Remembrance
1914 - 1918
by Kate Jones
This year, Remembrance Sunday falls on the eleventh day of the month. At 11a.m. it will be exactly 100 years since the Armistice of 1918. 11 o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month was the end of the Great War, 1914 – 1918. Peace was declared; victorious nations celebrated. My own grandmother, married to a soldier and expecting their first child, skipped for joy along her suburban high street.
The Great War involved countries all over the world and millions of men fought and died. ‘It will be Hell to be in it; and Hell to be out of it’, wrote the poet Rupert Brooke when war was declared in August 1914. By the end of that year hundreds of thousands of British men had volunteered. In Mumbles, 250 had enlisted by Christmas. The following year, on 24 June 1915, the Mumbles Press published the names of over 400 ‘Mumbles men who have obeyed the call to arms.’ In their patriotic enthusiasm some lads found ways to get around the age limits of 18 to 41. Thomas Davies (once of William Street) was only seventeen when he was killed in action in January 1915. He had been in France less than a month.
A Company, 14 (Service) Battalion, Welsh Regiment, 'Swansea Pals'
The Mumbles Roll of Honour runs from Ace to Young. The oldest was 61years old; the youngest was 17, others barely 18. They were sons, fathers, husbands, fiancés, uncles, cousins and brothers; their families the recipients of the dreaded telegrams. They fought in the trenches of the Western Front - at Ypres, on the Somme, in the stinking mud of Passchendaele, at Loos and Cambrai. They fought in Egypt, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Salonika and South Africa. They fought in the air and at sea, dying when their flimsy flying machines were shot down; killed when their vessels were mined or torpedoed.
A Long Way From Home: The first Mumbles casualty was Joseph Hughes of Woodville Road, killed in action in the North Sea on 15 October 1914. Two men, Francis Richards of Newton and John Williams of Mumbles were lost (off the Farne Islands and the Dardenelles respectively) on 10 November 1918, just a few hours before hostilities ended. Three Mumbles men (Samuel Gammon, George Walters and John Thomas) fell on the same day, 10 July 1916, at the Battle of the Somme. Six men died at Passchendaele in November 1917. Brothers Alfred and Ernest Jenkins of Southend were killed within four months of each other in 1917. Thomas Michael, of Southend, survivor of two Mumbles lifeboat disasters, serving as a coast-watcher in north-east England, had six sons, four serving in the forces; two of whom (Ernest and Arthur) died on active service.
Some died of wounds or disease in casualty clearing stations, field hospitals or back home in Britain. Towards the end of the war several men succumbed to influenza (‘Spanish Flu’) and others to injuries after the war was over. A few are buried in Oystermouth cemetery but most are laid to rest a long way from the home they called Mumbles.
‘At the going down of the sun …’ is the well-known line from Laurence Binyon’s poem, ‘For the Fallen’, published in the Times newspaper in September 1914. It was written in honour of the British Expeditionary Force casualties at the Battles of Mons and The Marne in the opening weeks of the war. By 1916 shrines to those serving were being erected in villages, towns and cities across Britain. These simple wooden triptychs, with a central crucifix and a shelf below for flowers, recorded the names of all who had gone from the locality to ‘fight for King and Country’. As the fighting continued, mass bereavement and the fact that many of the men who died had no grave meant the shrines came to commemorate the fallen - a focus for grief and loss and also pride.
Samuel Gammon
Ernest Jenkins
The Mumbles War Shrine: During the war a black-painted, wooden shrine was erected in Parade Gardens (now Southend Gardens) in Mumbles. At its official unveiling on 14 September 1918, four hundred villagers gathered to watch the church choir process from All Saints’ Church to the gardens. There was a firing party and the Last Post was sounded. Across the road, at the bottom of Hall Bank, photographs of men serving in the forces were displayed in the window of Nana Todd’s greengrocery and sweet shop – their faces a poignant reminder of the village’s sacrifice.
The Mumbles Shrine
The Rood Screen Great War Memorial, All Saints' Church
After the Armistice came the need for Remembrance. At 11a.m. on the first anniversary, 11 November 1919, the nation observed a minute’s silence. A year later the tradition of wearing poppies began - inspired by John McCrae’s 1915 poem ‘In Flanders Fields’. On 1 August 1920 a magnificent rood screen carved from Welsh oak was unveiled in All Saints’ Church. It was a memorial to ninety-eight men of the parish, inscribed alphabetically on the bottom panels with no distinction made between rank or denomination. Two months later, a brass plaque was erected in Mumbles Methodist church with the names of thirteen church members who had given their lives.
The Blackpill Memorial
The villagers of Blackpill made their own memorial to twelve local men. At the unveiling in May 1922 Rev. Canon Williams, vicar of Oystermouth, described it as ‘simple but grand’. A beautifully coloured Roll of Service, 1914-1918, was hung in Mumbles Baptist church. In Norton, a newly completed terrace of houses was re-named ‘Mons Terrace’ in memory of several of its wartime tenants who had fought at the Battle of Mons. Along with rolls of honour in schools and workplaces, these were permanent memorials to a war idealistically meant to be the ‘war to end all wars’.
The last Mumbles Memorial to the Great War was erected on the site of the wooden shrine in Southend Gardens. It was unveiled on 30 July 1939 by Mrs Ann Hixson of Newton, whose youngest son David had been killed in 1918. The monument was rededicated on 11 November 2006 – with the names of those killed in both wars inscribed on additional side plinths. In 2017 fifteen names were added to the All Saints’ rood screen. The brass plaque in the Methodist church has been renewed and the monument at Clyne restored in 2018. The men of Mumbles are not forgotten.
Mumbles Memorials at Southend, 1939 & 2006
One Hundred Years On: Although thousands of British men never returned, thousands more did. They came home to a country that had changed in their absence, sometimes to families who could not possibly comprehend their experiences. Often they suffered from life-changing injuries and psychological scars. Their names may not be on any war memorial, but we remember them with pride as well.
Kate Jones, November 2018
Acknowledgements: A History of Mumbles website, edited by John and Carol Powell; The Mumbles Press, 1914 & 1915; World War 1 records on Ancestry.co.uk. Photographs: Soldiers leaving Mumbles, 1914, M.A. Clare; The Mumbles Shrine in Parade Gardens, 14 September 1918, M.A. Clare; The Great War rood screen memorial in All Saints’ Church, Tony Roberts; Mrs Ann Hixson unveiling the Great War memorial, July 1939, OHA archive; the restored memorial at Clyne Chapel in 2018, John Powell; Bill Barrington and the war memorial in 2006, John Powell.
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