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Ones mans story

Astoness

Astoness

TRUE BRUMMIE MODERATOR
Staff member
.many times i have said before that for those who made it back life was very difficult for them..not only by coming home wounded but many came back mentally scared..no help back then like we have today.. today we only have to go to the docs and say we cant cope with everyday stresses and its straight off for councilling and given medication to help us and thank god things have moved forward with that.....we can only imagine the horrors enjured by so many..this brave man took his life beause he couldnt live with what he had seen in battle..so what?? can we really say we hand on heart that we could have come back from that awful war and have got on with life as though nothing had happened ?? i personally know of 2 men who threw away their medals not because they didnt want recognition for their bravery but because they wanted no reminder of what they had gone through..this man did his bit and he didnt have to...not to have his name on a war memorial is disgraceful..maybe not killed in action but he died as a result of that terrible war..back then ideas of suicide were looked upon as though the men were weak willed and cowards..how the hell can a man like this who gave so much be weak...someone needs to put this mans name on a memorial and show a bit of bloody compassion.. i make no apologies for my rant...this is just my opinion on a subject i feel very strongly about..

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/ww1-captain-branded-coward-after-7512658










 
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My father served for nearly three years in France with the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] Battalion Worcestershire Regiment, being wounded in the leg he was discharged in 1917.
He never said much about the terrible things he must have witnessed, but would talk about the more light-hearted things that went on.

He used to say that you couldn’t describe the carnage to anyone that hadn’t been there.
 
nick my grandad was with the RFA and suffered the effects of being gassed a couple of times...he came back but his health was never the same again...no one in the family has his medals so i guess he could have been one of the ones who just didnt want to keep them...how he managed to cycle back and forth from paddington st to chances glass in west bromwich i will never know..he died in 1938 just aged 50 leaving nan to bring up 3 young girls by herself and with the onset of WW2 that must have been so very hard for her as it was for the many families left to carry on and pick up the pieces....she never remarried...i am so lucky that grandads war records survived..
 
Astoness said:
.many times i have said before that for those who made it back life was very difficult for them..not only by coming home wounded but many came back mentally scared..no help back then like we have today.. today we only have to go to the docs and say we cant cope with everyday stresses and its straight off for councilling and given medication to help us and thank god things have moved forward with that.....we can only imagine the horrors enjured by so many..this brave man took his life beause he couldnt live with what he had seen in battle..so what?? can we really say we hand on heart that we could have come back from that awful war and have got on with life as though nothing had happened ?? i personally know of 2 men who threw away their medals not because they didnt want recognition for their bravery but because they wanted no reminder of what they had gone through..this man did his bit and he didnt have to...not to have his name on a war memorial is disgraceful..maybe not killed in action but he died as a result of that terrible war..back then ideas of suicide were looked upon as though the men were weak willed and cowards..how the hell can a man like this who gave so much be weak...someone needs to put this mans name on a memorial and show a bit of bloody compassion.. i make no apologies for my rant...this is just my opinion on a subject i feel very strongly about..

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/ww1-captain-branded-coward-after-7512658
Click to expand...

A tragic story of a very brave man. And as for the church not allowing him to be buried in church grounds is pathetic. Makes me glad i`m an atheist. No one in the circumstances of war should be labelled a coward. Most men in war are brave, but there were some who couldn`t cope, & who amongst us would be brave enough to go over the top when the whistle blew. I probably would, only because i wouldn`t want my mates to think i was a coward & i guess they would think the same. I hope the Captain gets the due recognition he deserves.

 
I thoroughly agree Lyn, and would condemn the attitude of the bigoted church and the authorities view with regard to the memorial, but I suspect that there might be two different reasons. Undoubtedly there are many thousands in this country whose death was caused by their service, though indirectly (ie. they did not die on the battlefield or directly after). They should be remembered. The action of the church was slightly different, though equally indefensible, in that up till quite recently suicides could not be buried on consecrated ground. That is why so many coroners and coroners juries have committed perjury , in stating that someone "took his life while the balance of his mind was disturbed", thus enabling consecrated burial. Presumably the (biased) coroner in this man's case did not do this.
 
points taken mike...either way and for whatever reason its just all very sad...
 
War memorials generally say they are a tribute to those that died in a particular conflict. They are usually restricted to those who died in military service on the battlefield. This excludes an awful lot of people and, depending on opinion, includes some that don't deserve a memorial. It devalues the names that are on the lists. This has always been the case. Trying to change that to something you might believe is fairer is probably impossible. You might have the odd name added to one memorial but for every name you'll come up with there are hundreds or even thousands that you'll miss. Maybe those who fell can become those who served but that still misses non-service personnel. You also get those who served but never saw action.

The matter of burial in unconsecrated ground is something different entirely. There's a long tradition of churches that will not allow people who broke the tenets of their faith (as perceived by the current tradition) to be buried on their grounds. They often won't allow those that weren't regulars at that church to be buried there either. If you want to change that, you have to decide what changes you want to be made. Then you have to persuade the relevant authority. That could be as small as a church council and difficult if you do not belong there.
 
Appalling story Lyn. And it was going on across the country. So many names are missing from our war memorials, it shouldn't be the case. They too have given their lives as a consequence of war. Viv.


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Wam and Mike, interesting background. The various authorities certainly had/still have (?) it all sewn up. And of course this was all going on in a climate of not bringing the war dead home because of the likely outrage at what was really going on in the battlefields. As you say, too late and too difficult to put it all right now. Although I hope that doesn't deter people from at least trying to correct matters for individual cases. Viv.


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It's a terrible injustice to all those brave men who died this way. My grandad was gassed in the war and he used to say the sights and emotions were too strong to be forgotten and too awful to be remembered. My Great uncle emigrated to Australia after the war for a new start, he won gallantry medals for saving the life of his CO, but all but one of his medals got "posted" through floorboards in their house in Adelaide by his young sons, only one was left, he never bothered to retrieve them because he said he wnated no reminder of the travesty of war.
Sue
 
You wonder how many of the WW1 soldiers died, not on the battlefield, but as a consequence of their experiences.

My maternal grandfather came back a broken 20 year old having been gassed, and seeing things that no young man should.
He suffered physically and mentally, but when war broke out in 1939 his mental health began to suffer more, he took delight in his grandaughter(me) but when I was 9 months old in early 1943 he could not stand the thought of war any longer and one night went outside with a razor and ended his life, age 48.


There must have been many more like him, suffering in silence.

I do not know where he is buried , there was a family grave with spaces in it but he was not allowed to be buried there.
 
The memories and experience of war, especially the First World War, must have been desperately unbearable. As Lyn says, no support for trauma, not even after WW2. Having now read and tagged one and a half thousand pages of WW1 diaries, I can say that deaths, nervous conditions etc were simply recorded as a fact; just another casualty without any emotion, for most not even a name (except for officers) just one of many. That must be how the War Office instructed their officers to record casualties and this attitude would have carried right through to all aspects of the War to avoid people seeing the real effects of what was happening. There was absolutely no chance that a soldier suffering the mental after-effects of war would get very little respect or sympathy for what he/she might be suffering. It's a horribly sad fact.

If anyone's interested there are a series of mini courses via the BBC coming in October, November. I've signed up to a couple, the one on trauma looks interesting. Viv.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/28293511



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This story is on Facebook and Cris Baker has said his name wasn't left off the War memorials because he committed suicide, but, "Most of the memorials had been completed and consecrated before this poor fellow took his own life"
 
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