High Hesket war memorial is just one of countless (or uncounted) such memorials across the length and breadth of the UK. Every name on every memorial has a story behind it, of a life lived and a lif...Read More
Food control was a matter of national concern in the UK in both the First World War and the Second World War. If the trade-off for the national prosperity of the Industrial Revolution was people leavi...Read More
Newbiggin Hall, in Cumbria, is more than 2,500km from Belgrade. But it has an important connection to the events that tipped Europe into the madness of the First World War. This third post on the Crac...Read More
Today is Remembrance Sunday and tomorrow the 101st anniversary of the Armistice. Here is my final reflection on the men whose names are recorded on just one memorial in one Cumbrian town. ‘After the...Read More
Which Newbiggin Hall is this? There is more than one! Newbiggin Hall – the one at Newbiggin, near Temple Sowerby – became the home of the Crackenthorpe/Crackanthorpe family in the 1300s. Here ...Read More
If ‘Two more Penrith casualties’ sounds somehow dismissive, it isn’t. Quite the opposite. More than 700,000 British soldiers were killed in the First World War (the number actually ...Read More
Prisoners of war have long been a staple of movies and TV dramas, from those based on true stories like The Great Escape, to the enjoyable nonsense of Escape to Victory. The focus is almost always o...Read More
Tom Telford is another of the men recorded on the 1920 Penrith Congregational Church memorial plaque. It’s ‘just’ one plaque among countless tributes to the dead of the First World W...Read More
Mustard gas is possibly misleading in this piece about the deaths of two Cumbrian First World War soldiers. Chlorine gas and phosgene were also used as chemical weapons. Which somehow have always seem...Read More
Henry and Jane Ann Pilkington, of Penrith, lost three sons to war. This is their story. Penrith Congregational Church unveiled a memorial table on September 26, 1920, ‘in grateful memory of the men ...Read More