, of Surrey. There is no mention of his family in Long Crendon. George Newton’s name appears on the Chatham Naval Memorial which commemorates 8,517 sailors of the First World War The Hawke was a 12-gun twin-screw cruiser, built in 1891. In 1914 it was engaged in various operations in the North Sea, in connection with the war with Germany. On October 15th the “Hawke,” was successfully torpedoed by a German submarine. A torpedo hit the magazine and caused a huge explosion ripping the ship apart and killing the captain and over 500 men. 70 men survived. Frederick Organ died on the 1st November 1914. He was a Chief Gunner in the Royal Navy. His baptised name was George Frederick and he was born in Gloucestershire in July 1874. Frederick’s father was George Frederick Organ, (left) originally from Stoke Damerel in Devon and his mother was Mary Jane (nee Oates) from Cornwall. George senior was the schoolmaster at Oakley School and retired to live in Bicester Road, Long Crendon. His wife was also a teacher. There was a strong naval tradition in the Organ family. The couple had ten children, seven sons and three daughters. One son died in childhood, but five others served in the Royal Navy. George was the second eldest and his younger brother Ambrose also died in the war in March 1916. (he is listed on the memorial as having died in 1914). Their younger brother Percy went on to become a Lieutenant Commander and ended his career as Commander of HMS Victory at Portsmouth. In the 1991 census George Organ was already in the Navy as a boy sailor, listed as crew on HMS Impregnable which was a training establishment at Devonport. According to the Naval Lists, George Frederick became a Gunner in July 1899 so he had completed over 20 years’ service by the time he died. He married Alice Allen in Portsea in 1899, and he left at least three children, Alice born in 1900, George born in 1906 and Cyril in 1909 Frederick was killed in action at the Battle of Coronel while serving on the HMS Good Hope. The Good Hope (right) was a Drake Class Armoured Cruiser, and at the time among the fastest ships in the world. She became the flagship of Rear Admiral Cradock of the South American station during August 1914 and was sunk by gunfire on 1st November 1914 by the German armoured cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau off the Chilean, the entire crew was lost. The casualty cost at Coronel was high, nearly 1,600 men, including Admiral Cradock and two capital ships. (For more information on the battle see www.coronel.org.uk.) George Organ’s name appears on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial which commemorates around 10,000 sailors of the First World War As 1914 came to an end the war was spreading out across the world from France and Flanders, across northern Europe, the Middles East, Japan and as far away as the Falkland Islands. Christmas 1914 saw the famous Christmas Truce, one of the most mythologised events of the First World War. Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches. The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man's land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts. However, this did not happen everywhere along the Western Front and elsewhere the fighting continued and casualties did occur on Christmas Day. Some officers were unhappy at the truce and worried that it would undermine fighting spirit. After 1914, the High Commands on both sides tried to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again. Despite this, there were some isolated incidents of soldiers holding brief truces later in the war, and not only at Christmas. 1915 This year was to bring the war closer to home for the people of Long Crendon when nine men joined the list of the dead, many of whom would have been well known to the villagers as they were born and lived in the village before enlisting. George William Eadle was the first village casualty to die in France, on 24th February 1915. He was actually born in East Ham in 1895 and probably spent little or no time in Long Crendon. His story is made more interesting because of what happened to the rest of his family. The Eadle family were in Long Crendon for several generations. His father was another George Eadle born in 1854. When young George was five, his father was a publican of The Trafalgar Tavern in St Pancras. His mother was Mary Ann Mills from Cliffe, Kent. At some point in the next ten years the family moved to Long Crendon and their youngest child was born in the village in 1906. In the 1911 census George was working as a house boy for a headmaster in Melton Mowbray but in 1913 he left Liverpool aboard the Adriatic, for Canada, one of a ship load of young men looking for a new life, many of whom later returned to fight in the war.