On 22 October 2022 St james Church hosted a service remembering the fallen of the Southwick Estate in WW1. Each man was remembered with a short and moving biography as family members came forward to add a lit candle to a cruciform soil montage near to the altar.

The service also saw the launch of a book, written by Joan Dickson and Elizabeth Brocklehurst, which remembers each of the men. The Squire, Mark Thistlethwayte, in his foreword to the book, writes:

One hundred years ago this community made a pledge, a pledge that they would remember the men of the Southwick Estate  who were killed during the First World War. 

Despite the brass memorial and an annual service of Remembrance the story of these men has faded with time and the passing of their close relatives. 

Most, if not all, of these men were born on the Estate and baptized in one of the Estate’s two churches. They perhaps went to Southwick School where they received an education. If the pattern of their lives had not been so rudely interrupted many of them would have been married here and at the end of their lives they would have been buried in the churchyard alongside other family members. 

When war was declared on 4th August 1914, few of these young men understood the nature of the conflict they were about to enter. The fearsome machines of war consumed men like never before. 

One by one, the men described in these few pages answered the call to arms to “do their bit” and one by one they died, in a desolate landscape, confronting men who in other circumstances could so easily have been their friends. 

I am grateful to the authors who have made these pages possible, because this is the story of these men, and in the writing and the reading of these pages the pledge made by this community, so long ago, is honoured. These young men, and the families devastated by their loss, are remembered.

Mark Thistlethwayte

September 2021