Yours Ever, Charlie: A Worcestershire Soldier's Journey to Gallipoli
96
Yours Ever, Charlie: A Worcestershire Soldier's Journey to Gallipoli
96Overview
'Yours Ever, Charlie' is the fascinating account of Charles Crowther, one of many British men who volunteered to fight for king and country in the First World War. When Charles volunteered he was almost forty-three and devoted to his family; this book demonstrates how his and an entire generation's sense of duty to the nation overpowered their fears of fighting abroad and, for many, the possibility of never coming home. Charles' granddaughter explores his journey from the idyllic village of Wilden, Worcestershire, to the battlefields of France and then Gallipoli, where he was fatally wounded. Using the fluent, vivid and moving letters sent home to his family, together with the few replies that ever reached him, this book reflects upon Charles' ideals, the people who inspired him, and those whom he loved and was fighting to protect.
Illustrated by rare photographs and original letters, and with a Foreword by Al Murray which provides an overview of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, this book is a poignant reminder of how beneath the staggering statistics of the First World War lie innumerable personal and tragic stories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750954310 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
Read an Excerpt
'Yours Ever Charlie'
A Worcestershire Soldier's Journey to Gallipoli
By Ann Crowther
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Ann CrowtherAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5431-0
CHAPTER 1
Wilden
Charles Crowther's parents, William and Eliza, went to work for Alfred Baldwin in 1866, when Alfred married Louisa Macdonald. Eliza, William and Alfred had met two or three years earlier when William and Eliza were first 'walking out' and working for an Astley farmer. Alfred was idealistic, God-fearing and had a strong social conscience; he came from a family of iron founders with many business interests in the area. William was a groom with good looks, charm and the beginnings of an impressive personality. He and Eliza went to live in with Alfred Baldwin and his wife when they set up home in an elegant house in nearby Bewdley (roughly four miles from the Baldwin Ironworks in Wilden). William was still a groom, but it would seem that he was being trained to take over as coachman. Also taken on at the same time was a delightful woman called Emma Payne, who worked as cook to Alfred's household from 1866 until her death in 1894; her verbal eccentricities were a source of great entertainment to staff and employers alike, so much so that Louisa wrote many of Emma's sayings down in a special notebook.
In 1868 William and Eliza were married from the Bewdley house, in the beautiful old church in nearby Ribbesford. Some years later, Alfred's nephew, Rudyard Kipling, would also be married at Ribbesford. William spent fifty-seven years in the employment of Alfred and Louisa Baldwin, and for some unexplained reason, was always known as Bobo to Alfred and his wife, and also to his only son, Stanley, and his children. The two men were the same age and were lifelong friends. William's first child, Alice, was born in the Bewdley house in 1869, two years after the birth of Stanley. The house is now resplendent with a Blue Plaque proclaiming the birthplace of a British Prime Minister.
In 1870, Alfred took over the ownership and management of his family's ironworks in Wilden. There had been years of mismanagement and Alfred sorted matters out at his own expense and took over the running of the works, which had been Baldwin-owned since 1840. With the exit of his two much older brothers from the works and village, Alfred was able to move his own little family into Wilden House, the main Baldwin residence in the village. William was now promoted to the post of coachman, and Alfred installed him and his little family in the lovely old coach house across the lane, opposite the Wilden House gates, with stables to the rear and plenty of room for growing vegetables and fattening pigs for winter. Here William and Eliza eventually had six more children, including Charles. William's fortnightly wage was two guineas, a generous payment. (The outgoing coachman earned £1 16s.)
One wing of Wilden House came right down to the narrow village lane; another wing, at right-angles to it, sat across the site atop a slope, and with a higher roof-line. Access on foot was straight up a steep path with steps; William would take the coach across the road, through the gateway and veer sharp right, following a curved drive which swept round the edge of the grounds and which helped the wheels to grip in bad weather. Much later, when the Baldwins bought a car and employed a chauffeur, Sam Jay, he took the same route which William had used. It is amusing to note that Sam Jay's family kept the public house close to the Wilden House gates, rather grandly known as the King of Prussia; it was hurriedly renamed the Wilden Inn in 1914 when hostilities broke out. (After William and Eliza died, Sam Jay and his wife moved into the coach house for a while.)
Wilden was a pleasant and sprawling village, with a few farms and the Baldwin ironworks. It lay in an agricultural area with views of several of the hill ranges that circle that part of north-west Worcestershire. The population in 1880 was 367, living in seventy-one households. Most of the homes lay along the eastern side of the one main street, Wilden Lane, which was over a mile long. On the other side of the road was the River Stour, at first running close behind the works, then looping away from the road to run around Wire Mill Farm, and then beside the Sling footpath to the bottom of a steep drop as the road went uphill; a couple of miles later it joined the River Severn at Stourport. Only the works, the coach house and a handful of cottages lay on the Stour side of Wilden Lane. Behind the houses, along the developed side, rose a red, sandstone ridge with three steep lanes leading up to the top of it, where another road, Wilden Top, ran parallel to the main street. The village has Domesday references, and Wilden had been home to one of seven wire mills strung along the banks of the small yet deep and fast-flowing River Stour in early times. The ironworks was a development of the ancient Wilden wire mill site. At one point in the previous century there had been as many as seventeen mills powered by the twenty-four-mile stretch of the little Stour, which sprang up in the Clent Hills.
The ironworks was linked to the nearby Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal by means of Platt's Wharf, an ingenious method of purposely flooding the Stour. Originally the Stour ran through the works, driving water wheels. By Alfred's time, the Stour was diverted to run behind the works. A short stretch of canal had been dug between the works and the road, leading to a store yard, with a link onto the Stour. Barges laden with coal slack and iron bars came down the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal and, by means of a lock, were fed onto the Stour once it was flooded. The barges were floated downstream and unloaded into the store yard; their contents could be taken on the short stretch of Wilden Canal into the heart of the works as required, again by barge. The finished rolled metal was then taken back to the store yard by barge and loaded onto carts and, by the twentieth century, lorries for transporting by road. The works prospered under Alfred. It was the hub of village life.
In common with other notable industrial philanthropists of the Victorian age, Alfred was anxious to improve the quality of life in his village. Charles and his siblings witnessed momentous developments in the village as they grew from childhood into their teens. The arrival of a bevy of very talented people in Wilden did much to fire the imagination and the feeling of living in a special place; lack of knowledge of any other community sharpened the focus on local loyalties. Alfred built both a new school and a church for Wilden. He built the school in 1882 and extended it eight years later; it still flourishes today. Charles' oldest daughter, Marjorie, spent almost her entire working life teaching at the school, and I began my education there. The need for a church had become pressing. All births, marriages and deaths were registered in nearby Hartlebury and burials had to be there, so Wilden needed its own church and a burial ground. In addition, boundary changes made by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners now left Wilden somewhat isolated. Alfred set about providing both a church and burial ground and quickly gained approval from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Land was acquired, plans were drawn up, builders engaged and an organ ordered from a London firm of organ builders. Alfred said that he wanted his church to be 'a miniature cathedral in a village'; to that end, he set aside a generous amount of money in order to attract the finest musician possible to be organist and choirmaster. The first organist, F.A. Griffiths, held the post briefly and was followed by his nephew. \J. Irving Glover FRCO. 'Jig' Glover was a successful, published hymn writer, and conductor of Kidderminster Music Society and of Kidderminster Choral Society (1899-1932). He was succeeded at Kidderminster Choral Society and at Wilden by Harry Oakes FRCO, a brilliant organ scholar under C. Hubert Parry at the Royal College of Music and, for a while, Chorus Master of what is now the CBSO Choir. Harry Oakes might have had a national career had he not come back from war in 1918 seriously suffering from the effects of mustard gas. One of his 1949 concerts with KCS lived long in memory, being an unforgettable performance of Edward Elgar's Gerontius with Heddle Nash and a young Kathleen Ferrier. The music at Wilden was of a standard unheard of in a small village church and was further aided by a generous budget for the purchase of sheet music. Alfred's money enabled Wilden Church to acquire a music library for its choir that most large city churches would have envied. The Baldwin family added many gifts to garnish the church, in particular, 'The Baldwin Silver'. This was a gift from Louisa, and was a Communion plate, chalice and jug in silver and set with some of her own personal jewels. The silver is now kept in the bank, but is brought out from time to time for public viewing. In the early days William would carry the Communion set from Wilden House to the church on a tray covered by a snowy white, linen cloth.
All Saints, Wilden, was consecrated in May 1880 and was at first a Chapel of Ease, attached to St Michael's in Lower Mitton, Stourport. In 1896 William Henry (Harry) Cory was appointed as Curate in Charge. He was a thirty-year-old Cambridge graduate from Ely, fluent in Latin and Greek, and a potential highflier within the Church. He had been recommended to Alfred by Canon Newbolt, who had been the Principal of Ely Theological College when Harry Cory was studying there. In 1904 Alfred Baldwin produced extra funds to endow the church and Wilden was made a parish; Harry Cory was now appointed Vicar of Wilden and Alfred built a splendid vicarage. The Reverend Cory embraced life in Worcestershire and married Phoebe, daughter of Alfred's ironworks' manager, William Felton. He became editor of the Diocesan Gazette and then of the Diocesan Directory; in 1936 he was made an Honorary Canon of Worcester Cathedral. One may wonder why such a man stayed in Wilden until his retirement in 1948, but his family have always known that he stayed for Phoebe's sake, for she loved Wilden and was surrounded there by the large and loving Felton family whom she could not bear to leave. There is no doubt that Alfred chose well when he sought men to serve his church and the village of Wilden, who could promote his ideals and be looked up to as role models.
The true glory of Wilden Church is, without doubt, its collection of fourteen stained-glass windows designed by Alfred's brother-in-law, Edward Burne Jones, and there is probably not another church anywhere in which all the glass is by William Morris. The little church is alight with Burne Jones' saints and angels, all dedicated to Alfred and those close to him. Sad to say, the space for Louisa Baldwin's memorial window was never filled with her chosen figure of St Margaret of Scotland; she had sat with Burne Jones early on and chosen from his designs to reflect her Scottish ancestry. By the time Louisa died, William Morris' old firm had ceased to exist and to quote Windham Baldwin, her grandson, 'it was deemed wrong to proceed to match with modern means the matchless stained glass lines which were his own special glory.' Thus, Louisa's window, placed beside the figure of Joshua, dedicated to Alfred in 1909, contains simple Burne Jones 'foliage' created years before by Morris.
The collaboration between Burne Jones and Morris was part of a unique coming together of outstanding artistic talents within the extended Baldwin family. Alfred's wife, Louisa, had four sisters, three of whom married well, like herself. One married John Lockwood Kipling and was the mother of Rudyard. One married Sir Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy. The other married Sir Edward Burne Jones. All were beautiful, and they were a close and affectionate family. Within the world of the arts, contacts were legion. There were many comings and goings of talented and famous people; and all the time, Alfred and his 'forge' prospered and Wilden benefited.
In later life, Stanley Baldwin would say of the Wilden of those times that it was 'a place where from childhood I had known every man and could talk to each about problems at work or at home.' He remembered Wilden as a place where strikes were unheard of, and generation after generation went into the works. No one ever got the sack, and there was a natural sympathy for those less concerned with efficiency 'than this modern generation is.' There were large numbers of old gentlemen who sat around on wheelbarrow handles, smoking their pipes. However, the works was not inefficient; in the iron industry its expertise was second to none, and major awards were won. At the Paris Exhibition in 1878, Wilden Works won the only Gold Medal given that year, awarded for its plate and sheet iron. The clang and throb of the works was the heartbeat of the village and never stopped from Monday to Friday. A great disadvantage of living in Wilden House was that like all the houses near to the works, it suffered constant fallout of large, black smuts. Being the man he was, Alfred felt he must share his workers' tribulations and live with the smuts rather than move further away. He did not look for gratitude for the school, church, or any other largesse. He saw it all as his duty to his workers and their families.
Charles Crowther and his siblings grew up in this sheltered village environment with its patriarchal, deeply caring employer who looked after his workforce well but demanded good behaviour from all both at work and in their own time. Though the work was heavy and dirty, men went to work in a clean shirt each morning. Alfred was, at the same time, very mindful of the needs of his workforce. On one occasion a virtuous busybody asked why the King of Prussia (later Wilden Inn) was open from early morning till late at night. The reply was that Alfred willed it so because his men needed to replace the many pints of sweat which they shed every day in his employment! Little wonder that men like Charles were bound up in a tradition of service, hard work, church attendance and, perhaps even more than devotion to nation, a devotion to the county of Worcestershire. Stanley's cousin, Rudyard Kipling (who was Louisa Baldwin's godson as well as nephew), seems to have spent much holiday time at Wilden House, as did a collection of other Baldwin cousins and the Crowther boys. Stanley, Rudyard and their cousins did whatever it was that boys did in school holidays then. My great-aunt, Alice (Charles' older sister), was heard to say that 'Master Ruddy' was a young devil for enraging William with cheeky verses scribbled on the coach house wallpaper. My father, ever practical, always said it was a great pity someone did not have the wit to salvage some of the wallpaper with its unpublished Kipling!
One story which my father told me many times concerned a fledgling white owl which the Crowther boys found and took home to nurse and then tame. From across the lane, the Baldwin cousins coveted the owl and bribes were offered. Nothing would persuade the Crowthers to part with it. Many years later, Stanley Baldwin told my father that the owl came to represent for him the precious things in life which money cannot buy, and on which one cannot put a price. When Stanley became the first Earl Baldwin and acquired a coat of arms, it contained owls. Some time later Wilden School adopted a uniform badge with owls in it, now affectionately known locally as 'the Wilden Owls'.
This then was Charles' Wilden. It was also Stanley's beloved place to come home to in school holidays, and a Mecca for his cousins. Who knows how much their boyhood attitudes influenced each other and rubbed off on the other youngsters growing up in Wilden? But the facts are that in 1914, Charles, at the age of forty-two with four small children and a pregnant wife, would be the first Wilden man to volunteer to fight, Stanley would devote his life to public service and Rudyard would write patriotic verse to stir the heart and soul. A distant relative of mine, whose father spent a considerable amount of time with Stanley Baldwin, believed, in common with many who knew him, that Rudyard wrote his poem 'If' with Stanley in mind. It also seems very appropriate for my grandfather and his fellow volunteers; patriotic fervour and sense of duty abounded, and by the beginning of 1916 the relatively small village of Wilden, with less than 100 households, had over fifty men on active service.
Charles was not academically inclined, unlike his sister, Alice, who became a headmistress. He went to work for Alfred in the ironworks. In 1901, at the age of thirty, he married Dora Kate Mayall. They met as a result of football. Dora Kate, her older sister Laura, and their brothers were all involved with the Hoobrook Olympic Football Club. The Mayalls ran the Viaduct Inn, which nestled in the lee of the new Kidderminster Railway Viaduct, on the Wilden side of Kidderminster. The stunning blue-brick viaduct, replacing an earlier wooden Brunel one, had been built between 1883 and 1885 by the Earl of Dudley with Dora Kate's maternal uncle, Bill Tipper, as Clerk of Works. The football club was run from the Viaduct Inn, and both Mayalls and Tippers were involved with the running, coaching and playing. The Crowther boys were part of the scene, as was a young man by the name of William Bourne.
Dora Kate's sister, Laura (five years her senior), married William Bourne in 1891, and ten years later Dora Kate married Charles Crowther. Both couples settled down in Wilden, near to each other, just across the lane from the works. After Charles' death, William Bourne became a father-figure for Charles' elder son, Wilfred. William was known as Shammy because he was devoted to shamrock; he always kept a pot of it on his kitchen window sill, and on the day he died his current plant keeled over and could not be revived. In the lovely photograph of Shammy and Laura taken on the day of their golden wedding anniversary, he is sporting a bunch of shamrock in his buttonhole. (By a curious coincidence 'shammy' was the nickname for one of the jobs in the works, but not his). William junior, one of the younger sons of Shammy and Laura, and the same age as Wilfred, would be not just Wilfred's cousin, but his great friend. They would work together at the works all their lives, play cricket and football together and share the ups and downs of Wilden Home Guard during the Second World War. (To my father's chagrin, his job was a Reserved Occupation. Master rollers could not be spared to fight.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 'Yours Ever Charlie' by Ann Crowther. Copyright © 2013 Ann Crowther. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
About the Author,Acknowledgements,
Foreword by Al Murray,
Introduction,
Part One,
Chapter One: Wilden,
Chapter Two: Why?,
Chapter Three: France,
Chapter Four: Devon,
Chapter Five: Gallipoli,
Chapter Six: Malta,
Part Two,
Letters,
Selected Scans of Letters,
Postscript,
List of Names,
Bibliography,