We will remember them…
November 1914 –The First Battle of Ypres
In early October, in the course of the ‘race to the sea’, the British ExpeditionaryForce was re-located to Flanders and on the 19th the Germans launched strong forces against the allied positions around Ypres. The battle lasted until 22nd November
during which the BEF suffered 58,155 casualties (killed, wounded or missing),
including 67 men of the Cheshire Regiment killed.
The allies retained control of Ypres for the rest of the war but because the town lay in a salient (a forward projection of the trench line) it was under constant bombardment and was the scene of two further major battles in 1915 and 1917.
Ten of the men commemorated on the War Memorial died in the Ypres salient, including Joseph Hockenhull (1917) and Alfred Hudson (1918), who are named on this third panel.
…and in Alderley Edge
The Brookdale Military Hospital was opened.
Brookdale was a large house on the site of Alderley Edge School for Girls (part of it still survives within the main building of the school).
It was the home of Humphrey Watts, who made it available to the Alderley Edge branch of the British Red Cross Society for use as a military hospital for less seriously wounded or convalescent service personnel.
It provided originally for 20 patients, but later a temporary annexe was added and by the end of the war it had treated 1817 patients.
The commandant was Mrs Emily Fenton Armitage Hutton, who lived at Woodlands on Congleton Road and who is commemorated on an inscribed paving stone at the foot of the War Memorial cross.
