We will remember them…

January 1915

By the beginning of 1915 the war on the western front had settled into the pattern of trench warfare which is for many people the defining motif of the Great War.  In the five months August – December 1914, British losses (killed, wounded and missing) came to about 90,000. Further heavy losses were sustained in the first three months of 1915 in unsuccessful attempts to break through the German lines.

Consequently ever more recruits were needed. This poster refers to the shelling of Scarborough by German battlecruisers in December 1914. 

As was the case everywhere throughout the country, men in Alderley Edge responded to the call to arms. 

Few records of enlistment dates survive but one man who responded in January 1915 was John Frederick Waller, son of the caretaker of Alderley Edge Cemetery.  He was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and his name appears on the fourth panel of the War Memorial.  Surviving records indicate that at least ten of the men who are named on the memorial were under arms by this time. 

Tracing men who joined the army but survived the war – many physically or psychologically scarred for the rest of their lives – is difficult and the results are necessarily incomplete because many records were destroyed in the 1940 blitz.

Yet they deserve to be remembered as well as those who lost their lives. This list of some who enlisted between August and December 1914 may serve to represent others who have not been identified:

Collin Ford, who lived in Heyes Lane; Oscar Birtles (Brook Lane); Thomas Davis and Herbert Hatton (both Moss Lane); Harry Clayton and Sydney Leah, (both The Hough).

If you know of Alderley Edge men who served in the war and returned home afterwards, we should be glad to hear of them.