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Question

Can you tell me whether Stapleford was a 'Thankful Village', that is to say one of the few which sent their sons to serve the Great War and welcomed them all home again?

Question asked on

04 July 2011

Answer

The phrase 'thankful village' was evidently coined by Arthur Mee, author of The King's England, in the 1930s, to denote one which lost no-one on active service during the Great War, as those who had left all returned safely. Mee identified 31, and the researchers Norman Thorpe and Tom Morgan have increased the list to 41. Geoff Sullivan has devised a search engine to the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, allowing keyword searches. Using Stapleford as the keyword I have identified

(1) Reginald Francis POLDEN, of the 1st/6th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who died 30 April 1918 on the Italian Front, and is buried in the Granezza British Cemetery, near Asagio, Vicenza, son of Isabelle and Henry Polden of Steeple Langford and the husband of Elizabeth Ann Polden of Stapleford nr Salisbury;

(2) Gilbert John WEST, of the Somerset Light Infantry, who died on 3 August 1918 and was buried at Bellacourt, south-west of Arras, the son of Sarah West of Stapleford nr Salisbury and husband of Elsie May West, of Charlton All Saints'.

You can see from the above details that the grounds which disqualify a village from being 'thankful' can be tricky, for all that can be said of the most certain of the above two examples is that Polden's widow was living in Stapleford at the time of his death, very likely with her mother Cecilia Hailstone. And in fact the couple had been married no more than sixteen months when Polden died, so he might well have enlisted from his parental home in Steeple Langford. Conversely, Gilbert West married Elsie Goodridge in Salisbury in the first quarter of 1910 and thus could have enlisted from anywhere, but more likely from Charlton All Saints, Elsie's family home, than Stapleford The parents' place of residence can be equally contentious as a marker of the soldiers' origins, for while Polden was born in Steeple Langford, West was born in Broad Chalke. But on the evidence above, one might argue that Stapleford should indeed be added to the list of Thankful Villages, and, if so, would now be the only one in Wiltshire, Littleton Drew having been demoted from Arthur Mee's list by Norman Thorpe and others (see the reference to their page on the Hellfire Corner website below).

Bibliography

Ancestry.com for references to indices of births, marriages and deaths and to the 1901 Census; Daily Telegraph: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1568891/'Thankful-Villages'-finally-get-plaques.html; The Guardian Notes and Queries: www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-49104,00.html; Historic UK.com: the history and heritage accommodation guide: www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/ThankfulVillages.htm; Salisbury Chamber of Commerce: Directory of Salisbury and the neighbourhood, 1925; Sullivan, Geoffrey: Geoff's 1914-1921 Search Engine: http://www.hut-six.co.uk/cgi-bin/search14-21.php;Thorpe, Norman, Morris, Rod and Morgan, Tom: The thankful villages (on Hellfire Corner Great War Webpages) www.fylde.demon.co.uk/thankful.htm;UK National Inventory of War Memorials Blog: http://ukniwm.wordpress.com/?s=thankful;Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Thankful_Villages.htm