Charles WOOD

'Clitheroe Advertiser' (4 December 1914)

(Kindly supplied by Shirley Penman of Clitheroe and Dorothy Falshaw of Gisburn)

Not all recruits are in training. One, Private Charles Wood of Brook Street, who has had experience with the Territorials, is guarding interned aliens in London. On a visit home last week-end he told of the fracas he had with some prisoners. He was releasing them in batches of five to allow a wash and shave when one lot, evidently by prearrangement, attacked him. His rifle was knocked out of his grasp but by dint of sundry knocks and kicks he recovered possession and got the recalcitrant's back to the cells. He received a black eye, and has fewer teeth to trouble him, but of the six soldiers engaged he was the least damaged. There was a tragic sequel to the event, one of the Germans cutting his throat with a razor which he secured during the fray.

'Clitheroe Times' (23 April 1915)

(Kindly supplied by Shirley Penman of Clitheroe and Dorothy Falshaw of Gisburn)

Mrs. Wood of Brook Street received news yesterday that her son, Private Charles Wood of the Grenadier Guards, has been wounded and was in hospital in France.

'Clitheroe Times' (10 September 1915)

(Kindly supplied by Shirley Penman of Clitheroe and Dorothy Falshaw of Gisburn)

GUARDS' MEMORIAL

DESCRIBED BY PRIVATE C. WOOD

WITH THE GRENADIERS' IN FRANCE

Interesting details of scenes in France are sent under the date August 7th by Private Charles Wood, of the Machine Gun Section, 1st Grenadier Guards.

Private Wood is a well known local man, who resided in Brook-street, and was identified with a cycle establishment in the Market-place. He says:-

"You will see by my last letter that we are back for a rest and we are not sorry. It will pass the time a little. Our 3rd Battalion have come out now and they are about two miles from us. Our 2nd Battalion is also coming down here when they are relieved from the trenches. I suppose we will be here for a few weeks now. I hope so anyway, and I wish the war could be over before we go back to the firing line, but I doubt it will not be over this year and will last a good way into the next, unless things alter as old 'Fritz' is a good way off being beaten yet. We have come down here to form a guard division so I can see us catching it again when we go back to the trenches.

"You see there are the Welsh Guards, the 2nd Irish Guards, a battalion of Scotts, and two battalions of our's that have not been in action yet and they will be seeking honour, so possibly we will be put into a tight corner. They will expect us taking everything in front of us. Of course, they will all be in the front line and we will be in reserve - they get the praise and we get the shell fire. We would ten times rather be in the front line than in the reserve. You have a bit of a chance with a rifle bullet, unless you try to stop it with your head, but the shells make such a mess of you - they knock you to pieces. We don't mind getting into close quarters with them; we have been in with them before and came out all right and I suppose we can do it again, but I have had enough of it. I think all of us have but we will have to stick it until it is all over.

"More get the W.C. - Wooden Cross - than the V.C., but I shall be glad to escape without either. You talk about cemeteries, you should see some that we made, twenty or thirty in one grave. Some of them are very nice ones where they can be looked after, others cannot be looked at as on many occasions you have to bury them behind the trenches and lots of poor beggars you cannot find to bury. You can find their equipment and also part of their clothes at times, and that is about all. You see I have been out here five months now and I am still alive to tell the tale and I have not had a holiday since I came. That's a fair record! There are some of our chaps who had leave, but it is not my turn yet.

"I told you about the Coldstreams memorial at Crinchy and they have a nice one. That's the place where O'Leary, of the Irish Guards, won his V.C. We went in the trenches at Crinchy after the battle of Festubert. We were in the trenches at Neuve Chapelle and then we went just below Ypres and we lost a few there. I went back to Kitsburgh and had a bit of a scrap there, then on to Festubert. It was like being in hell with the lid off. General Joffre said it would take us three weeks to take the position as the Germans were strongly fortified but we took it in as many hours nearly, but it was a hot shop. Then we went inside Crinchy, the Coldstreams memorial place. It is called Orchard Farm. I cannot say how many are buried there but they lost a lot of men. It is made of bricks, put over the graves in the shape of the Coldstream cap badge. It will be ten yards in diameter in the shape of a circle and it has wire round and flowers set in it, looking very nice in a farm yard. There have been buildings all round but they are all knocked down. A notice displayed asking troops who happen to be in the trenches there to look after the graves and the men see that the graves are attended to.

"When we were in the trenches the flowers were in bloom and it looked really beautiful. It would break lots of people's hearts in England just to see it, and to see how the 'Tommy' as you call us, out here is buried, and to see the reverence his comrades display. It would do a lot of single slackers good to see it, and to reflect on the price that is being paid, and the price we shall have to pay to gain victory. It is rather a simple piece of work, but it shows Tommy's spirit. Not above ten yards away from the graveyard there is a corner of what was once a building. There are still four pictures on the walls with the glass not broken, and there are also statues with glass covers over. It is really marvellous, there is not a crack in the glass; it is wonderful how it has escaped the shells. There are shrines and crucifixes up where you cannot see anything else. When we were up at Laventie the church in the village was all in ruins. There was the strip of a tower left, though and on the top was one of the monuments. But they dropped twenty-six shells in one Sunday afternoon and that finished it."

'Clitheroe Advertiser' (15 October 1915)

(Kindly supplied by Shirley Penman of Clitheroe and Dorothy Falshaw of Gisburn)

ANOTHER CLITHEROE VICTIM.

PRIVATE C. WOOD DIES OF WOUNDS.

Last Friday morning, Mrs. Wood, of Brook Street, received word that her husband - Private Charles Wood of the Grenadier Guards - was wounded. On Saturday morning only too definite information reached her that he had died of his wounds.

The distressing intelligence was sent by the Rev. A. Selwyn, Chaplain, who on October 6th. wrote:-

Dear Mrs. Wood,

I am sorry to have to tell you that your husband was severely wounded in the legs yesterday, and that he died of his wounds shortly after his admission to hospital.

I was with him shortly before he died and he asked me to write to you and give you his love.

You will receive official intimation later and his effects from the War Office.

With deepest sympathy,

Yours truly,

A. Selwyn.

Chaplain to the Forces.

Private Wood was one of the best known men in Clitheroe. For several years he carried on business as a cycle agent in the Market Place, prior to this being in partnership with his brother at Chatburn. The latter, Private W. Wood, is with the motor transport, expecting to be immediately sent on foreign service.

Private C. Wood was an old Volunteer and Territorial, and as such was a member of the National Reserve. He was one of three Clitheroe men selected to go to London for duty at the Coronation of King George. In the Volunteers he was a scout.

At the outbreak of the war he joined the Grenadier Guards and for some time was on duty guarding German prisoners. Subsequently he was transferred to France, where he has experienced much fighting. Several letters from his pen have appeared in these columns.

Private Wood, who would have been 27 years of age next February, leaves a widow and two children with whom much sympathy is felt.

100 Years On Guard

A Grenadier Guard in full battle dress and mourning pose has stood in a leafy and flower-filled Memorial Garden, keeping guard over the town of Clitheroe, for almost a century. Unveiled on 18th August 1923 by the Mayor of Clitheroe, Alderman John Thomas Whipp, the sculpture was the work of Frederick Louis Roslyn R.B.S. of London, who attended the unveiling. Two identical statues stand at Slaidburn and Denholme and are amongst the many memorials which Roslyn created in the British Isles plus one as far afield as Jamaica. The Scots granite plinth was designed by Mr. A. E. Blezard, Clitheroe Town Council’s surveyor, who also oversaw the construction of the cenotaph and the memorial garden. The finance for the cenotaph at Clitheroe Castle was sourced from part of the public donations which the citizens of Clitheroe had raised for the purchase of the castle, and the six point four hectare grounds surrounding it, from the Duke of Buccleuch as a war memorial for the princely sum of £9,500. His Lordship had asked for more but reduced the sum when told that the purchase was for a war memorial. More cash was accrued after this time to pay for making the grounds into a public park.

The money was collected in many ways – millworkers had one penny (1/2 p) stopped from their wages each week; school children sold bunches of wildflowers for a penny; mill owners provided multiples of tens of pounds at different times and there were fayres, bazaars, dances and auctions held to swell the funds. On the momentous day, almost 1,000 servicemen, – some horribly wounded or disfigured – lined the street through the town from the mayor’s parlour in Church Street to the entrance to the castle at the aptly named Castle Gate. The mayoral party, made up of the Mayor and Mayoress, Aldermen, Corporation councillors, magistrates, Town Clerk, Sergeant of the Mace and halberdiers, and members of the War Memorial Committee made their slow and dignified way between these men who grieved for their lost companions until they reached the locked gates of the castle grounds.

The little market town’s losses had been great – a goodly portion of the next generation gone for ever. Hardly a family or a street had been spared, with drawn curtains at many of the cottages in the little back-to-back houses in the Salford area, including the homes of the three Fielding brothers and the three McHales, – all of Harrop Street. Mrs. Annabella Park of High Street, Low Moor lost three of her sons, – one of whom enlisted from Canada to fight for the “mother-country”, one whilst a prisoner of war and one, so inhumanely treated whilst a prisoner of war, that he came home terminally ill and took his own life. Less than a hundred yards away, the aging Alston parents were left with only one son and a daughter from their family of five. The Boothman family of Pimlico, lost two sons, Frank and Bertram, both of whom worked in the offices of the local authority; the two Durham brothers, Joseph and Thomas from Brownlow Street, both unskilled workers. Many were the names and tragic stories of these “lost boys”; the very fabric of the township’s life was changed by these blows – the churches and Sunday schools, the football teams, cricket teams, industries and businesses. The lives of the parents, wives and children of all these brave men and boys had been changed forever; and so the mood was sombre as they gathered on this day of remembrance.

Here at the gates were waiting the Subscribers’ Committee, who had handled the weekly savings and the purchase of the castle, headed by Alderman Tom Garnett J.P. Whilst handing to the mayor the deeds to the castle and a key with which to open the gates, he voiced the hope that “the memory of the great dead would remain treasured and cherished in their hometown until time shall be lost in eternity.”

In the name of all Clitheronians, Mayor Whipp accepted these tokens of custody and said that “the Castle would stand as a perpetual reminder of the great deliverance wrought for our land by those who fought in the Great War. The Corporation would carefully guard the Castle and grounds as a sacred trust and would hand it on as a precious heritage to future generations.”

So began the council stewardship of the splendid and unique war memorial which the castle had become. Once more the mayoral party, followed by the servicemen and onlookers, made their slow, reverential way up the castle drive to the Garden of Remembrance where-in the Memorial, covered by the Union Jack, stood. Relatives of the fallen had been granted two tickets per family as entrance to this garden; other onlookers had to squeeze into every other available nook and cranny. A solemn unveiling by Mayor Whipp was followed by the Last Post, a two-minute silence and Reveille but then, instead of laying the first, Clitheroe citizens wreath himself, the mayor handed it to Mr. Thomas Snape and said, “Please, you have more right to lay this wreath than I.” Mr. Snape walked forward and took the beautiful arch of white lilies grown in the castle greenhouses which had the words “In Remembrance” picked out in purple flowers and laid it at the foot of the memorial. He, who had lost four sons and a son-in-law in the vicious five-year fight for peace, did indeed deserve this honour. The service continued with prayers, choir anthems, readings and hymns; culminating with the hymn “Abide with Me” and the National Anthem. Everyone was now allowed to place their own tributes at the foot of the Guard on his lofty, granite plinth. By the evening of that day over 400 floral tributes formed a beautiful token of love, gratitude and remembrance. Wreaths, anchors, crosses and cushions – had been laid in memory of the 334 men of the town who went away singing never to return.

Researched by Shirley Penman. August, 2023