Thankful Villages
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Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages[1]) are those few villages in Britain to which suffered no casualties in the First World War.
Throughout the land, in almost every village is a war memorial recaording and honouring the fallen of the Great War, but these few villages saw all their young men return. The term "Thankful Village" was popularised by the writer Arthur Mee in the 1930s. In Enchanted Land (1936), the introductory volume to The King’s England series of guides, he wrote that a Thankful Village was one which had lost no men in the Great War because all those who left to serve came home again. His initial list identified 32 villages.
In a November 2012 update [2] researchers have identified 51 villages in England and Wales from which all soldiers returned. None has been identified amongst the shires of Northern Ireland nor Scotland.
Of these villages, some may be accounted twice-thankful, for losing none of their sons in the First or Second World Wars. From Upper Slaughter in Gloucestershire in the Great War, 1914-1918, twenty-four men and one woman went to fight and all returned and then in the Second World War 1939-1945, thirty-six villagers went to war and all returned.
Doubly thankful villages are marked with an asterisk:
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A similar exercise of research was done in France, which was the battlefield itself and where the human cost of war was higher than for Britain. In the whole of France only one village, Thierville, lost no men in the First World War and thus had no memorials constructed in the subsequent period. Remarkably, the men of the village of Thierville were spared too in the Second World War and had lost none either in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.[3]
References
- ↑ St Cyrus - an example of the use of "Blessed Villages"
- ↑ The Thankful Villages on Hellfire Corner - Norman Thorpe, Rod Morris and Tom Morgan
- ↑ Jérôme Duhamel (Paris 1990). Grand Inventaire du Génie Français, p.196: "Between 1919 and 1925, a war memorial was erected in every community in France, with one single exception: the village of Thierville in the department of the Eure, the only French village which had no dead to mourn, not in 1870, nor in 14-18, nor in 39-45"
- Thankful Villages – Hellfire Corner