Foreward

Go to list of Soldiers

Go to pictures of Memorial

In St John's Church there are collective memorials to soldiers who gave their lives in the two world wars - however there are as many names again, recorded on inscriptions elsewhere at St John's. It is not known why so many were not recorded - some were undoubtedly the result of people moving into the area and then when they died, having the name of their lost son added to the grave inscription.

I was inspired to put together the full list by seeing the church windows dedicated to the memory of Kenneth & Derrick Ives and Tom Willey. An article had already been written about the Ives window in a booklet published by the Oakwood & District Historical Society and Tom Willey is well documented in the book 'The Leeds Pals' by Laurie Milner and also the Leeds Pals website - www.leedspals.co.uk. What could I do?

It should be mentioned that without the list of grave inscriptions put together by the Oakwood & District Historical Society, my work would have been nearly impossible, and certainly incomplete. You have to only spend a few minutes in the graveyard to realise how much effort went into recording every inscription - some of which are now either illegible or completely covered over. The grave references used on the list are those as mapped by the Society.

In the list I have given all information that is contained at St John's. In addition I have cross-referenced the list with details held on the Commonwealth Graves Commission (CWGC) website - www.cwgc.org.uk. Where full name, rank, regiment, age or date of death were better recorded on the CWGC website, I have used their information. Where details differed slightly, I have recorded details from both sources. It should be noted that the links to the CWGC are well worth following as they state where the soldier is buried, and based on this information, details of what events e.g. battles, happened locally to the grave site.

On the 1st World War collective memorial, a decision had been taken to only record the names of the soldiers, not their rank and regiment. Even the date of death was not recorded, however the list was ordered in ascending order of the date of death. This order was crucial in order to be able to identify the soldiers on the CWGC website, and therefore find out more details about them. Unfortunately, probably due to conflicting information caused by the sheer scale of the losses, I believe that some of the men are not recorded strictly in this order. There is always a chance however that the St John's soldier was not recorded on the CWGC website, and I have identified the wrong soldier. If anyone believes the details on the list to be incorrect, please let me know as I am very keen to get every detail correct. I have also identified one soldier, Harold Chapman, who died of illness contracted during active service, who was not on the CWGC website but, following information that has been passed to them, have agreed that he should be recognised.

On the 2nd World War collective memorials, at least the service e.g. RAF, was recorded, however this time there appeared to be no order. Fortunately it appears that fewer Commonwealth soldiers died during the 2nd World War, and this has made individual identification easier.

As mentioned above, there is a possibility I may have identified some wrong soldiers. To give an idea as to how certain I was about the match on the CWGC website, I have listed all points that match between our details and those from CWGC. The less obvious references are - I = Initials, FI = First Initial only, LR = Likely Regiment, DOD = Date of Death, P = Pattern (from the date order soldiers are listed on the WW1 memorial). In addition, if it says that there is only 1 soldier matching that name, this is from the whole of the fallen for that war.

I hope to add in future, links to the Regimental sites and any other information I can find out about the soldiers of St John's. I also intend to add photographs of the St John's memorials - photographs of the windows are already included elsewhere.

As a summary, there are 96 soldiers (plus 1 Civilian killed as a result of enemy action) in total - 61 from the 1st World War and 35 from the 2nd. 23 are buried at St John's. Currently 2 soldiers do not have a match on the CWGC website - because they died as a consequence of the war after it had finished.

There is a tremendous sense of loss looking through the list - 3, possibly 4, sons were lost from the Lupton family - the Davies, Stephenson, James, Ives & possibly Chapman families all lost 2 sons. Six soldiers died on the 1st of July 1916, the 1st day of the battle of the Somme - a tenth of all St John's losses from the 1st World War came on just 1 day!

Peter Oldfield.