1900s-1945
In November and December 2016 the Parish Magazine carried a two-part reflection by John Stevens, looking back at a moment when the First World War reached its halfway point. By November 1916 the fighting had been going on for more than two years, and the toll on Leigh was already heavy: eleven of the thirty-two men whose names appear on the village War Memorial had lost their lives by that month. His article traced their stories, home by home, and the account below follows the same path.
The first Leigh man to die was William Upton, and his loss came with shocking speed. He was serving aboard HMS Cressy when the ship was torpedoed off the Dutch coast, barely a month after the war began. A village still coming to terms with the outbreak of war had already given a life to the Navy, and the news must have landed hard in a community where everyone knew everyone else.
The sea claimed more local men as 1914 turned into 1915. Horace Batchelor, who had grown up at Powder Mills, was just seventeen years old when he was killed. He served on HMS Formidable, a battleship sunk in January 1915. In June of that same year Sidney Everest, aged only eighteen, was killed at sea while serving on HM Torpedo Boat 12. He had lived at Little Moorden. Two sailors so young, gone within six months of each other, underlined how widely the conflict reached.
On land, the fighting in Flanders had settled into the grim pattern familiar from the first battle of Ypres, which began in October 1914. That same front saw a new horror in January 1915, when chlorine gas was used for the first time. Among those who did not survive it was Herbert Upton, whose home was at Garden Cottages. He died in a gas attack in April 1915, one of the earliest victims of a weapon that would haunt the Western Front for the rest of the war.
April 1915 also saw the start of the Gallipoli landings, the campaign against Turkey that would draw in men from Leigh. Frank Faircloth, whose parents lived at Ivy House, served in both the Dardanelles and Egypt during this period. He died of wounds in May while fighting the Turks, far from the fields of Kent but remembered at home all the same.
The year 1916 proved the costliest yet on the Western Front, with five Leigh men dying there. Albert Towner, whose family home was at Killicks Bank, had enlisted when he was only fifteen years old — young enough that his service alone tells a story. He died at Ypres. Reginald Brooker, who lived at Forge Square, was killed in Pas de Calais in October 1916, as the fighting on the continent ground through its second full year.
July 1916 brought the opening of the battle of the Somme on the first day of that month, and the Somme too took Leigh men. Albert Jenman, who lodged at Chiddingstone Causeway, died there, as did John Everest, brother of Sidney Everest, the young sailor lost the year before. The name of William Bamblett of Powder Mills also stands among the village's war dead, another household on that single hamlet's lanes touched by loss.
One further death in 1916 came far from France. Ernest Mark Young served in the Royal Garrison Artillery and became a prisoner of the Turks after the surrender at Kut on 16 April 1916. Captivity in Mesopotamia proved fatal to many who endured it, and he did not come home: he died on 31 December 1916, aged thirty-five. Today he is remembered on the Basra Memorial in Iraq, one of the most distant points on the map where Leigh's loss is recorded.
Two names on the memorial remain a puzzle. The deaths of George Mitchell and Fred Parker are recorded there, yet research could establish no clear link binding either man to Leigh. Perhaps they had family connections that have since been lost, or moved away before the war. In the opposite direction, one Leigh man who died was omitted from the memorial list entirely, for reasons that are no longer known — a reminder that even a village roll of honour is not infallible.
The year 1917 took a heavy toll on one family in particular. Charles Bourner died at Ypres on 7 August 1917; his parents lived at Forge Square, the same address as Reginald Brooker. James Bourner died in Pas de Calais on 15 April, and Frank Bourner died in Pas de Calais on 25 May. Also lost that year were Harry Horsey of Cook's Pits, and James Davies, a second lieutenant who both lived and worked at Powder Mills. Sidney Pocock of Charcott was just twenty years old; he had worked for Duke, the cricket ball makers, before the war took him.
The war's final year was no kinder. Frank Garner and Victor Ready, who lived in Charcott, were both killed on the Somme in March 1918, during the German spring offensives. Jack Brooker, aged nineteen, died in April 1918 and was possibly a cousin of Reginald Brooker. Sidney Batchelor, of Powder Mills like James Davies before him, died at Ypres in July, and Charles Robinson, also of Powder Mills, died on the Somme in August. Jerusalem had been captured from the Turks in December 1917, and Frank Killick died there in May 1918.
Roland Woodgate's father was a gardener at Hall Place, and Roland signed up early, in 1914. In 1917 he was sent to Basra, and he died of influenza there in October 1918, as the war neared its end. His story, like all the others gathered here, is kept alive by the memorial and by the village that remembers them.