Thankful Villages

Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages)^[1] are settlements in England and Wales from which all their members of the armed forces survived World War I. 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 an October 2013 update,^[2] researchers identified 53 civil parishes in England and Wales from which all serving personnel returned. There are no Thankful Villages identified in Scotland or Ireland yet (all of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom).^[3]

Fourteen of the English and Welsh villages are considered "doubly thankful", in that they also lost no service personnel during World War II.^[3] These are marked with a (D) in the list below.

Buckinghamshire Stoke Hammond Cardiganshire Llanfihangel y Creuddyn Cornwall Herodsfoot (D) Cumberland Ousby Derbyshire Bradbourne Dorset Langton Herring (D) Durham Hunstanworth Essex Strethall Glamorgan Colwinston Gloucestershire Coln Rogers Little Sodbury Upper Slaughter (D) Herefordshire Knill Middleton-on-the-Hill (D) Hertfordshire Puttenham Kent Knowlton Lancashire Arkholme Nether Kellet (D) Leicestershire Saxby East Norton Stretton en le Field Lincolnshire Bigby Flixborough (D) High Toynton (D) Minting

Northamptonshire East Carlton Woodend Northumberland Meldon Nottinghamshire Cromwell Maplebeck Wigsley Wysall Pembrokeshire Herbrandston (D) Rutland Teigh Shropshire Harley Somerset Aisholt Chantry Chelwood Holywell Lake Rodney Stoke Shapwick Stocklinch (D) Tellisford Woolley (D) Staffordshire Butterton Suffolk Culpho South Elmham St Michael (D) Sussex East Wittering Yorkshire Catwick (D) Cundall Helperthorpe Norton-le-Clay Scruton

The researchers acknowledged a number of other villages which have been put forward as Thankful Villages but where they found there to be some uncertainty, generally over the place of residence of a serviceman.^[2]

In France, where the human cost of war was higher than in Britain, Thierville in Upper Normandy was remarkable as the only village in all of France with no men lost from World War I, nor any memorials constructed in the subsequent period. Thierville also suffered no losses in the Franco-Prussian War and World War II, France's other bloody wars of the modern era.^[4]

In popular culture

On 3 June 2016 singer-songwriter Darren Hayman released the first of three albums inspired by and written in-situ at the Thankful Villages. 54 villages are to be covered, including Welbury, North Yorkshire, not in the 53 listed above.^[5][6]

References

1. St Cyrus - an example of the use of "Blessed Villages"
2. Norman Thorpe, Rod Morris and Tom Morgan. "The Thankful Villages". Hellfire corner. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
3. Kelly, Jon (11 November 2011). "Thankful villages: The places where everyone came back from the wars". BBC News Magazine. BBC News. Retrieved 12 November 2011.
4. 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"
5. "We Lucky Few". i (newspaper). 31 May 2016. Retrieved 16 July 2016.
6. Petridis, Alexis (12 July 2016). "Darren Hayman: No sleep till Upper Slaughter". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 July 2016.

External links

• Thankful Villages; A project about rural life by Darren Hayman