VE Day 80: The graves of fallen heroes tended by a new generation

Interestingly, the CWGC operated a policy of non-repatriation (it was highly controversial in the aftermath of The Great War – one Leeds mother even wrote to the Yorkshire Post at the time, asking why, if the Unknown Warrior could be brought home, with so much pomp and ceremony albeit dignified and solemn, why couldn’t her only son, who had died in the mud of the Somme, be given the same rights? Her plea was refused. So, the stones that we see around the county are all the casualties of air combat, bombing raids over Yorkshire, naval warfare off our coastline, training exercises and medical evacuations from other theatres of war, accidents, and illnesses.

Now, to mark the anniversaries of VE Day, and, later in the year, VJ Day, the CWGC are offering free cemetery talks and tours encouraging us all to discover the heritage that is right here, on our doorsteps.

The CWGC’s Director of Education, Engagement and Volunteering, Simon Bendry says: “This year is both special. And unique, with the 80th anniversaries of VE and VJ Days, and we are incredibly excited for people to come out and join one of our tours in the coming weeks, and to share their stories of the fallen, so that we can keep telling them for the generations to come.” Personal inscriptions probably provide our insight into those lives lost – and those whose lives were forever changed by conflict. Incredibly, there are nearly 300,000 of them for the First World War alone, and many are Biblical quotations, or from literary references and hymns. Each is evidence of how grief is processed and, interestingly, there are a good many that suggested the futility of war. By the time of WWII, the inscriptions are more personalised, and less religious. The CWGC is the world leader in commemoration, looking after the final resting places of 1.7 million men and women from the Empire, later the Commonwealth who lost their lives in both World Wars.

“Some of the inscriptions that you read are, well, just heart-rending,” says Eleanor Dufton, who has a special interest in Huddersfield’s historic Edgerton Cemetery. Eleanor, 24, was born nearby, and is a member of one of the teams who will be leading the tours across Yorkshire. She points to the headstone which commemorates Sergeant Harold Longley, who was 44 when he died. He served in the ROAC, and he was the youngest son of a family who lived in Scar Lane, Milnsbridge. A newspaper obituary of the time noted that he had died “in particularly poignant circumstances.”

Eleanor says: “Research shows us that he died the weekend after he was to have been married. He’d served for well over four years, in India for some of that time, only to have been taken seriously ill – and he then died. On his stone is carved, in those beautifully designed letters that the CWGC use, ‘Resting free from sorrow and pain. Remembered always.’ You can’t but wonder what anguish his fiancée and his family must have gone through.” Eleanor says quietly: “Inscriptions make sense of a person.”

Another plot that fascinated Eleanor is that for Private Nellie Stocks. “It resonates so much with me,” she says, “because she was exactly my age when she died. Her widowed father lived in Whitestone Lane, not so far away, and she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Army. It’s rare indeed to find a woman’s commemoration stone of this kind. There are a number which tell us that the lady concerned was in the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) of with the RAF, but they nearly always have connections to an air-base, where they probably served in the operations room, or to a town or city with naval connections , and where the Wrens again served on vital operational duties. Nellie’s full name was Hannah Eliza, and she died at Bradley Wood Sanatorium. Digging deeper, you find that she must have been seriously ill, because a sanatorium was only used when there were: ‘Only those cases in which there was reasonable hope of improvement.’ But Nellie didn’t pull through, and here she lies. It’s so sad – she had all her life before her.”

Nellie’s death was in 1944, Harold’s was in the late autumn of 1945, so he would probably have joined in the celebrations of both VE and VJ days, and probably thought to himself that he and his wife-to-be would see a much sunnier future. It was not to be.

It was when she was at school that Eleanor’s interest in history was triggered, both at Shelley and Greenhead Colleges in Huddersfield. “There were two things that started it, I think. The first was my grandma, Brenda Fisher, compiling a family tree, which I found completely fascinating – she went into a lot of detail and carefully researched it all – and the second was a school trip to Bletchley Park, the home of the WWII codebreakers. It was for those of us doing maths, but I found the history of the place far more interesting, and the fact that there were some brilliant women in the team trying (and succeeding) to break complex codes.”

Eleanor went on to read French and Spanish at Leeds University, where she is currently working toward her PhD, but she was delighted that her chosen course modules also involved a lot of history studies. She was pointed to the work of the CWGC when she was in France, and encouraged by Professor Nina Wardleworth, the Professor of Global French Studies, and an expert in both WWII and the former French Colonies.

She became involved in tours to the battlefield and cemetery sites in France and Belgium, and became a guide for all sorts of visitors – something that she is proudly committed to today. “Thinking about it,” she says, “they fall roughly into three categories. There are youngsters on school trips, independent travellers with an interest in the two World Wars, and group visitors who ten, generally, to be made up of the children and grandchildren of the fallen. The thing that unites them all is the deep respect that they have for all the CWGC sites. And, of course, you encounter a lot of people who are looking for a specific family marker. I find every headstone moving, each one has a story to tell, and I do often research the people named. One that really touched me, I found it in the extensive archives, was a letter from a young man who wrote home to tell his wife that he was beyond excited that he was going to meet their new baby for the first time. Tragically, he never made it.That’s the deeply personal story, and we weave information like that into the tours and talks. My colleagues know so very much more than I do, but I’m so grateful to be involved with the CWGC. And here’s a bonus for me, I get to research in the archives, real legers and papers and books, making it truly tangible. Google might get you speedy answers, but there’s nothing like the thrill of finding a nugget of revealing information deep inside some paperwork. People may be out there celebrating VE Day and VJ Day – but we all want them to know why they are celebrating. We should never lose sight of that.”

www.cwgc.org