Wilfred Middleton, 'Memories' provided by Chris Worrall & Steve Clamp

Wilfred Middleton was born in 1893

Uncle Wilfred - 200,000 Gravestones standing in a row

My grandma was 92 when she died, in 1991, not that long ago really. Her brother, Wilfred had died long before then. Killed, September 24th 1918, just six weeks before the end of the murderous madness that was the First World War. And in all those intervening years my grandma, and her sister, never forgot their musical, gentle, beloved brother. As a small child there were times, during family gatherings, when, I could sense his absence.
But oh the follies of youth.

Now I am at an age when what may be wisdom, but is, more likely, apathy and resignation, has destroyed the certainty that is part, a vital part perhaps, of principled, passionate youth. I would not now go around shouting Marxist platitudes (though much sense still lives for me in left-wing thinking) or wear “Stuff the Jubilee” badges – or tell my grandma in heartless fashion that her brother had been killed in a bloody, avoidable conflict, and that he died, not as she still maintained for “King and Country” - but that he died for nothing.

But that is what I did in one of those regretful outbursts that pepper the lives of the painfully righteous young. Zealous youth cannot distinguish between promoting their own certainties, and injuring through ill-considered comment. A few years later, as advancing years brought with it an ability to make that important distinction I was filled with regret and having upset my grandma with my lose, ill-considered, callous words I attempted to make good. I promised that if I could not take her to visit her dear brother’s grave in far off Picardy, then I would visit on the her behalf. And so on August 4th 2005, some 30 years later, I did.

The graveyard at Holnon near Saint Quentin where Wilfred is buried is immaculately maintained. Cars buzz by on an adjacent main road. Modern red-brick dwellings hem in the cemetery. You could be most anywhere. Certainly you could be back in Thorne, back in South Yorkshire – back in Wilfred’s hometown. Wilfred had been blown up and had died and had been buried 800 miles from home - but really he’d gone nowhere at all. In death the cliché it’s a small world holding true - and there is, perhaps, some comfort in that.

Why am I telling you this? Well according to the British and Commonwealth Graves Commission, approximately 200,000 thousand – more than one in five of the gravestones for our British and Commonwealth First World War dead - were fashioned from stone by the quarry workers and sawsmen and masons and polishers at Hopton Wood Stone Firms Ltd. Quarry at Middleton. And Wilfred, my Great Uncle Wilfred, my grandma’s ever twenty five year old, ever grieved for, never forgotten brother is one of those 200,000 – 200,000 gravestones standing in a row - buried with Hopton Wood Stone to mark his plot – buried beneath stone taken from the earth in Middleton half a mile away from where I now live

"Write something Steve, write something about the gravestones from Middleton, write something personal with human interest". And so I have. And Wilfred’s surname – Middleton. My uncle’s name is the same as the place that his gravestone comes from. Now there’s connection. Now there’s irony. And there, I hope too, is remembrance - and perhaps a touch - a touch - of redemption.

A monologue written and performed at an arts festival in Wirksworth, Derbyshire.
Text and story picked up by local radio and then tv. See link below.
news.bbc.co.uk

Steve Clamp (Great Nephew of Wilfred Middleton)