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| The City of Leeds |
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| Scholes War Memorial |
Welcome to this website commemorating the men from the villages of Barwick in Elmet and Scholes, near Leeds, who served and
died in the two major wars of the 20th Century, the Great War 1914 - 1918 and the World War 1939 - 1945.
The main aim of the site is a simple one, and that is remembrance. By building this website I hope to perpetuate the memory
of the men of the two villages who gave their lives in the service of their country. Although we are commemorating men who
gave their lives almost a century ago, there is no reason why we cannot embrace modern methods in our commemoration of these
men. By doing so more people will have the opportunity to learn about those men and the villages they left behind. The original
idea behind the website was a simple one, and that was to positively identify, by name and regiment or unit, each of the men
listed on the two main war memorials in the villages. The vast majority of this of work has been completed, indeed at the
time of writing this passage (11 August 2007) only one Scholes man remains to be absolutely identified and properly remembered
on this site. New information is constantly being discovered as more sources of information become available, and therefore
this website will continue to grow and evolve. As always, I would welcome any information, documents or photographs which
would benefit this site and make it more complete and better able to inform visitors, and I am pleased to be able to say that
there has been some very valuable information submitted to the site by visitors to it.
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| Barwick in Elmet War Memorial |
At the outbreak of the Great War, on 4 August 1914, Barwick in Elmet and Scholes were typical rural villages on the edge of
a big city. Scholes had been a village mainly built on agriculture and much of the land where the heart of the village stands
now, along Station Road and Main Street was farmland with the odd house or terrace of houses here and there. The names common
in the village at the time of the Great War and before the major expansion of the village in the 1920s and 1930s, were names
that had been in the village for hundreds of years, and the same can be said of Barwick. In Scholes at the end of the 19th
Century, the village was widely but thinly spread. The Station, linking Scholes to Wetherby to the north and Leeds to the
east via a southerly route through Cross Gates, had tied cottages for its signalman and platelayer (later the tenancy was
taken by the station porter). Much of the lower portion of the village was given over to farming and there were two farms
opposite each other on Main Street a little way along from Scholes Hall and Mr Shippen’s Beer shop, Scholes Lodge Farm,
and Green Lodge Farm. People as far away as Whinmoor, Seacroft and Barnbow classed themselves as Scholes people and when war
came, they too joined the boys from the village proper.
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| 2Lt Derrick Childe of Barwick. |
Few of the men listed on the Scholes war memorial for the Great War of 1914 - 1919 are mentioned as living in Scholes at the
time of the 1901 census, which shows how people were still coming to live in Scholes, either to escape from the unhealthy
miasma of industrial Leeds or to take up tenancies on the land. Then as now, people were prepared to move great distances
in the search for work.
Barwick was (and still is) a village of ancient origin proud of its Maypole, topped with a silver fox weather vane at
just over 86ft above the road surface it is the tallest in England. As in Scholes, the population of Barwick, in the old Kingdom
of Penda's Elmet, was a stable one.
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| The grave stone of Pte Edmund Gardiner in Bagneux British Cemetery |
Again names in 1914 merely marked the current generation of ancient families who had worked the same fields, milled the same
grain, forged the same ironwork, or cut the same coal. Often there could be half a dozen households where different branches
of the same wider family lived, half streets were made up of cousins all bearing the same surnames. The influx of people not
Scholes was not as pronounced in Barwick. Many more of the men remembered on Barwick's war memorial are listed on the 1901
census. Whenever Barwick is spoken of or written about, the word ancient is never far from the topic. Barwick can boast evidence
of human habitation from the Iron Age having the remains of a complex hill fort to the north of the centre of the village.
There is also the Norman Motte in the southern end of the hill fort and the true scale of the prehistoric earthworks is difficult
to appreciate without the luxury of an aerial photograph.
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| The headstone of L/Cpl Austin Backhurst in Barwick churchyard |
During the course of the Great War, the twin villages in the parish gave up almost two hundred of their sons to serve the
Country. Many more who had been born in the villages but had moved away also served, and some names of Scholes and Barwick
men appear on war memorials near and far. The centre of Barwick today is a scene that the men who left for the Great War would
recognise, a few colour changes here and there, a better road surface and straighter rooflines, but the sinews that bind the
village together are unchanged. The Maypole is still as brightly decorated, the church and Methodist chapel, the school, the
pubs, Hall Tower Hill, and the land, all the same.
Thirty of those two hundred village men did not return and are commemorated by inclusion among the names borne on the
War Memorials in the villages.
As with many memorials the length and breadth of the country, some men were not included for various reasons and research
is ongoing to try to rectify the problem of their omission on local memorials. For this reason I have included the names of
a few men with associations with the villages who do not appear on the war memorials or are commemorated elsewhere. I will
add to these the names of more men, and possibly women, as their services and details become known.
This is the story of the men of Barwick and Scholes who left all that was dear to them and did not return from their war.
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