The golden-sandstone Cotswold village of Upper Slaughter in Gloucestershire belies its name, says Lizzie Enfield.
In many respects it has all the hallmarks of a quintessential English village: pub, cricket club, an old manor house and a river running through its centre. But there’s something missing: a war memorial.
What are thankful villages?
Upper Slaughter is one of some 53 settlements in the UK whose members of the armed forces survived the mass slaughter of the First World War, from 1914–1918. All Upper Slaughter residents who served in the conflict returned home safely – remarkable given the Great War cost the lives of around 886,000 UK military personnel (6% of the adult male population, according to UK Parliament data).
These settlements were retrospectively dubbed ‘thankful villages’ (also known as ‘blessed villages’) by the writer Arthur Mee in a series of guides to the English counties published in the 1930s, collectively known as The King’s England. There’s not a single such village in Scotland or Ireland; the latter was still part of the United Kingdom until its partition in 1922.
“It is incredibly rare to find a village that has no war memorial,” says Fred Mawer, a Blue Badge tour guide in the south west of England. “But in Somerset there are nine thankful villages, more than any other English county.
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“Rodney Stoke, on the main road between Wells and Cheddar, is one,” adds Mawer. “The village sign says ‘A Thankful Village’ on it, but my guests are often unaware of what this means. Or that there are, even rarer, doubly thankful villages [settlements that also lost no service personnel during the Second World War] such as Stocklinch and Woolley, which are both also in Somerset.”
Although tiny in comparison to the 16,000 places that lost many men during the war, the fact thankful villages exist at all could be down to the uniquely British concept known as pals battalions.
As Europe slid into war in 1914, the existing army urgently needed augmenting with volunteer soldiers. It was suggested that men would be more willing to join up if they could serve with people they already knew.
The concept of pals battalions led to men from the same village – and often from the same family – all going into battle together, which, combined with technological advances in modern warfare, resulted in tragic losses for many communities and miraculous escapes for a few.
At the battle of the Somme in 1916, a total of 93 of the 175 men from the town of Chorley in Lancashire were killed. Wadhurst, a village in East Sussex with a population of just 3,500, lost 149 men during the war, including 25 on one day at the Battle of Aubers.
While Rodney Stoke in Somerset saw all the 21 men who went off to war return home, of the 73 who went to the front from the nearby village of Draycott, 11 were killed. It’s perhaps not surprising, therefore, that these thankful villages initially didn’t trumpet their fortunate status.
In 1920, Rodney Stoke did have a stained-glass ‘thanksgiving’ window commissioned for the village’s St. Leonard’s Church. Other villages, such as the aforementioned Upper Slaughter, waited until after the Second World War when it became a doubly thankful village and put up a plaque in the village hall, inscribing the names of the 36 men who came home from both world wars.
The doubly thankful village of Catwick in Yorkshire initially had an unofficial memorial. The village blacksmith nailed a coin to the door of his forge for each man who went to serve in the First World War. The blacksmith did the same in the Second World War but, when the forge closed, the mementos were removed and kept by the family.
Catwick now has a different kind of marker, which serves also as a way of trying to maintain its good fortune. As you drive through the village a sign says: ‘Doubly thankful Catwick. Please drive safely’.
“While war memorials were intended to ensure we did not forget those who lost their lives during the Great War, the memorials to the survivors provide a poignant counterbalance,” says Mawer. “The war memorial is so ubiquitous that an absence, and the alternative tributes to survivors, can do more to underline the scale of the carnage and the sacrifices made by previous generations,” adds Mawer.
Top image by Graham Taylor / Upper Slaughter
