This account of Jonathan’s life is compiled from newspaper reports, known movements & actions of his battalion and other local sources including Cotton Town and thanks to Tony Foster for extra information on my relatives military service. It is not definitive but as accurate a story as I can portray from this distance in time. Hope you enjoy this look back at his life.
Private Jonathan Walkden 12120 of the 17th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial near to the village of that name in Northern France. You will find him on Pier and Face 3C and 3D of that distinctive war memorial. You will not find the resting place of his body – that was never found and his parents had nowhere to grieve their son.
Jonathan is the son of Ada and Jonathan Walkden who have a total of twelve children born to them. On his only known photograph from the newspaper he looks a confident almost cocky lad, bright and good looking. He is born on the 5th of May 1886 at 42 Heys Lane Darwen. He becomes a regular member of the Duckworth Street Congregational Church and is one of the Boy Scouts at the church from an early age. He is small as are many in my family but probably due to the living conditions of the time in Darwen he does not really seem unusually so.
By the time that Jonathan joins the army there are only three children still alive and only Jonathan and his younger brother William are still living at the family home in Back Noble Street, Darwen, Lancashire. Like so many families of this time period living in the harsh conditions of severe poverty, coupled with the prevalence of disease including the self-inflicted one of syphilis that is rife in the slums of Central Darwen, many families lose up to 80% of the children born to these world weary mothers. These conditions to our modern day sensibilities are almost impossible to imagine and how these women suffered cannot be put into a context that we can easily understand, even if we today live in the same town that they did. Noble Street is a short row of small terrace house, some now joined together to make a larger dwelling. Back Noble Street does not survive in the present day but must have been a small collection of very substandard dwellings sharing communal facilities and lacking the basics required for a healthy lifestyle. These terrace streets made up most of the town and all lead down to the main road through the town which in turn meant that anyone could access the multitude of cotton and paper mills by means of the trams or for the Walkdens – on foot.
The Walkden family are on the verge of making good in the town with the advent of motor transport but this will come too late for this part of the family who suffer terribly in the industrial system of East Lancashire. At least young Jonathan’s father does not have to work in the mills but was a part of the family business of carting – basically moving goods around the area by horse and cart. Young Jonathan does not join his father in this but works as a labourer at Darwen Paper Mill which is a relatively short walk from his home. Jonathan is 18 years old when he joins the army and will be just turned 20 years of age at the time of his death.
My connection with the Walkden family is through my grandmother Florrie Walkden who is born in 1908 just eight years before the death of her uncle Jonathan. My grandmother’s father Harry is also part of the family carting business but I believe it would be her brother David that would reap the fruits of the expansion of this enterprise. David takes the business to another level by turning it into a motorised haulage business that has a fleet of vehicles and Walkden Haulage endures up until the 1970’s as a major enterprise in the town. It also becomes a coal merchant at a time when virtually every domestic dwelling has to use coal for heating and also many households need it to run the cooking ranges still so prevalent in many kitchens of the terraced properties.
I have a vivid clear recollection from when I was a child of going into the Walkden coal offices at the bottom of Kay Street in Darwen. Outside the premises there was a weighbridge that monitored the deliveries on the coal lorries to the townsfolk of Darwen. Inside of the office was set up and run rather like the house rates offices that the council had in the centre of town, a place that made you deliberately conscious of your place in society as you handed your weekly rent to the man sat at the raised counter. Likewise, the coal office made it clear it was you who needed them and you needed to be grateful of that. I feel sure that my mother never obtained any family discount on the coal purchases and the wealth of that side of my family as far as I can tell never filtered down outside of that immediate circle. Certainly young Jonathan Walkden and his family missed out on the good times.
I never really knew that part of the family but I did come to know my grandmother’s sisters Ethel and Nellie Walkden, it was impossible not to, especially with Ethel and my grandmother Florrie. To say they came across as being larger than life would be a considerable understatement. My grandmother was a loud enough character on her own, always laughing, especially after returning from the Bingo Hall in town just ever so slightly lubricated with a glass of sherry or some similar refreshment, always with a cigarette in hand. She use to pass on her cigarette cards to me of which there were hundreds and how I so wish I had kept them all. When she was out and about with her sister Ethel the noise and cackling laughter was almost unbearable, they were uncontrollable and I never felt I heard a serious thought being uttered when they were in each other’s company. It is fair to say they were a fun couple of sisters. Their other sister Nellie was different, much quieter and I only really got to know her much later in her life. She lived over the moor at Tottington near Bury, Lancashire, close to where the Orrell family were based. Her elderly husband Richard Leach was blind. They lived in a small terrace cottage on the left of the road just coming down off the moor and seemed a happy but quiet couple. Richard retained a degree of independence but did not often leave the cottage. They had family that lived close by on the other side of the road. Nellie’s passion in life was Bury Football (Soccer) Club. Bury are not really a club that has ever overly troubled the consciousness of most followers of the beautiful game but they have had their successful moments back in the early days of the organized game. Those glory days were long gone but Nellie was proud of the club and followed them avidly, going on the bus to all their home games at Gigg Lane in Bury. I was fortunate enough to be taken by her when I visited and I still vividly recall going to that game with much affection although she did not pass on her fanaticism for the club to me and I stayed loyal to my hometown club. Sadly the club lost its Football League status and folded due to financial mismanagement. Nellie would have been devastated to see this demise of her beloved Bury.
Going back to the early history of the Walkden in modern times it turns out that the family arrived in Darwen from the town of Heywood near Rochdale in Lancashire. The employment they had left in Heywood in the early parts of the 19th Century was even worse if that is possible than the Atherton family endured in the mills of Darwen. The family all worked in the local tannery in Heywood, a place that was notorious for causing the foul smell that permeated the entire locality. The tanning process required a plentiful supply of clean and soft water that would run freely and the area of Heywood, close to the rain soaked Pennine Hills was ideal for suppling that in vast quantities. Unfortunately for the workers and residents that clean pure water did not stay fresh for very long once it had entered the stomach churning processes taking place in the tannery. Back in early Victorian times it was common for the process to use large quantities of urine and dog excrement or even the pulverised brains of the dead animal. My early ancestors must have returned home in an appalling state and it is impossible to imagine how they ever managed to become clean enough to eat their food safely. As would be expected disease was rife in the locality and the stagnant air around the tannery, a building that was located among residential houses was putrid. The long hours of work was conducted in this foul air and was very arduous as part of the preparation of the leather involved removing the fatty tissue and hairs from the hide, much of this done by scraping with a special knife – a truly filthy process that was backbreaking and damaging to the hand and fingers. It is one of those methods that actually works that makes you really wonder how anybody came up with the scientific reason for putting this together and making it successful. It was effective and the fine ladies of Manchester and Cheshire wore the softest of leather gloves but I am absolutely certain that these delicate females would have been totally unaware of the disgusting process that produced such fine embellishments to their expensive outfits.
Harry’s father Thomas had escaped from this life in Heywood and with other members of the Walkden family set up a fledgling carting business in Darwen. Most of the males in the family were engaged in this operation but it was hard work involving long hours and driving the horse and cart many miles around Lancashire in all weathers. They also had to care for their horses on which they depended and these were stabled basically at home in various locations around Darwen. The business did not make anyone rich at this point in time as there was much competition mainly in the movement of cloth to the factories in Preston or Manchester where the raw basic cotton from the Darwen Mills was turned into garments. There was however plenty of cloth to be made and the Walkden enterprise gave them a reasonable living that they had cause to consider was a step up in quality from a working life toiling in the mill. At least they got a lot more fresh air but back home the poverty was still ever present in the mind if not on the table and always they were in fear of going below the breadline if the carting business ran into a quiet and unproductive period. They always had one eye on the state of the economy in the mills and also the threat from the carting competition.
There is an interesting insight into the type of business that the Walkden family were engaged in during the early days of the business and this is recorded in the Blackburn Standard newspaper in February of 1900. Young Jonathan’s father has been to the local mill that morning and is transporting a cart load of cloth to Preston using two horses to pull the wooden cart which is piled with goods as high as possible without it falling over. He reaches Bolton Road, Blackburn some three miles from Darwen and as he proceeds slightly downhill into Blackburn on the last part of Bolton Road heading towards the railway bridge to continue his journey to Preston the rear horse gets its hind legs entangled in the cart shafts. This forces the cart into a lamppost which withstands the initial collision but Jonathan Walkden has to quickly uncouple the horses so as to get them separated from the shaft and be able to return them into proper harness. When Jonathan frees the lead horse the ungrateful animal bites him and it bolts towards a shop window at number 24 Bolton Road and on impact smashes it as well as putting its hoof through the skylight cellar window, a feature of these properties that anyone of a certain age that has lived in East Lancashire would be very familiar with. This incident causes cuts to the horse’s nose and leg and when Jonathan tries to restrain it and put it back into harness it bites him again a further two times. Jonathan’s language is not recorded by the newspaper. He does eventually manage to recouple the horses and successfully get on his way under the railway bridge and completes the journey to Preston without further delay and the load of cloth is safely delivered to the factory. There is no indication in the report that he paid for any repairs to the affected shop and he does not appear to have been prosecuted for having his horses go out of control. Clearly the newspaper was well informed about the incident, nothing escaped the gossip of the times, so I suspect Jonathan was obliged to make good the shop frontage. This accident occurred at seven o’clock in the morning and if you then take into account the time needed to get the horses fed, attached to the cart, the load ready and then travel the three miles into Blackburn it gives some indication of the long hours that must have been involved in conducting this family business.
At the time of this accident and only 14 years before his son Jonathan enlists in the army Jonathan Walkden has settled his family to be living in Heyes Lane Darwen. These properties would at the time have been relatively new houses and although ubiquitous terraced houses they were and still are today of a good standard of construction. Jonathan’s business must have been going fairly well at that time to have been living in a relatively new and quality property but seems to have taken a downhill turn shortly after this and they eventually found themselves in the reduced circumstances of Back Noble Street. From here they gathered to wave goodbye to their eldest surviving son Jonathan as he went away to enlist to fight in France. Perhaps the publicity from the incident with the out of control horse was not good for Jonathan’s business but it is more likely that he was finding carrying out this type of work more difficult as his health declined. He had seen his wife give birth to so many children in a very short space of time – virtually one a year between 1890 and 1900. During that time they had also lost nine of them, almost one child is born and one dies every single year during that time, a level of emotional suffering that you feel must have been impossible to bear. Ada dies just three years after she loses her son Jonathan at the Somme, she is physically worn out and broken hearted. Jonathan struggles on until 1937 but his life has been extremely hard and unfulfilling and the final years are sad and difficult. Once again my research in the family tree leaves me feeling somewhat incredulous that a man can put his wife through so much, and you feel that your real sympathies are with his wife Ada. Time and again I find, particularly in my family line, an ancestor giving birth to around ten and sometimes as many as eighteen children, giving birth to a child generally every year with many of these children dying in infancy. I feel sad that I can only make a harsh judgement on the husbands, many are my direct ancestors, particularly with the knowledge that some of these men passed on disease to their wives which only compounds the conflicting feelings I have about these relatives despite having to sympathise very much with the incredible poverty many of them suffered. Their reasoning at the time was surely that by producing more children it would eventually provide more income as they would be put to work at around 12 years of age in the mills. Their meagre wages would assist the family to stay out of poverty. In many of these cases it simply did not work and the children died young and we are left with the absolute certainty that it was the women who suffered the most and that treatment of them by a man who they loved is difficult to comprehend or justify.
Ada would first of all wave goodbye to her son Jonathan as he left to fight in the Great War but ultimately she would be left at home as her husband and youngest son also joined up later in the war.
Young Jonathan Walkden never marries or goes on to have a family of his own. As we mentioned previously Jonathan joins up to fight at the outset of the war in August 1914. Jonathan is initially attached to the 11th Battalion, part of the 104th brigade, 35th Division and by June 1915 these troops were concentrated as units in North Yorkshire at the market town of Masham, a place I know very well and as far as I am concerned most famous today as the home of the wonderful Black Sheep Brewery. In August 1915 they move to Salisbury plain for further extensive and repetitive training. Over the next weeks they move on once again to Chiseldon and Cholderton. In late June 1915 they receive orders to mobilize for operations in Egypt and are intended to ultimately be a part of the fated campaign in Gallipoli but these orders were rescinded. Jonathan passes several boring months in the South of England and he feels he has trained enough by now and is cheered that he and his Regiment are now travelling from Folkestone to Boulogne on the 28th January 1916. From there they journey south to Saint Remy, near to Abbeville located right on the Somme River and trained there until early February especially practicing the art of living and working in trenches. Life in the army was no longer fun for young Jonathan and the dire reality of living and working in these dreadful winter conditions was now very real to him. In writing of my family and how their lives were moulded by the Great War I do find it hard to grasp any possible reason that Jonathan spent around 18 months training for something that in the event of when he actually goes into battle the consequences were almost completely out of his control. Nothing and no length of time can ever prepare you to be sent ‘over the top’ and try to survive withering machine gun fire in the open fields of Northern France. You are left bewildered and angry at the pointlessness of it all. Jonathan might just as well have trained to land on the moon for all the good this endless repetitive ‘training’ did for him and his pals in the regiment when they left that trench for the very last time.
By late February of 1916 Jonathan and his regiment were located in the area of Maricourt on the far right of the British Sector of the Western Front, the front line located about half a mile away from his unit. Just to the west of them a small village called Carnoy was in British hands. Ahead of them the Germans held Fricourt, Mametz and Montauban. I will for the benefit of the story refer to these places as villages but in reality they were now just mounds of rubble and the whole landscape was becoming bereft of any noticeable landmarks. Jonathan is called on by the commanders located several miles behind the trenches to proceed with his pals to regularly try to hold the British Front line trenches. Eventually they gain much needed rest and a little recreation at the village of Suzanne located around two miles behind the lines and still relatively intact. They arrive for the first time at the billets at Suzanne but the timing is unfortunate as they are just in time to see the village shelled by the Germans and the battalion sustain a few casualties. The next day Jonathan’s unit relieve the troops holding the line just west of the village of Maricourt.
I have over the years seen many pieces of film showing the Allied troops behind the front lines building transport and communication links from the trenches back to the rear support depots. A popular method of keeping supplies moving from the rear to the front lines was by narrow gauge railway and Jonathan and his pals are active in building this rickety track on the very liquid foundations of the front as well as some road building and the deep burial of telephone lines as they try to avoid the German shells cutting off communication between the trenches and the rear. They engage in all this non-combat activity up until May of 1916. On the 24th of June an Allied bombardment of the German positions signals the start of the run up to the Battle of the Somme. Initially that battle was to begin on the 28th of June but the weather was unseasonably wet and overcast with reconnaissance by the Allied aircraft over the German lines proving to be impossible and so the Somme Battles as we all know today began on the 1st of July 1916. The information that the German lines have been pulverised into non-existence is wrong but fortunately in Jonathan’s sector the Germans are in a state of disarray after the bombing.
Jonathan and the unit arrive at the assembly spot called Cambridge Copse at around 10pm on the 30th of June with other support arriving at their side around midnight. Jonathan is not in the first wave of troops that he sees going into action at zero hour the next morning and unusually for the first day of the Somme the casualties in this sector are relatively light. At 8.30 am on the 1st of July Jonathan and his pals await the signal from their respected officer and when the whistle blows they go over the top of the trenches into an area already massively cratered by shell fire and the whole theatre of war in front of them is being swept across by steady withering machine gun fire from the German lines. To the left of the field a machine gun is taking a heavy toll of another regiment but the 17th battalion are not being spared either and their commanding officer is killed very soon into the fight. It seems incongruous looking back over time to call it a fight as very few got as far as to be able to come back and say they had been in a ‘fight’. For the most part they were sitting ducks and never fought in the true sense of the word – that was neither their fault nor indeed their decision. Jonathan and the men around him move on with great courage and reach the German front line but they do not actually know it as the devastation from the Allied shelling had been so effective that the trenches were unrecognizable. This causes them to move on to the second line of trenches which also are just a mass of craters and ditches and there is thankfully no problem with any uncut barbed wire. They are still under machine gun fire at this location and the exact point of fire is spotted and the gun destroyed at around 9am. The village and planned objective of Montauban is actually well prepared for defence by the Germans but in the event is discovered to be undefended and the regiment walk in to take possession taking any Germans still there as their prisoners. This is a rare success story on a day of truly catastrophic carnage for the British Army and Jonathan is still alive on this day of days.
By late afternoon this sector becomes quiet and stays that way until around 3am the following morning when German artillery fire begins and a German infantry attack has to be repulsed. This attack is stopped except for a small group that pins down a party of Jonathan’s 17th Battalion who for a time manage to hold out with grenades until being forced to retire from the position having suffered three or four casualties in the engagement. This finally leaves the regiment holding control of the village of Montauban and on the 3rd of July they are relieved by allied forces and are able to go back behind the lines. Jonathan has survived the first battle of the Somme but to keep beating the odds will be a tall order and he knows it.
The regiment has lost 8 officers and over 300 men in the operation and this we have to remind ourselves is considered a successful one. Every one of these men has a loved one back home and this is devastating to the regiment. Analysing the cold facts of the events surrounding the Battle of the Somme these casualties are quite small in number and the Regiment in the context of the ferocity of the battle has come out of it relatively intact.
The powers that be now decide that the only way forward in view of the limited successes of the first wave of attacks of the Battle of the Somme is to concentrate on capturing and breaking through at the village of Guillemont in the area that Jonathan has just fought in. Jonathan will not leave this area again and takes part in the next engagements through Trones Wood and on to Maltz Horn Farm. These objectives are met by the regiment until a withdrawal is ordered and Jonathan is engaged in much disputing of this territory over the coming two weeks. One particularly horrifying action he takes part in is in Bernafey Wood as the regiment attempts to clear the northern areas of Trones Wood. While Jonathan and his regiment are moving forward the Germans use gas in the shelling of the wood and combined with the drizzling rain it causes virtually zero visibility through their gas masks, ensuring that they make little progress and are unable to engage the enemy. After a tiring trek through the desolate and dangerous wood and undergrowth they finally regain contact with the other regiments and are able to hold the area for a time.
You may have seen the famous piece of black and white movie footage of the Lancashire Fusiliers in the sunken road close to these locations. This road was used in the prelude to the attack and also later when the 17th had to withdraw away from the repeated shelling. Was Jonathan in that film, there is a strong possibility that he was but more work would be needed to make a positive identification. The moving emotion about it is that he was there and these were his pals and many were soon to die. Jonathan again leaves the sunken road, having been ordered forward to occupy a trench south of Trones Wood but again they are beaten back to the sunken road and relative but uncomfortable safety.
On the 20th of July they are once again detailed to attack Maltz Horn Farm and Arrow Head Copse and to go on to take the German trenches, even though by now many, many lives had been lost in repeatedly taking and losing this same stretch of ground – all to no purpose. Jonathan has so far survived all the early events of the Somme but knows this could not continue indefinitely. He needs and secretly hopes for, a wound that will end his war but preserve his life – a ‘Blighty wound’. He will not get his wish.
There is a bombardment to cover a French attack on Jonathan’s right but in the end the attack by these allies is cancelled. Two companies of the regiment proceed forward and under massive machine gun fire the survivors reach and take a German trench but under continuous bombardment fail to hold that and have to retreat unable to take their dead with them. More attacks take place but are badly coordinated and the poor visibility of this day renders aircraft observation support impossible.
At 7pm on the 22nd of July another bombardment of the German positions begins but without any coordination of the attack all this does is to alert the Germans as to what is coming from the allied side. The attack lacks any real planning and only the absence of any moonlight protected the troops as they go forward once more. For Jonathan his fortune in battle has peaked and shortly after he goes back into the open ground in this action he is killed and because of the ferocity of the machine gun fire and the shelling that beat the soldiers back his body is never to be found. He is 20 years old and another statistic in the fruitless attempt to capture a few yards of desolate land in Northern France.
In November of 1916 his mother receives his personal effects and the money he has due to him to the day of his death – £2 15s 11d. She is given a gratuity relating to his death in service of £7. On the other side of the accounts ledger she has lost her eldest son.
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