When the lights go out tonight....

selside

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Jul 1, 2010
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Yorkshire Dales
My Grandad went to Ypres with his Lancashire pals regiment. He hardly ever spoke of it, just the once that I recall. Out of the blue, when he was staying at my childhood home in Liverpool, he suddenly started to speak. He was an electrical engineer, and had climbed a telegraph pole to mend some wires while his group rested on the roadside below. A shell landed in the middle of them and blew them all to pieces while he looked down on the scene from the top of his pole. Tears streamed down his cheeks while he remembered his lost pals. They all joined up together from the cotton mill where he worked. I was about 9 or 10 at the time, and had no idea what to say or do, so I did nothing other there sit there quietly, stunned and a bit embarrassed.

Our local town of Settle was the home of Major General Sir Henry Birkbeck. He was appointed Head of the Remount Directorate, formed to address the chronic lack of horses for troop and munitions service. Remount was tasked with gathering all the available horseflesh all over the country, and particularly Yorkshire. So many were sent and so few came back. There is a local exhibition telling of how the shipped in horses were stampeded to the front. They were driven on their way, 700 or so at a time, through the darkness, guided by fires that were lit at crossroads to keep them on track, shoes sparking on the cobbles and tracks as they charged en masse through the countryside. A tremendous, terrible effort was maintained to keep gathering horses for the front, often by Remount sections “manned “entirely by women.

We will be lighting a candle at 10pm tonight. Simply to remember Grandad Cowpe and his pals. And also to spare a thought for every last animal, from pit pony to shire, that went and never came back.
 
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Gosh that's made me fill up. How very touching. I am glad you posted it. It's good to remember these things - they should not be forgotten.
 
Thanks for sharing your grandads story, that must of been horrific for him.. you just couldn't imagine what the folk went through in the war.
 
I think I must have been in a maudlin mood yesterday - I couldn't stop thinking about the war horses.

There were some heart warming stories of the few horses that did make it back. One lucky survivor was Charlie, the horse who worked at the Crown Inn in Horton in Ribblesdale. Having lost part of an ear in France, he came back to his old job at the pub, to earn the local nickname of Old Loplugs.
 
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