The Casualties of War

As we are coming up to Remembrance Day I thought I'd share the following cuttings sent to us recently by Arthur Heywood.

These newspaper clippings show the absolute heartbreak some families endured during WW1.

The following families lost 3 and 4 sons in the war.

I cannot even begin to understand how they coped with losing their loved ones.

Many thanks for sharing, Arthur.

Much appreciated.

Updated from

The Hyde In Wartime Book

At the end of July, 1915, Mrs Esther Long of Cheapside, Hyde, a widow, received from Buckingham Palace a letter, sent on behalf of His Majesty the King congratulating her upon the fact that she had six sons serving with the colours.   The eldest soldier-son was 46 years of age, and the youngest 25. Sergeant Major Thomas Long, George Street, the eldest, married, a volunteer and Territorial for 27 years, and served in the Boer War, and been wounded in France. The seconds son, Lance Corporal Walter Long, for many years with the old Hyde Volunteers, enlisted for active service about Christmas, 1914, and went to France in February, 1915. He died at a Rouen Hospital on the 17th December, 1915, from wounds received in action. His home was at Hallbottom Gate, Newton, and he was married. Private John Long, the third son, enlisted at Whitsuntide, 1915. He was killed instantly, at Dardanelles, on the 1st. January, 1916. The forth, Private William Long, an old soldier, unmarried, served some time in India, also in South Africa, after the Boar War, was in much fighting in France and was 'gassed' on the 2nd of May, 1915. Later he was discharged as physically unfit for further military service, after serving 17 years. The fifth, Private Henry Long, spent 6 years in India, was called up as a reservist immediately after the war started, and at once went to France. He fought at Mons; was taken prisoner, and was subsequently located in Hanover, Germany. He is married, and his home is at Winsford. The youngest of the six, Trooper Joseph Long, went to France in October, 1914, and as been in the thick of the fighting. At the end of February, 1916, he was still in France, having been there all the time, with the exception of one leave of about a week. 

Newspaper Item 1967

Whilst looking through some old family photos and newspaper cuttings I came upon this...

 Then I found this one....

The unfortunate youth was my dearly departed cousin, Ian.

I'm sure the person who reported him meant well but it caused a lot of trouble at the time.

 

How times ( and attitudes) have changed.

News article from 1967

Just thought I'd share this little snippet that I found in some old papers I am sorting through.

  Are any of you culprits out there ? :)

A History Lesson

Below is  an article which, while not exclusive to Hyde, would have applied there at one time or another.

The so called "good old days" ! 

A couple of postcards accompanying it are courtesy of John H. and Elsie.

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & Sold to the tannery.......if you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor" But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot......they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s: Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . ...... . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting Married. Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!" 

 
Great Norbury Street

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof... Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs." There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence. The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold. In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat. Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous. Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust. Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would Sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. 

 

They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake. England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive... So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer. And that's the truth....

Now, whoever said History was boring...?

Many Thanks , John and Elsie :) 

The Perdue Family History.

 After going through the many emails we have received for the blog, I found this very sad story that was sent to us some time ago by Dave (sorry, I dont know your surname)... I cannot see that it was posted at the time - please accept our apologies.

 

Over to Dave now...

 

 Family History

I realised a few years ago that I was the last generation of the family to have retained the oral history.   The generation below me were far too interested in the big world of television to be bothered to sit and listen to grandparents talking about the past.  As I have no children, I have no one to pass it on to.  So I set about writing down as much as I could remember in the hope that one day it would be appreciated.

As many of you history lovers will know there is nothing simple about family history as once you show an interest it completely draws you in.  For some people there were just sketchy reminiscences and one could not be sure how much truth there was in them.  So I set about trying to fill in the details. One that totally absorbed me and has now run to 25,000 words concerned my great great aunt, Elizabeth.  All I knew was that she had spent her days in the Cheshire Asylum, Parkside, Macclesfield, dying there in 1943.  I feared the worst in unearthing this story.

The first gem came from the census record for 1901 where I found her and her five-year-old daughter as lodgers in a house in Hyde and the note “suffers epileptic fits”.  I now started to find records for her daughter and discovered she was the only one of nine babies to survive.  Obtaining the death certificates began to unravel an interesting yet heartbreaking story.  Most of the babies had died in the first few months of “inanition” what might now be termed “failure to thrive”.  I was able to get the reports of three inquests from the Ashton Under Lyne Reporter where they had been reported on at the time.  One such report absolved the mother from any neglect and in the words of the Doctor attending at the time of death “The mother had been very attentive to it.  Although in poor circumstances, she had carried out his instructions.”  And. “She had done all she possibly could for the infant.” Another child did thrive but at about one-year-old his mother fell on him during a fit and he suffocated.

Her husband stood beside her and worked to keep the family but in 1906 he decided to follow his wife’s sister and family to Boston, Mass. where he had heard they had good jobs and an excellent standard of living.  He promised to send for his wife and their last surviving child when he arrived.

My next piece of oral history to build on was that Elizabeth and her daughter went missing and were gone for a few weeks, leaving the house just as she had been living in it.  No one knew where she had gone or why.  Her brother and his wife travelled into Manchester looking for her.  She had spent her youth in Ancoats and Miles Platting.  Census records showed that as a girl of twelve she was working as a children’s nurse to a local draper’s family in Great Ancoats Street.

There was no sign of Elizabeth or her daughter Alice.  A snippet from a letter my mother wrote to me when I first started to take an interest in the family history tells the story.  Elizabeth waited and waited for word from her husband, became very poor in health and no money. The worry sent her off her mind. The family lost touch some way. I suppose, as she got poorer she moved from one place to another until her health, money and mind gave out and she must have ended up in the workhouse. That was found out because on Saturday her brother Ned and his wife Mary went down Manchester and coming back sat on the top deck of a tramcar. They saw some beggars of which there were many in those days. It was just like Fagin, you could go to the poorhouse and get a child for anything. For a little skivvy, down the pit, any dirty job in a mill, factory, hostel, anything. Now among these beggars one man had something musical, barrel organ, violin, flute, don’t know what, but he had a dirty urchin with him. God only knew if it was a girl or a boy, but it was dressed in the dirtiest clothes you could imagine. A mans cap and men’s shoes, miles too big. For some reason Mary couldn’t get the picture out of her mind. It worried her and something kept reminding her of Alice. She didn’t know why, but they talked it over, even with the children and decided to go back and try to find this child. It turned out to be Alice. Then the story unfolded. The man claimed he was her uncle on her father’s side and he was looking after her, which was doubtful. A few shilling changed hands and Alice came home to her rightful place with the family. Alice was taken home where she had all her clothes and most of her hair cut off in the back yard, and burned. She was so dirty and ‘wick’.  Elizabeth was found in the Workhouse than moved to Parkside.
*local dialect – ‘alive’ as in crawling with lice.

I then managed to track down Elizabeth’s medical records from Parkside.  They told the story of how in 1908 she had been committed to the asylum from the workhouse. Due to the deaths of her children the Doctor at Manchester Workhouse had declared her “dangerous but with harmless causes” and in line with regulations at the time, the Hyde Board of Guardians had been obliged to commit her as an “insane pauper.”  They recorded the fact that her epilepsy had started when she was about 14.

As tragic as commitment might have seemed it was the first stroke of luck for Elizabeth.  Parkside was one of the foremost medical institutions of its time and the first to have a specialist epilepsy unit.  The records over the next 35 years recorded her severe fits and the physical damage she suffered after them.  She also received prompt medical attention and treatment, something which would have been very scarce in the community pre National Health.  For anyone who may have been embarrassed by the stigma of having a relative spend her days in the asylum.  She was described as “gentle in manner, well behaved and a good worker in the laundry”. The year before she died of carcinoma of the liver she had been one of the first people to receive new anti-epilepsy medication that was just on the market.

The strange twist to the tale was that whilst initially knowing nothing about her condition I have worked as a volunteer supporting an epilepsy charity for the past 15 years.  It was through that connection that I was able to find out about the history of the treatment of ‘epileptics’.  When Elizabeth was a young woman the main treatment was Bromide Salts.  Bromism, an effect of prolonged ingestion of bromide, is characterized by mental dullness, memory loss, slurred speech, tremors, ataxia and muscular weakness, and a transitory state resembling paranoid schizophrenia.  The side effects of ‘bromism’, not only affected the patient, neonatal bromism resulted in babies with poor suck, weak cry, diminished reflexes, lethargy, and poor muscle tone.

Her husband never did get in touch.  My great grandfather met a man who had served in France in WW1 who had served with him and met his “French wife”.  In the early 1940’s great granddad also received a letter from the man’s wife and child in Boston, Mass. trying to trace their “English cousins”.  He had even had the gall to name his daughter in America Alice after the one he had abandoned in Hyde.





                                                                                           

 

 Here is a photo of "Lizzie Anne" as a young woman.

 

  

I have also attached a brief history of her life and cuttings from the Reporter re the inquests.

 

Sudden death.
At the Sportsman Hotel, Mottram Road Hyde, on Monday morning.  Mr Francis Newton, the district coroner, held an enquiry touching the death of Gladys Perdue, the five months old, daughter of Elizabeth and Ann Henry Robert Perdue, which occurred at Lumn Court on the sixth instant.  Mr John Firth was the foreman of the jury.  Dr Stephen Infield said that he had been attending the deceased for about five months.  It was an eight months old child and had been in delicate health since birth.  He last saw her on the 26th of October.  The mother had been very attentive to it.  Although in poor circumstances, she had carried out his instructions.  He saw the child a few minutes after death, but did not see any signs of convulsions.  It really died from inanition.  Elizabeth Ann Perdue wife of Henry Robert Perdue, a labourer employed by the great Central Railway Company, an ex-soldier second Manchester regiment served in the South African War, said she lived at 1 Lumn Court hide.  Gladys Perdue was her daughter and was five months old.  Deceased had been weak and delicate since birth and had been attended by Dr Infield.  On Friday morning, about eight o'clock, she was nursing the deceased and after watching her, she commenced sighing and moaning and died about five minutes past nine.  She sent to Dr infield but the child died before his arrival.  She had done all she possibly could for her.
A verdict to the effect that death was due to inanition was recorded.

Thanks for sharing this very interesting piece of family history with us, Dave. :)
Much appreciated !