Thankful Villages

While I was thinking about the fact that it was "Remembrance Day", when I stumbled across a small story about an aspect of the remembrance day events that I had never heard of  before. There are villages and communities in Britain and France that were known as "Thankful Villages" because despite sending many men to fight in the first world war, every man jack of them came back alive, albeit missing the odd limb. In Britain fifty two such villages have been identified, and all are in England (none in Scotland, Wales or Ireland).

Upper Slaughter, one of a handful of  'Doubly Thankful' villages. 

There are an even smaller of these villages, just fourteen, like Upper Slaughter in England, that have come to be known as 'doubly thankful' for also losing no-one from WWII as well (24 men and one woman joined the services in WWI and a further 36 men in WWII) .... the original term "Thankful Villages" was first coined by the writer Arthur Mee in 1930's.

 

In contrast to these lucky few, there were over 16,000 British communities which paid the highest sacrifice during those wars, such as Wadhurst, in East Sussex, which with a population of just over 3,500 people, which lost 649 men in WWI. On a single day in 1915 at the Battle of Aubers, twenty five men from Wadhurst were killed, nearly 80% of all those who went forward into no-man's land, and almost certainly the heaviest per capita casualties of any community in the UK for one day's battle ....  the majority of those killed had no known grave.

In France, there is a similar tale, but there is one village, Thierville in Normandy that has not lost any soldiers (in any arm of the services), in any of France's last five national wars (the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, World Wars I and II, Indochina, and Algeria).

If anyone is interested in more on this story, a good starting point is the lengthy BBC story that I based this post on, which is here.