Tag Archives: Great War

The Price of Silver, the Price of History

This is what is known as a 1914 Trio with clasp, or sometimes (inaccurately) as a Mons Star Trio, because Mons was the most famous British battle of 1914. The Star was issued to British troops who landed in France and Belgium between 5 August and 22 November 1914. This included men of the Indian Army and the Canadian forces, men and women of the medical services and the poet Rupert Brooke who fought as part of the Royal Naval Division. Approximately 378,000 medals were issued. 145,000 of them had the clasp, as seen in this photograph. This indicated that the wearer had been within range of the enemy and was part of what the Kaiser supposedly referred to as “Britain’s contemptible little Army”

The recipient was Pte Edward Broomhead of the Army Service Corps, who landed in France on 26 August 1914. He was a foreman bricklayer from Nottingham, who joined up a the age of 39, was rushed out to France within days, contracted rheumatic fever from working in the cold and wet, was invalided out, re-enlisted for Home Service, was invalided out again, and died of influenza in 1918, leaving a wife and five children.

In truth, the Kaiser probably didn’t say that. It is more likely to have been the invention of British propagandists who desperately needed to enthuse Britain to fight a German Army ten times its size. In 1925 these men banded together to form an organisation known as the Old Contemptible Association.

The price of silver is currently £87.19 per ounce. It will be different in ten minutes, but that will do for now. That means that the silver medal in the middle of this group is worth more now than the entire group was worth a couple of months ago.

The British War Medal (BWM) awarded for service in 1914-18 weighs one ounce and is struck from Sterling Silver, which is 92.5% pure. The 7.5% copper is to make it harder wearing. Sterling silver was the silver used in British coins until 1919, when the costs of WW1 compelled us to reduce our coinage to 50% silver. That was reduced to zero in 1946, after another expensive war, when we converted to cupro-nickel.

British War Medal 1914-18 (Obverse)

That means that one ounce of Sterling Silver is worth 92.5% of £87.19. That’s £80.65 for the amount of silver in a BWM.

When I was at school they used to cost £1 or £1.50 each and there were plenty about – 6.5 million being issued. When I was living in Preston in 1980 the Hunt Brothers of Texas tried to corner the market in silver but failed and lost a lot of money. However, the price of BWMs went up sharply and as collectors are interested in history rather than bullion, many were melted for bullion. It wasn’t just the common WW1 medals going into the pot, many older and rarer medals were scrapped too, as were a number of gallantry decorations, rare coins and sports awards. People were just buying for bullion without any appreciation of the history behind the articles they were scrapping. The same thing happened again in 2011 when prices shot up. They were round £15-£20 retail for many years, which seems fair compared to inflation. At a silver value of £80.65 I fear that more will be melted.

Silver is needed for many industrial processes and currently supply is lagging behind the demand for solar power, batteries, electronics and computer chips It will be interesting to see what happens to Mexico once the USA realises that its southern neighbour is the largest producer of silver in the world. What are the chances of another late night raid on a Presidential Palace?

Of course, it’s not rarity or gallantry that concerns me here, most British campaign medals are named, so any medal that is destroyed is a loss of history because each one has the potential for a story to be found. Private Broomhead never did anything famous, he didn’t lead any charges or have any gallantry medals pinned on him by a grateful King, he just went to France, became ill and, weakened by his war service, died. It’s still a history that deserves preserving.

British War Medal 1914-18 (Reverse). Note that the horse, symbolising man’s control of technology, is treading on a shield with a German eagle whilst a skull reminds if death. Symbolism in 1918 was a lot more in your face than it is now.

The single medal pictured, was issued to the next of kin of Pioneer Harry Gow of the Royal Engineers. It is his sole entitlement. The BWM was awarded by the Army to personnel who left the UK. To get the Victory Medal (the gilt one with the Angel and the rainbow ribbon) you had to serve in a war zone. For soldiers, the sea was not considered a war zone so when the troopship Transylvania was torpedoed by the German submarine U-69 on May 4 1917 this became his only medal, and probably, apart from his grave marker, the only proof he ever lived. He was 19 years old and had not had much time to leave anything behind, apart from his grieving parents who had the inscription Gone from us but not Forgotten Never Shall His Memory Fade carved on his memorial stone.

Over the years I have traced stories of domestic violence, babies born out of wedlock, amputations, ill health, criminal careers and, quite often, normal family lives. I recently researched a man who, after being wounded in 1914, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, served in he Army between the wars, retired in the late 30s, and spent WW2 as a Colonel in the Home Guard. I was a life of service and adventure which ended abruptly in the 1950s when he and his wife were charged by a rhino whilst walking on their farm in Kenya. He was gored and died in hospital, having succeeded in diverting the animal from his wife by hitting it with his walking stick.

A Postcard with Three Stories

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How can an article for a society newsletter take all day to write. Yes, I’ve made some food and done some washing up, but mostly I’ve been sat in front of a computer screen hacking away at a few hundred words and altering a few photographs. Then there were the replies to emails, a couple of emails to write and some comments to read. I’m being gradually forced towards the conclusion that I’m a very slow writer.

The postcard I am writing about shows a shop wrecked in the bombardment of Scarborough in December 1914. It mentions that the wife of the shop’s proprietor was killed by the shop doorway.

The shop is Joseph Merryweather’s grocer and sub-post office. It was hit by a shell and Emily Merryweather was killed as she helped two customers take refuge in the cellar. Mr Merryweather was covered in debris. It must have been one of the worst days of his life. He seems, based on other photographs, to be the man in the apron, at the right of the picture. In 1939 he was still in the grocery trade and in 1945, he died, at the age of sixty. As I have started to say recently “that’s younger than me”.

Emily Merryweather

The shop is now an Indian Restaurant.

Mrs Merryweather’s younger brother was killed later in the war. He had emigrated to Canada, married and had two children. When war broke out he joined the Canadian army, having served in the British Army before the war, and wqas killed at the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917.

And finally, the man who wrote the postcard? Pte \William Boalch. He was from |Guernsey, but served with the Royal Irish Regiment, as his address on the card shows. The Guernsey Militia mainly served overseas with the Royal Irish, because they had been so impressed by them when they had been based on the Channel Islands before the war. This was all new to me, but having noted from his records that there were a lot of men from the Royal Irish Regiment who transferred back to the Guernsey Light Infantry, I did some digging. Boalch himself, was wounded by a gunshot in the left arm and chest at Guillemont, during the Somme battles of 1916. He had spent ten months on the Western Front and would not return to the front, though he was kept in the army until the end of the war.

That, I thought as I tracked the details down, is a lot of stories for one small card, and most of them didn’t end well.

Apart from the name and address of the sender and the fact that six postcards cost 2d there is little of interest on this card – maybe a lesson to all us bloggers.

Tripadvisor 1916

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War Memorial – Cliheroe Castle

I was just saying to Paol Soren that I wondered if we have the resilience to live through another world war, when it struck me that history could be approached in a new way these days, by comparing Tripadvisor reviews.

Picture it. My grandfather sitting in the bottom of a trench. It is dark and it is raining. It didn’t always rain in France, but it sometimes seems like it when you read the histories. It could be quite dusty at times, particularly in the chalky areas. One of the few things he ever said about his time in the war was that he had once spent days in a flooded gun pit building up the parapet with dead bodies. As a result of his immersion in filthy water he suffered from skin complaints for over forty years.

They didn’t have snowflakes in 1916, you had to get on with it. While I have recently written a review of a carvery decrying the dried out vegetables, my grandfather was compelled to eat the infamous Maconochie’s stew from a can. This is an icon of the Great War, a tinned stew composed of “sliced turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, haricot beans, and beef in a thin broth”. It appears in many memoirs and produced a flatulence that is also mentioned several times. When you think of the miasma of death and chemicals that must have hovered over the battlefields it is remarkable that flatulence even rated a mention. It must have been formidable stuff.

As for noisy neighbours, I sometimes get a bit irritated by loud TV from one side and a yapping dog from the other. The Germans were undoubtedly noisier than any of my neighbours and, to be fair, my neighbours have never tried to kill me. and think of all those package tours where people complain of the Germans getting up early to put their towels on sun loungers. Towels really don’t compare to the poison gas and flamethrowers that were used on the Western Front.

Pot holes are another thing we complain about today. There was a news item about them last night again. I can’r begin to imagine what the roads were like near the front lines, but I do know we had to build 2,000 miles of light railway to transport supplies to the trenches, as the roads were impassable to wheeled transport.

Yes, it’s a shame we don’t have Tripadvisor reviews from WW1 to make us appreciate how lucky we are.

The header picture is the Clitheroe War Memorial. The second is the identical statue used on the war memorial at Slaidburn. It was undergoing restoration the day we visited. Unlike Knowlton in a previous post, they were neither thankful or brave just two places linked by similar statues and my family history, as members of my family appear on both. On a more cheerful note, my family tree also includes one of the landlords at the Hark to Bounty pub that is pictured on the Slaidburn link.

I will leave the last word to my reimagined grandfather. “I am giving this War one star, not because I think it deserves it, but because there is no option to give it no stars.”

Slaidburn War Memorial

A Brave and Thankful Village

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Poppies and corn wreath

A “Thankful Village” is one where, at the end of the war, all its men returned alive. It is a term coined by Arthur Mee, the Bill Bryson of his day, in The King’s England series of 1936.He identified 32 of these villages, a number which has been increased to 53 after further research. To put it in context, there are 43,452 towns and villages in the UK. There would have been slightly more in the Great War because Ireland was still part of the UK until 1922. There are 50 in England, 3 in Wales and none have yet been identified in either Scotland or Ireland.

The village of Knowlton is one of these villages. Some villages are doubly thankful because they also lost nobody in WW2. Knowlton isn’t one of those, but it does have another distinction – Britain’s Bravest Village. The Weekly Dispatch newspaper held a competition in 1914 to recognise excellence in recruiting. The measure of bravery was to see how many volunteered for war service compared to the number of inhabitants, and the cut-off date was 28 February 1915. Twelve men joined up from a population of 39. When the result was announced there were complaints – mainly based on claims that most of the twelve, although they worked for the estate of Knowlton Court, were not actually residents.

Poppies at MENCAP Gardens

The village of Shillingstone, in Dorset, claims that its vicar objected, on the grounds that Knolton is only a hamlet, and that Shillingstone as runner-up, was then elevated to winner. The problem with this story is that Shillingstone wasn’t the runner-up, that was a village in Scotland called Mennock. Of course, Mennock is also a hamlet (a settlement without a church) so maybe Shillingstone objected to them too. But Shillingstone weren’t third either, that was the Orkney Islands, also in Scotland. It’s all looking a bit unreliable as a story. Anyway, Knowsley’s prize was a war memorial, which is ironic as they had no casualties to put on it. They took the course that was followed by several other places, of adding the names of the survivors.

The memorial is by George Frampton, noted sculptor, probably best known for his Peter Pan statue, or the Edith Cavell memorial.

If you look at the Mennock picture closely, you will see a row of poppies in the foreground just like the ones we made on the farm, using the bottoms of pop bottles. THis was what prompted my selection of photos for the post. Strangely, although Mennock appears to have an Aberdeen granite war memorial by Frampton, the actual prize offered was either a Roll of Honour or a bronze medallion, according to different newspaper reports. There were several similar competitions on a local basis.

Considering that I’d never heard of the competition before I started to research an In Memorium card, I have manged to make a blog post out of it, and am likely to do more digging as it’s an interesting subject. I have just found the rules in the paper – it does state villages, but makes it clear that no borough and no place over 5,000 in population can enter. People don’t always differentiate between villages and hamlets, but it’s clearly a competition for smaller places.

Poppies and Rosemary in MENCAP gardens.

A Lesson Learned the Hard Way

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As usual, I have left things late. It’s the Numismatic Society tomorrow and, as part of my drive to injecting a little more life into it, I want to take a small display down. I did some research on an item last night, about two hours, plus a bit I’d done a few weeks ago, so probably three hours in all.

It’s a Sacriston Tribute Medal, which I have mentioned before.

I checked the man out, his family, his military history and the war memorials he was on (he was killed in action in 1916) and was quite pleased with myself for putting it all together. Then I thought I’d better do one final check, just to make sure that there was only one man of that name in the village. It had been niggling me all night that his rank on the medal was Private, but his military records showed Sapper and Lance Corporal. Sapper is the Royal Engineers equivalent of Private, and Lance Corporal is an appointment, not a rank, so L/Cpls are often still counted as privates by the army, so it could, I told myself, be right. But then again . . .

So I checked. There’s another man of the same name in the village in 1911. He was also there as a child in 1901, so it’s likely he was there for 1914-18 too. So, I may have spent hours researching the wrong man. And I still have other things to do to make a decent display.

Moral of the story – don’t just do your research – do it in the right order!

Sacriston Tribute Medal – Obverse

Sacriston Tribute Medal – Reverse

Post 3,001 and the Plan Continues

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I say “the plan continues” but it’s not quite as simple as that. The original post I had in mind was going to discuss how things had changed since October 2014, but that sort of post can easily turn depressing if you strike the wrong tone. Or be too boring and introspective. Well, the first two tries turned out that way. In the manner of such things, their existence has been erased and their pixels scattered to the four winds . . .

Instead, I will revert to one of my specialist subjects. This is the Tribute Medal given to the servicemen and women of Sacriston, a mining village in County Durham on their return from the war.

I bought it on eBay a few days ago as I don’t have a specimen and the research has already been quite interesting. According to the research I did last night there were 760 people who served in the war, including at least five women. Of these 104 died. The medals were given out in a series of dinners at the local Institute. I have traced two lists of recipients in the papers, and am trying to find others – there is mention of a plan to hold five or six dinners.

Sacriston Tribute Medal 1919 – Obverse

As usual, there is no reward for the people who kept the country running during the absence of the soldiers, including miners, nurses, munitions workers and the Women’s Land Army.

Over the years I have developed a formula for calculating the approximate size of issue of tribute medals. If I can find out how many people were killed from a village I can calculate the approximate total of people who served. It’s not very precise but I usually multiply by seven to get the low end of the issue. In this case that would have been 728, so it was close. It’s just a way of working out comparative rarity – telling me if I’m ever likely to find one.

One thing to note is the excellence of the design and production. Corners were not cut with the production of this medallion and it is made from silver. It is made by Walker & Hall, who were makers of high quality silver goods, and it is marked as sterling silver.

They are also named, which doesn’t always happen. The nearby town of Ashington gave a smaller silver fob, and left it blank for the recipient to engrave their own name. So, after forty years of looking, I still haven’t found a named example.

Sacriston Tribute Medal 1919 – Reverse

Finally, note the dates – 1914-19. The war, we tend to think, ended on 11th November 1918. It didn’t. We were still fighting in Russia until the end of 1919, having originally become involved after the revolution when we tried to prevent resources falling into the hands of the Germans. It wasn’t the best organised of interventions and nobody really took a grip of organising it. The fighting finished in the autumn of 1919 and all British personnel were withdrawn. Czechs, French, Americans, Greeks, Japanese, Chinese, British, Canadian, even Australians, all ended up fighting there, as did many others., so I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t even attempt to describe it. Over 900 British troops were killed when they should have been safe at home.

I have a pair of medals in my collection to a coal miner from Yorkshire. He was called up in the summer of 1918, when the war was almost over, and sent to Russia, where he served for a year and then came home. I can’t imagine he was happy. I know a lot of mothers weren’t, because the papers of 1919 are full of letters from mothers wanting to know why their sons are still in danger in Russia when the war is supposedly over.

Hallmarks Sacriston Tribute Medal

That’s it then, the first post of the next 1,000 and the second day of my new plan. Day three indicates that I must “Probably write an informative piece about world peace. Though possibly not that informative, and possibly a different subject.”

After struggling for a subject tonight, I’m not sure whether I may have set the next bar a little high.

Post 3,000, and I Love my Job

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The header photo is nearly all that remains of a young life. There are a few letters and army forms, but they don’t photograph well. It had barely got going when he volunteered for the army and it wasn’t destined to last long. He went to France in August 1915 and, as far as I can tell, spent the next 26 months there. He wrote a letter to his mother in August 1917. It’s not very interesting, these things seldom are after the passage of 100 years. It’s a letter from a son not wanting to mention anything that would get him censored or upset his mother. It ends with him saying that he is hoping to get home soon because of his toes. It didn’t quite work out like that.

People have often asked me over the years if it concerns me that I’m selling the remains of people’s lives. They often add that it’s a shame they can’t be left with the family or given to a museum.

Medals and Plaque – Great War

In reverse order – don’t give anything to a museum. Unless you have something of national importance it will be dropped into a box or a drawer and never seen again. This isn’t idle speculation, I know of many cases where it has been done. Museums are generally good, and should be encouraged, but they don’t need more stuff.

Left with the family? I know of one case where the recipient wasn’t even cold before the family had his medals down to the local antique shop. And where do people think the medals all come from? The family sells them. Sometimes recipients sell medals – they don’t necessarily represent the same thing to the recipient that they do to a collector. We bought these off the family. However, when you think about it, you would have to be over 106 to have known this man. When families sell us medals they are often two or three generations away and sometimes don’t even know where in the family the medals have come from.

And three, no, I don’t have a problem with it. I have given L/Cpl Louis Thornley a good write-up on eBay and have done something the army couldn’t do for him – I’ve spelt his name correctly. The army had him as Lewis Thornbey on their medal index cards, and they named his medals incorrectly. This is an echo of what happened to my great-grandfather – not only did they name his medals incorrectly but when they sent his widow the (correctly) named memorial scroll they spelt her name wrong on the address label.

On top of that, I have taken his documents and medals out of a tin where they have clearly been for many years and I have brought his story into the open. They will go to a collector who will value them for the sacrifice that Louis Thornley made, and who will bring his story back to life.

It’s something I’m able to do regularly at work, after family members have forgotten all about them. It’s not their fault, it’s just that time passes and life moves on. It’s a privilege to be able to ensure that people aren’t forgotten.

Louis Thornley’s Plaque and Scroll

On 12th October 1917 Louis Thornley, who had been with his unit through six major actions, lined up in the driving rain and muddy terrain on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele.

It’s a battle that has become synonymous with the mud and slaughter picture of the Great War, and when it was finished the Allies had lost over 300,000 men, 42,000 of them have no known grave. Louis Thornley, who is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial, is one of them.

Two week’s later, Mr and Mrs Thornley received an Army Form B 104, telling them that their son had been killed in action on the 12th. According to the Derby Evening Telegraph in January 1940, when they were celebrating their 50th Wedding Anniversary, they had four sons who served in the war, the other three surviving.

Poppies in wheat field

Day 174

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I had it all planned in my head. I was going to come home from work, write the blog post, prepare tea, watch quizzes, make tea and then watch a bit more TV before working on the computer.

So I came home, watched a quiz, fell asleep, ate tea (prepared by Julia), watched TV and started frittering time on the computer. It wasn’t quite how I had planned it. I also missed the cut-off time for making changes to my grocery order.

It is now late and I am writing a blog post whilst feeling tired, and remorseful for my lack of energy.

We had an interesting medal brought in this afternoon, along with some cloth arm badges. The medal is named to the Royal Naval Air Service and one of the cloth badges is from the RNAS too. The other two were worn by the same man but are just general naval badges – the chevron is for 3 years service and the anchor is the badge of a Leading Seaman, or Leading Mechanic in this case.

The RNAS was a short-lived organisation, formed in 1914 as an air arm of the Royal Navy and disbanded when it became part of the RAF in April 1918. It was an interesting organisation and carried out various duties in the war, such as strategic bombing, airship flights, anti-submarine warfare, the development of aircraft carriers and it even had an armoured car unit. From this you may deduce that nobody was really sure what to do with it.

The recipient of the medal is fairly well documented. Born in London, he joined up in 1916 at the age of 18 and served at RAF Cranwell (which was, at the time, a base of the RNAS, despite being in the middle of Lincolnshire), was demobbed in 1919 with the rank of Corporal Mechanic (paid 5 shillings a day) and by 1939 was an engineer in Loughborough who was also a member of the ARP. He died in Worthing in 1966.

Approximately 100 years after his war service ended, his family sold his war medal and uniform badges to us.

RNAS Mechanic’s Arm Badge

They say we all die twice – once when we stop breathing and once when nobody remembers us. Sometimes, when I find details of a medal recipient, it feels like we are helping him live again.

Paths of Glory

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The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Today I not only use Grey’s Elegy for a title, but Kubrick’s film. Eliot said Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal, and Quercus says If you’re going to steal, steal big.

Behind Southwell MInster in the Nottinghamshire town of Southwell, there’s an ivy covered wall, and on that wall there’s a mouldering wooden cross. The metal plate on it says:

‘In memory of Major J P Becher DSO (1/8th Sherwood Foresters) who died on 1.1.16 from wounds received in the attack on the Hohenzollern redoubt 16.10.15. Sans Peur. Sans Reproche.’

It is an original wooden grave marker as used on military graves just after the Great War, There were many styles of cross as they were often put up by comrades of the dead men and they made them out of whatever was available. When they were replaced by the neat white markers that we now find so familiar, the families were given the chance of having the wooden ones sent home. Many of the ones that were returned were put in local churches, but Major Becher’s family put his up outside. So far it has lasted 100 years, but every time I go to look at it, I worry that it will have disintegrated.

Becher’s grave marker

This isn’t the place to go into the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but the logistical effort of returning the markers, at a time when they were still recovering bodies by the thousand, must have been tremendous. There were, according to this article, 10,000 crosses sent back to families so they could have something tangible to link families to the graves of their loved ones.

Though they didn’t realise it, they were the lucky ones. It haunted my grandmother all her life that her father had no known grave. He is listed on the Thiepval Memorial, but it isn’t the same as having a grave, even if the family never visited it.

That’s the Thiepval memorial. There are over 72,000 names on it – 72,000 people who have no known grave.

To be honest, I was amazed by the number of markers that were returned. It’s a small number compared to the total of the losses but it was still a huge logistical effort, particularly for a government that is usually portrayed as callous and unfeeling.

This is John Pickard Becher DSO.

There’s no reason why you should have heard of him. He was a country solicitor from Southwell. I assume he pursued the life of an English provincial gentleman in the years before 1914. His name is mentioned numerous times in the period before the war, though always in connection with legal matters, and with no personal stories attached. The only non-legal matter I can find is his entry into the volunteers in 1906 when, on November 1st 1906 ” John Pickard Becher, Gentleman,” was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 4th (Nottinghamshire) Volunteer Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire) regiment. The Volunteers were the ancestors of the Territorial Army, which was formed in 1908. Becher’s battalion became the 8th battalion of the Sherwood Foresters, based in Newark

Nothing is heard of him from 1912 to 1915. He was obviously embodied with the battalion in 1914 and went overseas with them in February 1915. The battalion was quickly in action and in April 1915 he performed the first of several acts of gallantry that would lead to the award of the Distinguished Service Order, one step down from the Victoria Cross.

This was his citation, published in the London Gazette.

‘Conspicuous gallantry and good service on several occasions. On April 4th 1915 at Kemmel when part of his trench was blown in under heavy fire he personally assisted in repairing the parapet and digging out buried men. On June 15th at Kemmel when part of his trench was blown in by mines, shells and trench mortars, he displayed great gallantry and coolness in reorganising the defences. On July 30th and subsequent days at Ypres he displayed great coolness, cheerfulness and resource under trying circumstances when in temporary command of his battalion.’

Of course, it didn’t last long. On 15th October 1915, the British attacked the Hohenzollern Redoubt as a follow up to the Battle of Loos. Pickard was seriously wounded and lay out in No Man’s Land for 48 hours. He died nearly three months later of blood poisoning. These were the days before antibiotics.

Both his brothers in law, Everard, and Basil were also killed in the attack. Neither of them has a known grave and they are both commemorated on the Loos Memorial.

They are quite well commemorated around Nottinghamshire as we are lucky in having a number of volunteers who have helped build an on-line Roll of Honour.

Some of you will have noticed the poppy on Becher’s cross. That’s in memory of Squadron Leader John Henry Becher RAF, who was killed in a plane crash in 1940. He was the son of J P Becher and his wife Gertrude who, with a husband, son and two brothers, really had more tragedy in her life than anyone should be expected to bear.

I noted, when researching this post, that he is commemorated in the Minster – I’ve visited several times but never knew about this.

Another generation

Time to Think

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Julia came home from work with Bear Claws tonight. In case you aren’t familiar with th eterm, this means that she brought fruit-filled danish pastries home. They are a treat and not a terrible deformity.

We sat round the fire, drew the curtains and reverted to winter, in much the same way as the weather has done ever since I said that Spring was here. Tomorrow I was going to have a walk, but the forecast is for rain, so I am reconsidering. Having lived as a recluse for the best part of a year I don’t really want to go out just to get wet. In fact I don’t want to go out. I’ve got used to having a lid on my life and I’m not sure about going out and just having sky overhead.

Stange how these things creep up on you. is it lockdown, or am I just becoming old?

I have been doing research on medals today for work. One was an interesting group – aman who served 21 years in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Boer War and Great War. He was decorated twice, wounded, had enteric fever, and became a publican after leaving the army.

His reward for for all his service – the death of his eldest son in 1941, serving in a second world war.

No mater how bad we may think things are, it sometimes serves us well to look back at history and see how much adversity other people had to face.

I note that daffodils are out now, and the crocuses don’t seem to be doing at all well.

Daffodils

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Life after the Care Farm