In Local Studies we have a big box of photographs which have been donated to us over the years that arrived with little to no context. Interior shots, exterior shots, roads, farms, people on walls…all sorts. So they live in this box near the map drawers in the hopes that a casual browser will immediately recognise a scene and let us know so that it can be catalogued. In a moment of distraction I paged through this box the other week and found a WW1 photo, a company of 14 men, one with a puppy, and a clue on the back – “Came from Excs Mrs. S. H. Wright (formerly at Waiters Arms) 1972”
What I found was enough to catalogue it; what I didn’t find, maybe you can help with.
You just need a place to start to be able to solve a mystery like this. To the online resources! And my first result via Ancestry is Sarah Hannah Wright, the license holder for the Waiters Arms on Tuel Lane Sowerby Bridge from 27th January 1917 to 15th January 1945.
Previously the license had been held by Emma Turner, who FindAGrave showed me was a relative of Sarah Hannah as she is named on the gravestone where Sarah Hannah was buried in June 1972. Emma is named as the wife of William Turner and mother of Fred Turner. This helped me to identify Sarah Hannah’s marriage to Arthur William Wright in November of 1916 – as she was then Sarah Hannah Turner, with her father named as the deceased William Turner. Her address then was 61 Tuel Lane, and Arthur’s was South View. The marriage license held another clue as to why this photo was part of her estate: Arthur’s occupation is “soldier”.
Arthur William Wright was born in Halifax, and the marriage license gives his father as “John Wright, gentleman”. He had been married previously and is a widower in 1916 when he married Sarah Hannah. His first marriage took place in 1907 in Canada, of all places – he was working in Hamilton, near Ontario, in a cotton mill. His wife Lily Ann Dyer (born in Oldham – another economic migrant!) died less than a year after they married, along with their newborn son. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Arthur was back in Halifax by the time the 1911 Census was taken. He joined the army at some point after war broke out, and was serving by at least August 1915, when he became eligible for a Victory medal.
The insignia worn by the soldiers in the photograph are for the Army Service Corps, not the Royal Irish Rifles, which helps me to roughly date it. Arthur originally started out in the ASC before being “combed in”, ie. transferred over, to the RIR, probably in late 1917. It’s interesting – the ASC had a bit of a bad rep as their work was loading and unloading ships, sorting out transport, baking, and general non-combatant duties, and the men were seen as softer or less courageous than those in the trenches even though some of them were in the ASC precisely because they weren’t classed as at peak fitness. It’s understandable because of what was going on, but soldiers need supplies, food, and transport, so the ASC was doing valuable work and not the slackers they were jokingly made out to be at the time. Arthur’s service number as given on his medals record indicated that he was a labourer with the prefix 4, which makes him 4th Company ASC. As you can see on the photograph’s matting, the studio taking the photo was that of Henri Caudevelle at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Company 4 was indeed located at Boulogne, and Arthur was likely a dock worker loading and unloading supply ships, trains and trucks. The 4th Company was part of the 6 Labour Group stationed at Boulogne from 12th May 1917; so we can firmly date the photo to mid-to-late 1917 and confirm that it is of the 4th Company ASC. A success at long last! As Arthur was a Private, he will be one of the eight, possibly nine, men in the photo without stripes on his sleeve.
Meanwhile, casualties were piling up, particularly in the Rifle regiments. Riflers and gunners in fact suffered some of the greatest losses proportionally. This led to a certain Colonel W. Churchill (yes that Churchill) making a speech in Parliament declaring the number of fighting fit men in the ASC and Royal Ambulance Medical Corps to be a disgrace and proposing that men from those regiments be “combed out” and into other regiments. His exact words were that he would “send them to the trenches with a rifle.” This was part of his insistence on opening a second front in the war, which history has not judged to have been a particularly good idea (understatement of the year perhaps!), and the thought of a large number of men whose training was not in soldiering or shooting being dragged out of one role and thrown into another, highly dangerous one, in these circumstances, would lead most today I think to pause and wonder about.
Churchill’s speech was given in May 1916; Arthur and Sarah Hannah were married in November 1916. I wonder if Arthur knew the score, and made sure that when he came home on leave that he married Sarah Hannah in case anything happened to him. At some point he WAS transferred and became a Rifleman in the Royal Irish Rifles, 1st Battalion. And if he had a hunch, it was right. Arthur was killed in action on 16th January 1918 in France. His effects amounted to the sum total of £18, 10s and 1p, paid out in two instalments to Sarah Hannah in 1918 and 1919. He also received Victory and Star medals, the second posthumously.
Fred, meanwhile, also served – but thankfully returned home, as did his brother James, which must have been a relief (however small) to Sarah Hannah. The British Newspaper Archive gives a small extract from a letter home from Gunner Fred Turner of the RGA (Royal Garrison Artillery) saying “it is nice to know that we are not forgotten at home” printed in December 1917 in the Halifax Evening Courier. This seems likely to be our Fred. The epitaph on his gravestone reads “rest after weariness, peace after pain” – although I cannot find any other war records for him, I wonder what sort of experience he had in WW1 and what sort of physical or emotional trauma he brought home with him. Meanwhile their mother Emma had died at the end of 1916, and Sarah Hannah had taken over the running of the Waiters Arms.
Sarah Hannah and Fred were now on their own and with maybe-physical and definitely-emotional wounds. They supported each other throughout the rest of their lives, co-managing the Waiters Arms for a grand total of 27 years for Fred, and 28 for Sarah Hannah. Both appear at that address on the 1939 Register, with Sarah Hannah as the “beer house keeper” and Fred as the “beer house manager”. After Sarah Hannah gave up the tenancy, we don’t know where she went; without sitting and reading through endless electoral registers (not searchable online) we can’t know that. But perhaps someone reading this does know.
This blog post was intended to show how much you can find out using our online family history resources, but it has also showed how much you can’t find. Many WW1 records are lost forever and we can only guess at what happened during those gaps, and records after 1939 are for the most part not available online. There is much that you can access here, but like electoral registers that are arranged by street address rather than surname or newspapers that are only available on microfiche, a lot of sitting and reading maybe required to find the last crucial fact needed to complete the story. But with the right resources and the right local knowledge you can discover an awful lot.
If you have information about the Turner or Wright families, or had a relative from Sowerby Bridge or Halifax who joined the ASC, we would love to hear from you. Putting names to the faces of the men in this picture would be the final piece of the puzzle and allow this photo to come alive in a final, definitive way that we weren’t quite able to manage with this post. And even if you don’t have any information about this particular photograph or family, pay us a visit and look through the box of unidentified photos, and maybe you can submit a story to us about another photo in there that we can highlight on our blog and crowdsource more information about. You never know…
Calderdale Local Studies Library 