Only one of the other three brothers seems to have served in the war.
Thomas, the oldest brother, was a Labourer in a Print Works in 1891, a Cotton Mill Oiler in 1901 and a Corporation Labourer in 1911. According to his obituary (September 1938) he joined the Clitheroe Fire Brigade in 1911 and served for 26 years. I’ll leave that for another post.
Albert, who was unmarried, and a Print Works Labourer in 1911, died in 1913. I don’t know anything about the circumstances, so that’s another avenue of research. In 1911 there was someone else in the Carus household too – Margaret Evelyn, a grand daughter aged seven. She was born in Aldershot, and that is part of Walter’s tale.
In 1911 Walter was living with wife and two younger children in Aldershot, where he was working as a carman for a furniture company.
There is little military paperwork, just an index card (pictured above) for a Walter Carus indicating that he went to France on 18th August 1914. On the back of the card is a Clitheroe address.
Adding Aldershot to a soldier who went to France within two weeks of the start of the war, I decided that it was likely that Walter had been a regular soldier before the war, and he had been called back from the Reserve (they mainly signed on for seven years in the army and five in the Reserve).
And that, as I often say, was that.
Looking through the papers, I was able to find this article in the edition for 3rd August 1917. The superimposed blue frames are part of the search process.
From the mention of artillery, it looks like he may have been in an artillery ammunition column, delivering shells to the front. I can see that three years of that would produce “some exceedingly narrow escapes”.
The next time he appears in the paper is in 1955, when 50 members of the family took part in a reunion, when a son and a daughter, and their respective spouses, returned from overseas military postings. The full family was three sons, seven daughters, 34 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren. Plus in-laws. One of the sons-in-law produced cakes for the party – he was a prize-winning member of the Army Catering Corps so they were in safe hands.
His final appearance in the paper is a short obituary in 1957, which reveals the additional details that he served in the Army Service Corps for 19 years and was an Old Contemptible and member of the British Legion. He was a joiner by trade and retired from his last job, at the Ribblesdale Cement Co Ltd when he was 65.
I had three other relatives working there around that time, all from different branches of the family tree.
An Old Contemptible, in case you aren’t familiar with the term, is a soldier who served in France and Belgium with the British Army in the first phase of the war – 5th August 1914 to 22nd November 1914. They were referred to as a “contemptible little army” by the Kaiser.
It’s true they weren’t a very big army, and they didn’t have great equipment. If you subscribe to traditional views of history they may even have been badly led.
But they did what was necessary.
