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Prologue - The Early Days

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28th June 1914 the prospect of four long years of unparalleled bloodshed must have seemed a long way away in the minds of the people living in our Dale.  Life here was dominated by agriculture and mining, with much of the Dale owned by the Marshall family of Patterdale Hall, and much of the employment, especially around Glenridding, centred around  Greenside Mine.

Even when war was declared on the 4th August 1914 there was little sense of the impending tragedy about to unfold. On the 14th of August the front page story of the Mid Cumberland and North Westmorland Herald was of an upset in Penrith due to the weekly market having to move outdoors to accommodate the military in the Market Hall, which had a  “disastrous effect” on the butter. However, as the early optimism of a war over by Christmas gave way to the stalemate of trench warfare, the front-pages of the newspapers soon became a tragic weekly list of the fallen.

Sadly this included men from our Dale. With no reserved occupations in the First World War, production at Greenside mine actually decreased dramatically as  many men answered the call to arms. In total, at least 107 men from Patterdale, Glenridding and Hartsop served in the Armed Forces in the First World War, and of those at least 15 were never to return.  Their names are engraved on our War Memorial by Ullswater, and as part of the 100th Anniversary Commemoration of the outbreak of war, we have tried to find out more about them.

Their generation have all gone now, but their stories still resonate. From research including interviews with people around the Dale, trawling local Newspapers archives, studying the Parish Registers, online investigation and frankly a lot of guesswork, we have tried to piece together the stories of each of these men as far as we can.

We realise that no amount of words could ever fully do justice to the suffering and sacrifice made by those who died and by those who fought and survived. Suffice to say that we are forever in their debt and can never imagine what they went through. We hope that by telling their story and keeping their memory alive, we can perhaps repay a small part of our enormous debt of gratitude to them, and help others to remember their sacrifice in the “War to End All Wars”……

Epilogue - The Aftermath of War

After more than four long years of the bloodiest and most widespread fighting the world had ever seen, an Armistice was finally signed at 11:00 on the 11th November 1918. However, for some of the soldiers from the Dale the war continued – with those like John Watson and Jack Bell serving in India continuing on active service well into 1919 on the North West Frontier.

So what had changed for those who returned? Whilst in the towns and cities there had been many physical as well as social changes caused by the war, had anything changed the way of life in the Dale?

Perhaps the main change was one in society itself. Before the war the agricultural way of life in the Dale had not changed much since Victorian times or even earlier. The “Lords of the Manor”, the Marshall family, still retained a degree of feudal power and influence. Many of the men who went to war would never have ventured further afield than Penrith or Carlisle in their lives. Now they returned from the horrors of the trenches and the War, having seen the wider world, having fought across the globe from Mesopotamia to Mons.

The men who returned did so with an entirely deserved sense of their own equality with men whom they may have previously felt socially inferior to. There would certainly be no more cap doffing and forelock tugging from the likes of Albert Routledge to the Marshall family. And quite right too. The other noticeable feature remembered by the children of the ex-soldiers was their reluctance to talk to others, who hadn’t served, about the war.  The only people they could talk comfortably to were their brothers in arms, fellow veterans who could understand. They’d been there.

In terms of other aspects of life in the Dale, things settled back down in the 1920s as much as they could. Life continued on the farms, and the tourists still came to enjoy the wonders of Ullswater. The workforce swelled again at Greenside, as did mine production, which continued to grow through the inter-war period until its peak during World War Two. This would be another time of even greater upheaval, when Glenridding and Patterdale played host to an array of visitors and once again many of the young men of the Parish went off to war. But that’s another story for a different day….