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| Wilfred Wilkinson in his military uniform aged 19 0r 20 in 1915 or 1916. Author's own collection. |
For whatever reason
you need to look at the 1911 census, give some time and attention to the
young men recorded there: the butchers’ boys, telegraph and post boys, the
grooms, shop assistants, apprentices and junior servants. Remember that these
names on the page were once hopeful and expectant boys who had no idea about
what lay round the corner. Remember too that the families clustered around them
on the census returns would, in many cases, soon be families no more. Those
young men belonged to a world very different to the one that would succeed it -
a world in which men of different backgrounds knew their place in the class
hierarchy and in which they were subjects of a country with enormous and
unchallenged power on the international stage. Nobody could have predicted in
1911 that the conflict that ensued would take
- from Great Britain and her Empire alone - the lives of 908,000 men,
that two million would be wounded and that a further 180,000 would go missing.
The Baker’s Boy
I recently visited the 1911 census to search
for my great-uncle Wilfred Wilkinson who was killed in 1917. Wilfred was the
eldest surviving child of George and Mary Wilkinson of Hindley, Wigan,
Lancashire. Born in 1896, Wilfred was fifteen at the time of the 1911 census. I
wondered what he had been doing at that time. It wasn’t difficult to locate him
but I caught my breath when I saw his occupation described as ‘baker’s errand boy.’ I was reminded that in
1911, Wilfred had been so young that he had not even mastered a trade. He was
not yet a baker – just an errand boy. I remembered too that my grandfather,
George, (Wilfred’s younger brother), once told me, with tears in his eyes, that
Wilfred had ‘done nothing but work’ before he enlisted – that he had had no
life at all. He hadn’t even got round to having a girlfriend.
The Soldier
I searched for Wilfred Wilkinson at www.ancestry.co.uk on a database entitled
Great Britain, Royal Naval Division Casualties of The Great War, 1914-1924.
This is a register
of the deaths of Royal Navy servicemen who served in the
Royal Naval Division (RND) in World War I. It was compiled from original
service records and all other sources listing RND casualties. From this, you
may potentially ascertain the following details about your ancestor:
- his unit and rank
- the date and cause of death
- awards
- his place of burial (gives
the place of burial and/or the relevant Commonwealth War Graves Commission
(CWGC) memorial for those with known grave)
- a brief service history
(this is a summary of a man’s active service, but may include enlistment
date, home service, and previous military/naval service)
- Notes (this may list
occupation, next of kin, home address, birth date, medal entitlement,
etc.)
- Service number.
- The record also contains
details of Wilfred’s parents, two of their addresses and Wilfred’s date of
birth.
According to this database, Wilfred
volunteered in July 1915 and joined the Royal Marine Brigade in February 1916.
Eight days later he was at the small Greek port of Mudros on the Meditteranean
island of Lemnos. He went on to join the First Royal Marine Battalion of the
Royal Marine Light Infantry on April 25th 1916. In November of that
year, he received a gunshot wound to the thigh and was found to be suffering
from scabies. He must have returned home briefly – though, I presume, not to
work in the bakery. Just over a month later he rejoined his battalion in
Northern France. It was here that he was killed on 17th February
1917. He is buried in Queen’s Cemetery at Bucquoy.
Great Britain, Royal Naval Division Casualties of the
Great War, 1914-1924
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The Decimation of Some Enumeration
Districts
Like all censuses, the 1911 census was
carried out street by street, and area by area. But in the light of what
happened next, the way it was organised seems highly poignant. My grandfather
told me that many of Wilfred’s local friends enlisted when he did and, by the
end of the War, his family knew young men in every neighbouring street who had
been killed. Today, whole neighbourhoods can be searched online with a few
clicks of your computer mouse. It’s shocking to think that simply by flicking
through the streets adjoining Wilfred’s in the online census and looking at the
young men of comparable ages, it is probably possible to hazard a guess as to
which young men might not appear in the next census of 1921.
Wilfred’s neighbourhood of Hindley, of
course, was not alone in this phenomenon. Indeed, the idea of young men from a
small area joining up together was actively encouraged by Lord Kitchener,
Secretary of State for War, in the early days of the conflict. He believed that
more men would be encouraged to join the army if they thought that they would
be fighting alongside friends, neighbours and work colleagues (‘Pals’) rather
than being allocated to regular army regiments. He was right. As early as
September 1914, over fifty Pals battalions had been formed.
The most famous and tragic example of a Pals
battalion was probably a group that formed not far away from Wilfred’s home
town. ‘The Accrington Pals’ was a battalion made up of large number of young
working-class men from the Northern towns of Acccrington, Burnley, Blackburn
and Chorley, who answered Kitchener’s call for volunteers and became the 11th
battalion of the East Lancashire regiment.
On the 1st July, 1916 – the first day of the infamous battle
of the Somme - the Accrington Pals advanced on the French village of Serre. In
half an hour 235 men were killed and 350 were wounded. There is an appalling
irony in the fact that the young men whose names had appeared close to each
other in the census of 1911 were soon lying next to each other in some French
cemetery. And, of course, certain
enumeration districts in the census must have suffered disroportionate losses
over the course of the First World War because of the policy of recruiting
pals.
A Poignant Question
There is another aspect of the 1911 census
that makes it all the more ironic a record. It was the first census to include
a question about fertility. Under a section headed ‘Particulars as to
Marriage’, married women were asked how many children had been born alive in
the current marriage, how many children were still living and how many had
died. This section of the census can, of course, provide a family historian
with fascinating information about lost family members otherwise only guessed
at.
The Wilkinsons’ answer to the question on
fertility clearly shows that they had four children and had lost one. Wilfred’s
mother, my great-grandmother Mary Wilkinson, had given birth five times but her
eldest child Janette had died at the age of just two and a half from
meningitis. Mary probably thought that her four remaining children, since they
were all over the age of five, had escaped the most harmful infant illnesses.
She probably had every reason to hope that they would live to a ripe old age.
Certainly, in 1911 – without a hint of War in the air - it wouldn’t have
crossed her mind that Wilfred – her capable eldest son - would also soon be dead. Given the
extraordinary numbers of young men slaughtered in The First World War, the
question on fertility in the 1911 census takes on an almost sinister irony.
Widows in Waiting
The mood of innocence pervades the details
of many of the young women on the 1911 census as well as the men. Like
thousands of others in their early teens, Elsie Wilkinson, Wilfred’s sister
(aged 13), was learning a trade – in her case ‘to weave calico.’ She was
lucky in that she did marry later in life. But many girls like her were
destined to remain unmarried because of the shortage of men to go round after
the War. The writer and pacifist Vera Brittain records in her autobiography Testament
of Youth (1933) how every young man of her intimate acquaintance was
killed in the First World War. They
included her fiance, her brother and her two good friends. It is salutary to
remember also, of course, that thousands of young women who married around
the time of the census or soon afterwards became the widows of the next
generation.
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A Census of Pathos
The 1911 census is a special census
recording a moment of peace before an unforeseen transformation of enormous proportions. Nearly every family
would be affected by the War in some way. The consequences for family history
were multiple, sometimes disastrous. Think of all the children brought up
without a father, the families smaller than they would otherwise have been, the
younger sons taking on greater responsibility than they might have done, the
women forced out to work and the widows taking in lodgers to make ends meet.
For women, in particular, opportunities rose out of the chaos which were to
change the routines of family life forever.
And after the War, other aspects of life
recorded on the census would never be the same again either. Traditional ways
of living and working were overturned. Families grew smaller and moved apart.
Many of the old occupations so carefully
recorded in the 1911 census could not necessarily be relied upon. There were,
for example, far fewer people working in domestic service at the end of the War
than there had been at the beginning. Old class structures with their
characteristic patterns of deference from poor to rich were starting to
decline. If Wilfred Wilkinson had returned from the War he may have demanded
something more from life than a job as a baker’s boy in his uncle’s bakery. He
may even have moved away from the town his family had inhabited for
generations. The census of 1921 – when we finally have access to it – will
reveal a world entirely different to the one ten years earlier.
**
My grandfather remembered walking his elder
brother, Wilfred, to the station the last time he saw him – in December 1916.
He told me that he carried Wilfred’s knapsack and slapped him on the back for
luck as he left. It was a moment of
naivety that stayed with him until the end of his own life. Only six on the
1911 census, grandfather George was too young to join up, even by the end of
the War. By a mere quirk of fate, he went on to live seventy years more than
Wilfred, dying only in 1995 aged 91. The other Wilkinson brother Alf also lived
into his nineties. They were both mindful for the rest of their lives of that
great swathe of older brothers ahead of them, who didn’t make it.
Click here for more on books by Ruth A. Symes (UK)
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Click to browse and buy Replica Suffragette Memorabilia Including Jewellery
Useful Books Click here for more on books by Ruth A. Symes (USA)
Click to browse and buy Replica Suffragette Memorabilia Including Jewellery
S. Fowler, Tracing Your First World War Ancestors, Countryside Books, 2003
W. Spencer Army Service Records of the First World War, National Archives, 2001
E. A. James British Regiments 1914-1918, Naval and Military Press, 1998
William Turner, Pals: the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington), East Lancashire Regiment, Pen and Sword Books, 1993.
Useful Websites
www.familyrelatives.com This has a wide range of military records
www.military-genealogy.com - Military records on a pay per view basis
www.1911census.co.uk Search the 1911 census for a fee.
www.findmypast.co.uk Search the 1911 census for a fee.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/ Causes, events and people of World War One.
http://www.1911census.co.uk/content/default.aspx?r=24&25 For more information on what the world was like in 1911.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/FWWcasualties.htm Some statistics on the casualties of World War One.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/pals_01.shtml The Pals battalions in World War One
This article first appeared in Family Tree Magazine UK
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Beautifully illustrated family history books with a difference by a frequent contributor to the UK family history press. I write for Family Tree Magazine UK ( https://www.family-tree.co.uk/); Discover Your Ancestors Online Periodical and Bookazine (http://www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk/); Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine (http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/). The publishers of my family history books are Pen and Sword Books (http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/) and The History Press (http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/).
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