“I join with my grateful people in sending you this memorial of a brave life given for others in the Great War – George R”
Sometimes, family history just catches you out. Even when you think you’ve covered it all.
My personal journey of discovery began many years ago, with stories handed down by mum; stories about the men of her paternal genealogy, long-distant in the family psyche. They were the soldiers, farm boys and pioneers that inspired my collection of ramblings assembled in this website.
As a child, I was too young to understand that indelible fingerprint of inherited sadness left by the loss of war in family tales. Young men swept up from the stony soils of the Brecklands to fight in foreign wars, or from their migratory outposts of the then still mighty British Empire. Men separated from me by time and history, but connected still by the grief that allegedly broke my great grandmother’s heart.
A shadow more than one hundred years long.
It still affects me even now that I’m old enough and wise enough to analyse the facts and separate myths from memory.
If you’ve followed my writings about the Crook boys of East Harling and Eccles, you will by now understand my efforts to uncover firstly the truth about their war service and the connections left behind after Sydney and Harry jr emigrated to Canada in 1910 and 1913 respectively, and secondly, that over many blogs, I’ve attempted to write it all down so that, one day hopefully, someone else will carry their history forward.
You’ll have also noticed that periodically I’ve reached blind alleys as the research runs out of clues, or until another source is revealed or a distant cousin uncovers another heirloom: most recently it was cousin Kris in Saskatchewan finding letters from Fred Crook to his brother Herbert on active service in Mesopotamia causing an upsurge in interest. Sometimes a hiatus can last months; occasionally a tidal surge of information has me writing more than one tale at once.
Pretty much everything easily available had been written about the Crook family at war; my great grandfather Harry Snr and his service in Egypt, Harry Jr and his decorated adventures with the Princess Patricia’s, Sydney’s death at Hill 60 in 1916, Walter and his service and capture on The Somme, Herbert and his death in the 1920 Arab revolt in Mesopotamia, and finally, the youngest son, and my grandfather, Frank’s service in World War Two. All covered in lesser or greater detail over several years of scribbling.
And that’s where we were. Paused again, but always hopeful that another family fact would surface.
An Unexpected Development
I have to say that I’m not a medal hunter, and although I’m lucky to have a couple of sets from our family, I’ve always accepted that decisions made long before I was interested meant that any that existed would either be somewhere else in the hands of the wider family tree, or disposed of long ago. Memories either too painful to keep, or disconnected from significance and lost.
There is, however, something about a medal earned for gallantry, or issued in return for the ultimate sacrifice, that makes my hand tremble when you find them. For example, I’ve casually searched for the Military Medals awarded to Harry Crook jr and my Great grandfather George Burlingham, but presumed they were lost.
Sydney was such a case – because his story was at the very core of my long interest in the Great War and its effect on my family. I have his pocket watch which I cherish and still wear today, and because he was the one everyone talked about.
I was content that Sydney’s book was closed. For now.
Until, that is, lightning struck in a way that put me into a complete spin!
I’m not sure that I was ever likely to be prepared for the development in the story that caught me by surprise, but short of one of the brothers walking in and sitting down to tell me their story in person, I simply wasn’t ready for what happened next.
Out of the blue, an email arrived from a complete stranger, telling me they had possession of the medals and ephemera for Harry Snr, Sydney, and Herbert. The world almost stopped spinning…
There in black and white was the list of medals earned by those I’d written hundreds, if not thousands, of words about over almost a decade:
- The 1882 Egypt Medal with Tel el Kebir clasp and the Khedive’s Bronze Star issued to Harry Crook.
- The 1914-15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal belonging to Sydney Crook, along with his bronze Memorial Plaque (and packaging) and his silver Canadian Memorial Cross along with a General Service cap badge and collar badge, and a 5th Battalion cap badge.
- Two signaller qualification sleeve patches (most likely belonging to Harry Crook jr).
- The 1918 General Service Medal with Iraq clasp issued to Herbert Crook.
The medals that I’d never seen and only read about in their respective files.
I was speechless, and I admit, slightly emotional.
Maybe more than slightly emotional…
I knew my great grandfather was a proud old soldier and active member of the Royal British Legion, so knew he would have regularly worn his medals, even if I’d assumed he was buried with them or they were simply disposed of after his death. They bear the marks of being worn with pride.
As for the other medals, I understood the process for them to be issued to the next of kin, and assumed they had gone to the family as per the records. Sadly, both Sydney and Herbert were long dead before the post war distribution processes began, and in the case of Herbert, so was his mother Mary.
As I’ve written previously, my mother described Mary as ‘dying of a broken heart’. I don’t know if that’s true, but I can only imagine her reaction to the belated arrival of official packages marked ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ containing the metallic tokens of a grateful nation, and it must have wounded her all over again. Her grief lingers still.
Mary was dead by October 1922. With Sydney buried in Flanders, Herbert lost to the sands of Najaf, and Harry jr and Fred scattered to Saskatchewan building new futures, she must have been crushed by loss and separation, and it would have been no surprise to me if she was in no need of a few pieces of metal as consolation. Walter had also spent the last seven months of the war as a prisoner, so she’d been through it all.
You could consider it entirely understandable if the medals and tokens had been thrown away or set aside to be banished from memory.
But as with everything connected to Canada, in the case of Sydney we have a written record that tells us the story…
The greatest benefit of having a relative who served for Canada is the often meticulous records; and we can see that Sydney’s medals were despatched to his family on September 24th 1920. Poignantly, Herbert had died just a month before, so I’m not certain if the family would have been aware of his death by the time Sydney’s medals arrived. His scroll followed on 11th November 1920 with his memorial plaque not being despatched until January 1922 – the packaging showing it was posted from Ottowa back to England.
While it’s impressive that this family collection has remained together for more than a century, and to have a full set for Sydney is remarkable, it’s not the medals that touched me the most.
To have the cap badges is extremely emotional for me, as they are the only part of the collection actually worn by him, and a physical connection to the man and his story. What intrigues me about his General Service cap badge and collar badge, or the 5th Battalion cap badge and patches, is whether they were returned to the family from Sydney’s personal effects after his death in Flanders, or more likely that he deposited them as a gift for his mother during leave from the front.
We don’t have a clear record of Sydney visiting home on leave in the year between his arrival back in England in the June of 1915 and his death in June 1916, although we do have anecdotal evidence of ‘the boys’ visiting home by train and surprising their mother by throwing their kit bags off the carriage as they passed Overa Cottages. In the ten months of his active service, we simply don’t know if or when he made it home to Eccles.
Similarly, I suspect that the signaller patches were a gift from Harry jr, as we have definitive records of his service as a battalion signaller, including the action in which he was awarded his MM. I know he was home briefly in the summer of 1917 just before the 3rd Battle of Ypres. as I have a letter where he discusses his visit.
I can only imagine how these small fragments of army life made my great grandmother feel as her boys visited fleetingly from the front, and were then gone again. Family tales, woven like a thread by my mother into the history of her forebears, and forever into my fascination with those uncles from a century ago.
To have these tiny mementos of their life back in the family has affected me deeply, as it is as much a conduit to memories of her, as it is to them.
My final thoughts are for David McCarthy who located the medals and very quickly realised their significance as a family group. Luckily for both of us, he took the time to research the collection, and as a result found this website and contacted me. Where they’ve been for more than a century matters not; but their stories continue as a result.
We are forever thankful for his empathy and diligence in bringing them back to us. I just wish mum was here to see it, as the stories she told have come full circle.
Further reading:
If you have found this website for the first time and are interested in the wider family story, you will find all the linked blogs in the index. For direct links to Harry, Harry Jr, Sydney, Herbert and Mary, their individual histories are below:
Who Do You Think You Are? – Farm Boys and Pioneers https://share.google/094o2ndfOuSm5qQXH
Herbert Crook: Lost in the desert – Farm Boys and Pioneers https://share.google/X8rYLdWvGdKxqBPiU
Uncle Syd: The First to Fall – Farm Boys and Pioneers https://share.google/0fdht8upnTuqiFkaE
Farm Boys and Pioneers 