When the man compiling a history of the men whose names appeared on the war memorials in Shropshire, as having died during the first world war, got in touch with me as parish clerk of Clungunford at the time, to ask me to ask in the village for any information concerning one of the men whose names appeared on our war memorial, who he was having trouble pinning down as belonging to our village, namely one Frederick Wilfred Evans, I expected it to be a piece of cake for me to find out which local family he had been a part of. Evans, I knew, was a common name in the village, so how much trouble could it be to find out which family he had actually been a part of?
It turned out not to be the case at all. Evans had been a common name in the village once upon a time, but wasn’t anymore. Hadn’t been for quite a long time in fact. No one, in the village, it turned out, could furnish me with any information concerning the man on out war memorial at all.
I wasn’t as perturbed by that as I should have been. I subscribe to Ancestors. com, and through them, had successfully researched my own family history. How much more difficult could it be to find out the man on our war memorial came to have been there in the first place?
Much more difficult as it turned out. It didn’t help that he was born in Tenbury Wells, the son of Edwin B Evans, a postman, and his wife, Emma, in the bosom of whose family the young Frederick appeared in the 1901census along with two brothers and two sisters. A family gathering from which he had disappeared at the time of the 1911, census, having left home at some time, still in Tenbury Wells as it happened, but page boy to a physician and surgeon, a single man.
There haven’t been the results of any published census since, and he wouldn’t have appeared on them anyway, if there had, because the next appearance of the unfortunate Frederick, was on the Menin Gate war memorial, dedicated to the hundreds of thousands who died in the first world war, without any grave of their own to mark their passing, where he was recorded as service number11501, of the 5th Kings Shropshire Light Infantry, who died on 25th of September 1915, aged 19, son of Mr and Mrs Bernard Evans of 35 Cross Street , Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, without any mention at all of the village on whose war memorial his name appears, Clungunford in Shropshire, or how he came to be there.
The family originated near Eardisley, in Herefordshire, according to the place of birth William Evans, Frederick’s grandfather, gave on all the Census returns he ever filled in, a place really in the back of beyond, near the Welsh and English border, with Kington possibly the nearest town. He never actually appeared in a census there at all, though. The closest he ever came to it was to appear amongst a group in nearby Kinnersley, about a mile across the fields from Eardisley, in 1841, when he appeared in the company of Richard Evans, a stone mason, and a number of other people of the same name, though, it being 1841, without any relationship with each other being given. Margaret, Christina, Thomas and baby John were there with William, along with Anne Davies and James Downes, who were probably both servants of some sort.
In 1851, William, described as an Ironmonger, was living in Banbury, Oxfordshire, a very long way away from Kinnersley, with wife, Sarah, who had been born in Wellesbourne on Warwickshire, along with son Robert G, aged 2 and eight month old daughter Mary, both born in Banbury, Mary Flint a 50years old annuitant from Avondale in Warwickshire, James Middleton, an ironmongers assistant, Thomas Swinbourne and Sophie Read, both house servants, and Amanda Hanna, a nursemaid.
The family had moved on to Kingsholm, Gloucester by 1861, William Evans was now an Ironmonger traveller from Nelson, Eardisley, living with wife, Sarah, daughter, Mary Frances 10, and sons Edwin B , William and Henry, all born in Banbury, Mary Flint was visiting again.
In 1871 the family were still in Gloucestershire, but at St Mary’s South Hamlet. William was a commercial traveller now, Mary a governess, and William an apprentice, though it didn’t say to which trade, both had been born in Banbury, Edwin and Anna, both born in Gloucester, were scholars, Mary Flint was still there and described as William’s mother in law now.
In 1881 the family, still in Gloucester, had moved again, this time to Oxford Road, St John the Baptist. William was away working as a commercial traveller, leaving wife Sarah, in charge. Edwin B, now 27, was a Drapers Assistant, Agnes B a daughter, was assisting at home, Mary Flint, 81, was now described as a gentlewoman. Mary Mulholland aged 4 from Durham, was a visitor. It was the last time William was head of household, he and Sarah, now described as retired, had moved to Cardiff by the time of the 1891 Census.
Whether Edwin B set up home as a result of that, or him setting up home promoted it, by 1891 he had moved to Tenbury Wells, in Worcestershire, a very long way away from Gloucester, where the new mineral water works was attracting workers, though he wasn’t working for them at the time, but living along Cross Street, employed as an insurance agent, with new wife Emma, from Westbury in Gloucester and sons Maurice 3, and William 1, both born in Hereford.
He had changed jobs to that of a postman in 1901, though still living along Cross Street with wife, Emma, sons Maurice, now a telephone messenger from Westbury, and William 11, from Hereford, daughters Catherine, 7 Nora, 19 months and sons Frederick,5, and Reginald, 4, all scholars and all from Tenbury Wells.
It was the only time Frederick was recorded by a census as living in the bosom of his family. By 1911, though the others were still living at 35 Cross Street, Tenbury Wells, with Edwin now recorded as working at the mineral plant, son Evan Ewart a railway porter, and other son, Reginald a telegraph messenger, whilst daughters Teresa and Annie were both scholars, Frederick Wilfred Evans, 15, had left home and was being employed as a page boy to a surgeon/physician living elsewhere in Tenbury Wells.
All were still around, probably, to take part in the next Census, due to be held in 1921. By then, though, the name Frederick Wilfred Evans had been inscribed amongst the names of the other unfortunates on the Menin Gate war memorial, in Belgium, dedicated to the hundreds of thousands who died in the first world war, without any grave of their own to mark their passing, as well as amongst the names of the twelve men from Clungunford, who had died during the fighting in the First World War, someone had thought important enough to Clungunford to put their names forward to be inscribed on the new war memorial erected in the church.
At the time of Frederick’s death, you still had to be a volunteer to go off and fight in the battlefields of France and Belgium. Conscription was still two years away at that time, when not enough young men were coming forward as canon fodder anymore, for the authorities to get by without. Frederick must have been a volunteer not a conscript then, and had he not volunteered at that particular time, he might not have died in the war at all, but been fighting on a completely different Front.
Tenbury Wells was about twelve miles away from Clungunford, if you travelled in a straight line. In a different county even. Unlikely that the young man would find his way into a position with the staff at Clungunford House, working for the Rock family, who were Lords of the Manor of Clungunford at that time.
In Blue Ribbon Days, an account, in part, of life in Clungunford during the latter part of the eighteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds, Thomas Edward Lewis wrote an account of his early life there, before he eventually left to become a draper’s apprentice in Knighton, his brother already filling the role of apprentice to his saddler father.
In the book he also gave a family history, beginning with the Bridgwater family who owned much of the village of Clungunford at the time, telling how the last female member of that family, married a farmer, John Evans, by whom one son and four daughters were born.
The son eventually married and moved away to Cleobury Mortimer, where he took over an inn, called The Talbot, thereby ending the Evan’s family’s association with Clungunford. The daughters, meanwhile, were married to a number of local tradesmen in the area, one of whom was Edward Lewis, a carpenter, who lived at Sycamore Cottage, which became a Saddlery first and then the village post office as well.
It was run by Thomas Edward’s brother and sister, Mary Anne and John, who carried on with running both until the second world war, as well as setting up a Primitive Methodist chapel in their grounds, for which they did a lot of fund raising. Both were there together at the time of the First World War. John usually having an apprentice saddler working for him as well.
Whether the Evans family from whom the Lewises were descended came from Eardisley or not is impossible to say, because the Clungunford parish registers have a lot of gaps in them at vital times. Eardisley is only about eighteen miles from Clungunford in a straight line, so it is possible that that was the case. And that being the case it is also possible that Frederick Evans, having found his way to Clungunford to work as an apprentice saddler some time between appearing on the 1911 census at Tenbury Wells, working as a page boy, also found his way to fight and die on the western front on 25th September 1915 ,aged only 19 at the time. In fact, working in the saddlery might have been what took him there in the first place.
At a meeting on 29 July 1914, the British cabinet had narrowly decided its obligations to Belgium under the 1839 Treaty of London did not require it to oppose a German invasion with military force. However, this was largely driven by Prime Minister Asquith’s desire to maintain unity; he and his senior Cabinet ministers were already committed to support France, the Royal Navy had been mobilised and public opinion was strongly in favour of intervention. On 31 July, Britain sent notes to Germany and France, asking them to respect Belgian neutrality; France pledged to do so, Germany did not reply
Once the German ultimatum to Russia expired on the morning of 1 August, the two countries were at war. Later the same day, Wilhelm was informed by his Ambassador in London, that Britain would remain neutral if France was not attacked, and in any case might be stayed by a crisis in Ireland Jubilant at this news, he ordered General Moltke the German chief of staff, to "march the whole of the army to the East". Moltke protested that "it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised." Lichnowsky, in any case, quickly realised he was mistaken. Although Wilhelm insisted on waiting for a telegram from his cousin George V once received, it confirmed there had been a misunderstanding and he told Moltke "Now do what you want."
French intelligence was well aware of German plans to attack through Belgium, and their Commander-in-Chief, General Joseph Joffre asked that his troops be allowed to cross the border to pre-empt such a move. This was rejected by the French government, in part to avoid antagonising the British, and Joffre was told any advance into Belgium could come only after a German invasion. On 2 August, Germany occupied Luxembourg and exchanged fire with French units; on 3 August, they declared war on France and demanded the Belgians allow them unimpeded right of way, which was refused. Early on the morning of 4 August, the Germans invaded; Albert 1 of Belgium ordered his army to resist and called for assistance under the Treaty of London. Britain sent Germany an ultimatum demanding they respect Belgian neutrality and withdraw, which expired at midnight without a response; Germany was now at war with Britain and its global empire.
At the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, the British regular army numbered 247,432 serving officers and other ranks. This did not include reservists liable to be recalled to the colours upon general mobilization or the part-time volunteers of the Territorial Army. About one-third of the peace-time regulars were stationed in India and were not immediately available for service in Europe.
For a century British governmental policy and public opinion were against conscription for foreign wars. At the start of World War I the British Army consisted of six infantry divisions, one cavalry division in the United Kingdom formed after the outbreak of war and four divisions overseas. Fourteen Territorial Force divisions also existed, and 300,000 soldiers in the Reserve Army Lord Kitchener the Secretary of State for War, considered the Territorial Force untrained and useless. He believed that the regular army must not be wasted in immediate battle, but instead used to help train a new army with 70 divisions—the size of the French and German armies—that he foresaw would be needed to fight a war lasting many years.[
In 1914, the British had about 5.5 million men of military age, with another 500,000 reaching the age of 18 each year. The initial call for 100,000 volunteers was far exceeded; almost half a million men enlisted in two months (see the graph). Around 250,000 underage boys also volunteered, either by lying about their age or giving false names. These were always rejected if the lie was discovered.
In May 1915 the Allies carried out an offensive north of Arras towards Lille. This was the Second Battle of Artois (9 May - 18 June 1915) with the aim to push the Germans off the dominating high ground of the Loretto and Vimy Ridges north of Arras. British attacks on the German line took place a little further north on the flat Flanders plain at Aubers Ridge and Festubert. By the end of the offensive there were approximately 100,000 French casualties, 26,000 British casualties and 90,000 German casualties.
In July 1915 the French carried out an offensive almost 3,000 feet above sea level on the rounded peaks of the Vosges mountains of Alsace. The offensive followed battles between the French and the Germans for possession of the peaks in deep snow and storms in the early part of 1915. Following a limited offensive to try to push the Germans out of the Fecht valley on the east side of the mountain range at Munster the French pressed on later in the summer to try to take the peaks and mountain road toutes around Le Linge. The Battle of Le Linge (20 July - 15 October 1915) was fought for almost three months. Since the fighting there earlier in the year the Germans had reinforced their lightly-held positions by constructing an impregnable fortress of tunnels, trenches and bunkers hewn either out of the rock or supplemented by reinforced concrete. The German line could not be broken and after the close of the battle the Front Lines on this peak remained static, and only a few yards apart in places, for the rest of the war.
In the autumn of 1915 the French and British Armies carried out a second large-scale, two-pronged offensive against the German positions, which were by this time well-consolidated and proving increasingly more difficult to break into. The Second Champagne Offensive (25 September - 6 November 1915), had the objective of forcing the German Third and Fifth Armies in the Argonne sector to withdraw along the Meuse river towards Belgium. A simultaneous attack by French and British forces from Vimy Ridge to La Bassée, called the Artois-Loos Offensive or the Third Battle of Artois (25 September - 15 October 1915), aimed to break through the German Front in Artois. This would compel the German Second and Seventh Armies caught between the two attacks to pull back to the Belgian border in order to protect their road and rail routes in their Lines of Communication on the Douai plain.
The Champagne offensive gained a few miles of ground and captured some 25,000 German prisoners, but with German reinforcements brought into the sector from the Eastern Front, the French could not withstand repeated German counter-attacks. French losses were over 145,000 casualties by the time the Champagne offensive drew to a close.
The Artois offensive witnessed the first use of a gas cloud weapon by the British Army on the Western Front at the Battle of Loos (25 September - 8 October 1915). The French managed to get onto the Vimy Ridge but did not succeed in pushing the Germans off this dominating ridge. The British attack achieved some success north of Loos and by the end of the first day they had passed through Loos village and reached the outskirts of the industrial, built-up town of Lens. Crucial time lost by the delayed arrival of the reserve divisions added to problems of command and control of the troops on the ground east of Loos, who had inadvertently headed south instead of east in the confusion of battle and the confusion created by similar pit-head landscape features in this mining area. The pause in the attack gave the German Fourth Army time to bring in reserves to the area overnight who reinforced a new German Second Position located on higher ground with good views across the British attack area. The British did not succeed in making any headway against this Second Position and suffered heavy casualties on 26 September. A second British advance against the German Second Position failed with heavy casualties in early October as bad weather closed in.
The lessons learned by the German defenders in these 1915 autumn battles was the value of “Defence in Depth”. This is the term for a tactic whereby the defenders man the Front Line lightly, the attacker is initially allowed to gain some ground beyond his own artillery cover in the opening phase of an attack, and then he is counter-attacked by groups of well-placed defenders in second and third positions constructed behind the Front Line.
At the same time as Frederick Evans must have been living and working in Clungunford, to be mentioned on the war memorial like that, even if the greatest irony of all is that he didn’t actually die during any of the Battles of the Somme, which happened later, but during the third Battle of Atois, an altogether lower key affair, though not for the thousands of men who died during it of course, another nineteen years old boy who also went by the name of Evans, was living at Clungunford.
Living with his grandmother, Lucy Jacks, and his mother, Ellen Evans, who had taken her surname from her father, Charles Evans, at the time when Lucy was Lucy Evans, and had had two illegitimate sons under that name at Crossways in Clungunford at the time of the First World War, was another lad of about the same age as Frederick, Edward Leonard Evans who, though also going by the name of Evans, but not related to him in any way.
The Evanses from whom the Lewises were descended had moved out of the village a long time before. These Evans were from the lower echelons of society. They were only Evanses, in fact, because their mother hadn’t married and they’d kept her name instead of whatever their father’s name had been. She was living and working in Manchester by the time of the First World War.
According to his short service attestation when he signed on as a soldier with the Kings Light Shropshire infantry on 31st august 1914, for an initial period of three years which could be lengthened to more time depending on how long the war lasted, Edward was a blacksmith living in his father’s house who had been an apprentice in the trade but the time had expired
In fact Edward Leonard Evans was a blacksmith by trade, but he lived with his grandmother at Crossways by night and by day was to be found in the blacksmiths shop, close to Sycamore Cottage in the centre of the village.
The blacksmith shop used to be where the village hall stands now, next to the brook which cut across Chapel Road there, Sycamore Cottage has always been where it is, and the chapel which gave the road its name lay in between the two.
In the mood of optimistic enthusiasm for the war, which marked its beginnings, it is very likely that two young lads of the same age and the same name, would feel drawn to enlist with the local infantry force when they arrived at Ludlow on August Bank Holiday for that purpose.
Edward Evans certainly did. His Short Service Attestation was signed at Ludlow recruitment fair on that day, witnessed by a captain in the Shropshire Light Infantry. He signed on for an initial three years, or as long as the war lasted, bur was lucky enough, though he might not have thought so at the time, to be deemed unfit for service, on grounds of heath a month later, without ever having to face the horrors of the war.
Frederick Evans must have also filled in the necessary paperwork, though none of it survives and though what does survive tells that he did enlist at Ludlow, there is no saying that it was at the same time as his blacksmith friend. Frederick was unlucky enough not to be refused service for any reason, health or otherwise, and was killed a year and three weeks later, though not on the Somme as the memorial suggests, but along the River Artois, after Edward Evans failed attempt to enlist
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