Only one village in the East Riding of Yorkshire – that of Catwick, between Beverley and Hornsea – is officially designated “thankful”. The writer and educator Arthur Mee coined the phrase a century ago to denote those communities that had against all the odds lost no-one to the First World War. There are officially 56 such places, and if not for two tragedies, Holmpton would be amongst their number. But should our village in fact be counted as number 57?
A Roll of Honour in St Nicholas Church records the names of Bertram Wales and Fredrick Sergeant as Holmpton’s war dead. Whilst researching my own family tree I found that I am distantly related to Bertram Wales (whose father was the teacher here at the turn of the century) and I decided to find out more about them, writes Richard Killingbeck, of Rocket House.
Bertram William Wales was born in York in 1886, was living here in Holmpton in 1901, but by 1911 was back in York and working as a joiner. He joined the Army at the start of the war in September 1914 when he was a manual instructor (presumably teaching woodwork and metalwork) at the George Dixon Secondary School in Birmingham. Frederick Edward Sergeant, meanwhile, was born in 1898 in Weeton. He joined the Army in 1916 at which time he was living in what is now Bleak House Care Home, Patrington. Coincidentally, Bertram Wales was the son of the school teacher in Holmpton and in 1919, Frances Sergeant, one of Fredrick’s sisters, was appointed as the assistant teacher.
It appeared to me that neither was resident in Holmpton when they joined up – on which basis Holmpton would be one the “Thankful Villages”. I contacted the researches who drew up the list and gave them my findings. Their research confirmed mine. They have therefore recently amended their site to add information about us. However they have only listed Holmpton as one about which there is some doubt. Their reasoning is explained in their note:
“Holmpton has a Roll of Honour recording the names of two soldiers who died in the Great War. (One of the men clearly lived and worked in Birmingham when he enlisted in 1914, but seems to have been included on the Roll of Honour because he had lived previously in Holmpton and went to school there). The other, 55669 Pvt. Frederick Edward Sergeant , York and Lancaster Regiment, died 27.09.1918, was born in the village of Weeton. East Yorkshire, in 1898. He and his parents moved to Holmpton some time between 1898 and 1901, when Frederick Edward would still have been a baby, and according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records, his parents were still living there after the war when they returned the Final Verification Form. When he joined the army on 30.5.1916, aged 18, he gave his address as “Bleak House Farm, Patrington. He was employed there as a “Farm Servant”. Patrington is about 3.5 miles from Holmpton. But we are not sure that an 18-year-old, in those circumstances, would have considered the farm he worked at, even if he were a residential servant, to be his home, when his parents lived nearby, in the village he had grown up in. Pvt. Sergeant is not named on the Patrington Roll of Honour. The real puzzle, and one we encounter here for the first time, is that when drawing up their Roll of Honour, the villagers of Holmpton clearly considered both soldiers as being among “their boys”.
More about the Army careers of Bertram Wales and Fredrick Sergeant