One Day, One Battalion, One Memorial

[Chris]

Having just emailed someone off forum with some details about the town of Barton in North Lincolnshire i realised that of the 165 men listed on the town's memorial 16 of them were killed on the same day and were from the same battalion. In this case they were 1/5th Lincolnshire men killed on the 13th October 1915 during an attack on the Hohenzollern redoubt. Even my maths is able to calculate that nearly 10% of the men listed on Bartons memorial were killed on the same day fighting for the same Battalion. i just wondered if any other forum members who have done similair work on memorials knew of any similair horrific casulty rates. Even given the Pals style of serving together i found this statistic a surprise.

Chris

[jim_davies]

Chris,

I have slightly lower percentage for the 1/4th Lincolns in Stamford, Lincs for Hohenzollern, 13 Oct 1915.

Of about 230 men, 17 were KIA with a further 3 diw in the next couple of days.

There are also 7 men of the 6th Lincs who fell on 9 Aug 1915.

Jim

[Guest Pete Wood]

This is an interesting topic, for me also.

I have asked the Isle of Wight Living History Group to tot up their figures on memorials around the Newport area.

On the 12th August 1915, nearly half of the local men to this town who enlisted in the 8th Hants, Isle Of Wight Rifles were killed on this day, at Gallipoli. It will be interesting to see what percentage, espcially in the small villages, that this equates to.

I suspect that other small villages on the mainland, with a 'local' (Pals-style) batallion, may also have higher percentages than those shown by Chris and Jim. I agree that these statistics are appalling and make me, anyway, shudder.....

At a first division football match I went to, recently, a friend looked at the large crowd and said "Can you imagine all these people, and next week's crowd, being killed or wounded in the time that it takes to play this match - that's the Somme for you....."

[Paul Reed]

Wadhurst in Sussex provided one of the pre-war companies to the 5th (Cinque Ports) Bn Royal Sussex Regiment. In the attack on Aubers Ridge on 9th May 1915, more than 20 men from this village were killed, from farm hands to postmen to the local doctor's son. There are only 116 names from the Great War on the memorial, this represented 20+% of the day, from one day of the war.

The war memorial in the church, placed there in 1919, has the names listed in order of date of death, so the tragic loss from this battle for one small Sussex village was clearly visible to all.

In the 1990s Wadhurst twinned with Aubers, and the local school run regular trips to the battlefields to remember the local men who died.

[Clive Maier]

28 men on the Southborough memorial – out of a total population of 7,000 – died together when their transport, a requisitioned and overloaded cross-channel ferry, was rammed and sunk off Cape Helles in 1915. They are 14 percent of Southborough’s Great War Dead, of those listed on the memorial anyway. Their vessel, the Hythe, was struck by the Sarnia, an empty outgoing transport, when both were proceeding without lights close to the shore. Altogether, 155 men were lost. Of these, 129 including all the Southborough men were from the 1/3 Kent Field Company Royal Engineers. The company was raised in Southborough and the surrounding towns and villages largely at the instigation of Sir David Salomons. His only son, Captain Reggie Salomons, was among those lost. The men are commemorated on their local memorials, on the Helles Memorial, and on a marble memorial plaque placed in their drill hall by Sir David. This was rescued when the hall fell into disuse and eventually made its way to St Matthew’s church in nearby High Brooms. They are also remembered by a housing development built on the site of my father’s old home and now known as Hythe Close. There a commemorative wall plaque recalls the Hythe disaster, as it was known locally.