Good Morning,
I will start this week by wishing all of you a Very Happy, Healthy and Peaceful New Year and hope you have all fully enjoyed your Christmas and New Year break?
NEWS & EVENTS
Here are the first events of the New Year at the various organisations in our locality.
Lincoln & North Lincolnshire Branch, Western Front Association.
The Branch will continue to meet during 2025 on Monday evenings at The Royal Naval Association Club, Coulson Road, Lincoln, LN6 7BG. However, please note that by popular request we have made a major change to our meeting times. As from January 2025, doors will open at 7.00pm for a 7.30pm start. We hope this will allow more time for those of you who spend the day grafting hard to get home, have a bite to eat, and travel to the venue without rushing. Furthermore, the later time will mean there is less traffic to contend with.
Monday January 20th – John Chester presents “German Atrocities in 1914”.
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Spalding & South Lincolnshire Branch, Western Front Association.
The Branch will continue to meet during 2025 on Thursday evenings at Spalding Baptist Church, Swan Street, Spalding, PE11 1BT. Meetings are held in an ante-room of this pleasant, and modern venue. It’s warm in winter, cool in summer, and we continue to serve free refreshments at the end of the meeting. However, please note that due to the fact we cannot monitor the entrance doors from the ante-room, you will need to ring the doorbell to gain admission as the doors are kept locked in the evenings for security reasons. But, don’t let that put you off attending this small, but friendly branch. If you live within reasonable travelling distance, drag yourself away from the boring old gogglebox and enjoy the convivial atmosphere of our meetings, make new friends, and learn something new.
Thursday January 23rd – Jonathan D’Hooghe presents “The 6th Lincolns at Gallipoli, and the Post-War Controversy”.
See below.
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I am delighted to announce that going forward into 2025, TL will now also be advertising all speaker events for the East Midlands (Nottingham) WFA branch. Branch chairman, John Beech, would be delighted to see any TL readers who live south of Lincoln and may fancy a drive over to St. Peter's church rooms, Church Street, Ruddington, NG11 6HA on a Friday night for a 7.30pm start.
I am delighted to be the first speaker of the year and hope that those living south of Newark who can’t always get to Lincoln, may be able to attend at St. Peter’s Rooms at Ruddington, NG11 6HA?
My talk is about the “6th Lincolns on Gallipoli and the Post War Controversy.”
A synopsis of the talk: – “When Great Britain entered the Great War in August 1914, only Lord Kitchener foresaw a long and attritional war. This led to the formation of Kitchener’s New Army of which the 6th Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment, was the first New Army battalion formed by the Lincolnshire Regiment. Within twelve months, the 1000 civilians who first enlisted in Lincoln and surrounding villages found themselves opposing the Ottoman Turks on the Gallipoli Peninsular, and fighting in hand to hand combat at Chocolate Hill in August 1915. Such was the prowess of this battalion in its first major action, that it was described as their finest moment in the whole war, which included over two years on the Western Front. Nevertheless, it led to a post war argument and much rancour when the Official History came to be written. This talk will tell their story and try to come to a conclusion over the post war debate.”
Captain K Peake KIA 1915.
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The Leadenham Military History Group has now successfully completed its first year and will meet again in 2025 on a Tuesday night in Leadenham Village Hall at 7.30pm.
Tuesday 28th January – “Introduction to War Gaming in 2025.” – Ed Sisson; followed by;
“The My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.” – Sean McCabe.
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The first meeting of the Friends of the Lincoln Tank group is not until March but I can let you know that there has been a change of speaker notified to me.
Therefore, the first speaker event of 2025 will be on Thursday March 13th - Alwyn Killingsworth "Lt. Bond and Tank 743."
Full details nearer the date.
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I hope that you all enjoyed a Very Happy New Year celebration and for those of you embarking on a January diet or doing ‘Dry January’, I will be with you every step of the way!
However, before the purgatory started on January 2nd, my wife and I nipped down to London for a day to meet up with friends at the Natural History Museum to view the award winning Wildlife of the Year photos for 2024.
Some of the entries were stunning, my favourite being a tiger majestically laying on a hill side overlooking an Indian village, no doubt deciding on his next meal! Surprisingly, the winning photo was an underwater shot of developing tadpoles – not my winner, but then I wasn’t one of the judges.
Tadpoles - winner of the wildlife photo of the year for 2024.
London was extremely busy and after a good lunch, we took a stroll up Regent Street, across Piccadilly and continued on to Leicester Square where we caught the underground back to King’s Cross. Fortnum and Mason was decked out as an advent calendar…..
……..which was very clever, and the lights were a spectacle. With a travel time of just over an hour to Newark, one New Year Resolution has to be to pay more visits. For all of the societal issues that London has, it is still a fabulous city to visit. I certainly intend to take grandchildren to the NHM to see the dinosaurs, even if on this occasion, T-Rex was in his Christmas sweater and hat!
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Over the holiday period, a pal of mine visited Portsmouth and paid a visit to Fratton Park, the home of Portsmouth Football Club. It is a very old, predominantly wooden and historic ground and he kindly sent me the photo below, remembering the lads who enlisted at Fratton Park as Pompey Pals and who served in the 14th and 15th battalions of the Hampshire Regiment.
The Hampshire Regiment to us in the midlands, is a regiment that I have not particularly researched or know much about. Therefore, having a spare half hour, I looked up the history of the 14th and 15th battalions on the Long Long Trail website.
14th (Service) Battalion (1st Portsmouth)
Formed at Portsmouth on 3 September 1914 by the Mayor and a local Committee. Adopted by War Office on 30 May 1915.
October 1915 : moved to Witley and came under orders of 116th Brigade in 39th Division.
Landed at Le Havre 6th March 1916.
22 March 1918 : disbanded in France, with at least some of the men going to 20th Entrenching Battalion.
15th (Service) Battalion (2nd Portsmouth)
Formed at Portsmouth on 5 April 1915 by the Mayor and a local Committee. Adopted by War Office on 30 May 1915.
October 1915 : moved to Aldershot and came under orders of 122nd Brigade in 41st Division. Moved to Marlborough Lines in February 1916 and landed in France in early May.
27 September 1917 : amalgamated at Caestre with dismounted 1/1st Hampshire Yeomanry and renamed as the 15th (Hampshire Yeomanry) Bn.
Battle of Bazentin Ridge, Somme. Troops of the 5th Platoon, B Company, 15th Battalion, Hampshire Regiment resting before going into the trenches. Southern Road, Mametz Wood, 17 July 1916. Ambulances of the 63rd Field Ambulance and 2/2nd West Lancashire Field Ambulance (Territorial Force) in the background. Imperial War Museum image Q3978.
The 39th Division served with distinction on the Somme 1916, 3rd Battle of Ypres 1917, again on the Somme in 1918 and finally at the Lys as the fighting came to an end.
The 41st Division had a similar record to the 39th, but with a spell in Italy in late 1917.
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Talking of ongoing research, there are 11 men in my direct family tree who served in the Great War. You will be aware through Trench Lincs of my grandfather and his brother, who was killed on the Somme on July 3rd 1916.
However, with the other 9 men, I have only dipped my toe into the water with regard to trying to produce a service biography for each of them. Some of my initial notes are dated as far back as 2009 and so, over the Christmas period, I have attempted to put together a written account of their war service.
In the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I had a most remarkable Eureka moment regarding 15384 Gunner Leonard D’Hooghe. I knew from his Medal Index Card that he was a pre-war regular gunner who arrived in France on 16th August 1914, thus making him an Old Contemptible, however, I have never been able to find a surviving service record for him.
Therefore, imagine my surprise when I came across a reference on the Great War Forum to him and his service record! Armed with this news, I attempted all of my usual search tricks including all the usual misspellings of my surname and after a little while, I simply tried a search using his service number only – 15384.
This gave me a list of 17 men of varying regiments who had all been issued with that service number, and number 16 on the list was Leonard with a major typo in his surname by whoever had digitised the records! – can you believe that I now have 54 additional pages to wade through. It just goes to show that old dogs can learn new tricks!
Gunner Leonard D'Hooghe served from 1901 to 1920.
Leonard served through 1914,15 and 16, was wounded in 1917, spent some time in hospital back in the UK but was back in France in 1918 and was eventually discharged in 1920 having enlisted in 1901. He certainly did his bit and more, and was a very lucky chap to have survived the whole war. A 1925 Nottingham trade directory lists him as a butcher on Denman Street, Radford, Nottingham but sadly, Leonard died in 1932 aged just 48.
The other remarkable family tale I have uncovered (so far), concerns another gunner, 186024 Frederick Philip D’Hooghe. He married in 1913 and already had two children when war broke out. He enlisted under the Lord Derby scheme in 1915, was mobilised in 1916 and in France in 1917.
Whilst on the Western Front doing ‘his bit’, a Maria Keetley of St. Ann’s, Nottingham brought a petition against him at Nottingham Guildhall for non-payment of child maintenance. The records show that he and Maria had produced a daughter, Mabel, in 1908 out of wedlock and up to being sent overseas, Frederick had paid maintenance for the child.
The surviving records show that the court ordered the Army to stop 5 shillings a week from his pay and send it to Maria until Mabel attained the age of 15. It would be interesting to know what his wife, Clara, made of the news?
I am so pleased that I have started the task of recording the service of these 9 men and I will let you have more news about them all in due course.
As a footnote, whilst researching Maria Keetley I discovered that her brother Robert was killed in action in October 1917 whilst serving with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
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Sticking with the research theme, Matt Colley has unearthed a superb document being a 1915 Lord Mayor’s Roll of all the men of Peterborough under arms. It lists the names under the regiments they are serving with but was not updated later in the war, as apparently, the Mayor didn’t think very much of conscripts and believed that all eligible men should have volunteered in 1914/15!
I publish below the front cover of the Roll. It is quite a lengthy tome, so if you have a Peterborough connection and knowledge of the regiment that your forefather served in, drop me a line and I will send you the relevant page.
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I was very pleased to hear this week from Bill Pinfold who has spent Christmas braving the east winds in and around Bridlington. Bill takes up the story thus; ‘Many thanks for a very interesting Trench Lincs last weekend, especially the aircraft pictures. [More from Omaka below – Ed]
We took a house in Bridlington for our family Christmas break, joining up with relatives from Manchester. This was a new location for all of us and during some day trips I, of course, took the opportunity to seek out the local WW1 memorials.
Flamborough village war memorial lies beside a wide open area that was once the grounds of Flamborough Castle, a large fortified manor house. The castle was laid waste after the owner, Robert Constable, took part in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 which was a rising of Yorkshire landowners and clergy against Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. The setting gives a nice open space to site the very simple cross memorial, but the weather blowing in from Flamborough Head has made many of the markings on the memorial unreadable, so a new plaque has been added to relist the names of the fallen.’
Bill continues; ‘Bridlington benefits from a delightfully preserved old railway station. It features some blue plaques to commemorate three LNER men who bravely fought fires on an ammunition train in the station yard that was struck by a bomb from a German raider Ju88 on the 11th July 1940. Local man Ernest Barker and Arthur Harrison and George Whitehurst, both from Hull, were each awarded the George Medal for their bravery in preventing a major incident. Sadly, the raider's bombs did kill 5 other civilians, some of whom were queuing for a bus, which shows how sudden the attack had been.’
The original old town of Bridlington was formed around Bridlington Priory from the 12th century onwards, and is some way inland from the modern Brid port area that was formerly a hamlet known as Burlington Quay. The Priory was drastically reduced in size as part of the reforms of King Henry and Thomas Cromwell, such that the church is now only half as long as it was in the early 16th century and most outbuildings were lost. The last Prior, William Wode, was executed at Tyburn for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace.
The war memorial Roll of Honour inside the church lists many of the over 300 Bridlington men who died in the Great War. Those who lost their lives in the 1939-45 War are listed on the wooden screens around a nearby chapel room and are especially poignant as several couples are listed, who presumably died when their homes in the town were bombed.’
I know that you are interested in people awarded the Victoria Cross. Amongst some additional memorials on the Priory walls are a plaque for Captain George Symons, VC DCM, awarded for his actions at Inkerman, Crimea in 1855. There are also memorials for local men Ginger Lacey, one of our foremost Battle of Britain aces, and Dr Martin Richardson, a RAMC Lieutenant who died at Ypres in November 1914.’
The village of Rudston, just five miles from Bridlington, is famed for having the tallest standing stone in England in its churchyard. However, there are also two interesting CWGC graves there.
Lance Corporal James Etherington of the 2nd Battalion Yorkshire Regiment was one of two men who died at Hartlepool on the 15th August 1917 whilst on bathing parade.’
The Birmingham Post, 20 August 1917.
‘The second grave is of Private Stanley Blanchard, who had served with the Cambridgeshire Regiment but then moved to the Labour Corps, and was originally from Rudston. It is not clear how Blanchard died on 9th December 1918, whether from wounds or perhaps from the Spanish Flu, but it happened in Grantham Military Hospital, as noted in the Army Registers of Soldiers' Effects.
Just outside the churchyard there stands Rudston's war memorial, another simple and impressive cross.’
Rudston.
‘I must say that we really liked Bridlington at this time of year, a super town with proper local shops for meat and groceries, great beaches for walks and a very interesting harbour. And lots of other sights to visit nearby as well, I recommend it to all.’
Thank you Bill for your comprehensive report and selection of photos which I am sure we will all enjoy reading.
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For the final time now, I return to the Omaka Aviation Heritage Museum in New Zealand. Please find a selection of photos of uniforms, dioramas, ephemera and militaria on display at the museum. Should you ever get the opportunity to visit NZ, I would recommend a visit to this excellent museum.
Diorama of RFC ground crew loading Lewis Gun pans.
The museum has a large collection of period uniforms, from many combatant nations.
Uniform of Herman Goering and his portrait below.
Mess silver from Oswald Boelcke - the man who taught Richthofen.
Italian Uniform
Scottish kilted uniform
American uniform.
It really is a remarkable collection to visit and I hope I have perhaps whet your appetite to visit NZ at some point in time?
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IN MEMORIAM – The Lincolnshire Regiment 5th January.
1915
9699 Private Parkinson Cook, 2nd Battalion, aged 19. Buried in Boulogne Eastern Cemetery, France.
1917
11582 Private Arthur Milward Burton, 8th Battalion, aged 23. Buried in Puchevillers British Cemetery, France.
1918
41396 Private Robert Shields Cockburn, 2nd/5th Battalion, aged 19. Buried in Abbeville Communal Cemetery Extension, France.
203113 Private J Brackenbury, 4th Battalion, aged 27. Buried in Lincoln (Canwick Road) Cemetery, UK.
WE WILL REMEMBER THEM
I am sure that many of us look forward to speaker events starting again this month and hopefully I may see a friendly additional face or two at Ruddington this coming Friday?
Until next week,
Kind regards
Jonathan
Email me on: trenchlincs@gmail.com
© Jonathan D’Hooghe.
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