Stoke men who died in the Great War

In 2000 the Stoke History Group played their part in the Millennium celebrations by staging a local history exhibition in the Working Men’s Club. My contribution towards this was to research the men whose names are inscribed on the monument on Ham Hill.  After the excitement of the exhibition was over, the folders of research sat gathering dust on a shelf in my house.  In 2014, the Centenary of the 1st World War prompted me to bring my files out again and download the information onto the Stoke village website so that everyone would have access to it.

Martin Herrod kindly worked on the presentation of the project for the original village website, with links to my sources such as census returns, military diaries etc.  I would like to thank not only Martin but all the people took the trouble to tell me about their families and lent precious photographs.  If I have made mistakes or drawn the wrong conclusions in cases where there was little documentation available, I rely on people who know better to put matters straight. 

It is over a hundred years since the beginning of the Great War, when the boys and men of this village, with names that are still familiar to us, joined the army and went out to places they had only heard of in the school classroom – France, Belgium, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia.  

These are the stories of the ones who didn’t come back.  They range in agefrom 18 years old (Percy Trott) to 48 years old (William Hann).  Some were married with small children.  Some were hardly more than children themselves.  Several served for nearly the entire four years of the War, while one never got to leave England. 

Edward Skilton, the Minister of the Congregational (afterwards the United Reform) Church) enlisted as a chaplain and sought out his ex-Boys’ Brigade in hospitals in France.  He wrote letters to their families at home, saying that so and so had been wounded but was doing well.  The gloving company, Southcombe’s, offered to pick up from the station soldiers coming home on leave. Cigarettes and chocolate and socks were packaged up by the villagers and sent out to the Front.  There was feeling of pride when the news came through that one of our men had been decorated for bravery.  Reverend Monck wrote movingly in the church magazine about the deaths of his ex-Scouts, and with every “missing” or “killed in action” reported in the Western Gazette, there was a wave of sympathy in the village for the affected family.  

Everybody knew these men, and when the war memorial on Ham Hill was unveiled on 19th July 1923 by the Prince of Wales, all the names carved on the monument would have been familiar to the villagers who stood watching the ceremony.   

More and more of us each year assemble on top of Ham Hill on 11th November and look at that list of names as the bugle sounds. Many of us know the story of our own particular “name on the Monument”, but perhaps not so much about the others. I hope, after you have read these stories, that all the names will be as familiar to you as they were to the Stoke villagers in 1923. 

Angie (Min) Hodges

Stoke History Group