The short straw – followed by a bullet through the heart

Historian Dennis Perkins, who helped tell their stories, has been pictured standing in front of the memorial board, which now dominates the hall of the Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College in Vane Terrace Over his left shoulder, eagle-eyed Alicia Wilson, just four months shy of her 100th birthday, spotted the name of her father – HR Wilson MC.

Captain Hugh Russell Wilson was born in 1878 and joined the Northumberland Fusiliers aged 16.

He served in the Boer War, but on a visit home to the West End of Darlington, he realised his father was falling ill and he was needed to look after his younger siblings.

“He had to go back to South Africa to give in his commission and then come back to England,” says Ms Wilson. “It was all terribly slow.”

He took on his father’s role as a merchant connected to the railways – he seems to have been involved in Barton Quarry, which mined stone for the Merrybent Railway.

Capt Wilson maintained his connection with the territorial regiment of the Durham Light Infantry, and when the First World War broke out, he volunteered for service.

At first, he was detailed to put up barbed wire on the beaches at Hartlepool and South Gare, near Redcar, but then he was sent to the Somme. In the spring of 1915, he was awarded the Military Cross and was mentioned in dispatches for the way he had commanded his company during the Second Battle of Ypres.

In September 1916, he was promoted to the rank of captain and was preparing for the Battle of Flers Courcelette – the first engagement to involve tanks.

Three officers were waiting to join the action. They drew straws to see who would go first. Capt Wilson drew the short straw, and was almost immediately shot through the heart.

His men made a cross out of the wood which propped up the sides of the trenches. Although Capt Wilson was buried in Becourt Cemetery, the cross came home to Darlington and stood for many years in West Cemetery.

Last year, Miss Wilson told The Northern Echo: “My earliest memory was being very small at school and sitting in a room when it was announced the war was over.

“The children were all told their fathers would be coming home.

“I remember registering that I haven’t got a father, so there won’t be one coming home.

“That is how we had grown up, being told he wasn’t coming home. I was a lump in the pram when he left home.”

DURING the First World War, The Northern Echo started an evening sister paper to bring the people of Darlington and south Durham the latest news from the front. The two papers combined to provide what today we know as 24- hour rolling news.

The role of deaths in September 1916 is sobering.

Young men were falling like flies, and it wasn’t just the working classes which were succumbing.

Capt Wilson’s death notice first appeared in the Despatch on September 18, 1916. That same day, the paper carried the news of the deaths in action of Lieutenant Ronald Pike Pease, the son of the Darlington MP, Captain David Henderson, son of the former Barnard Castle MP who became the first Labour representative to reach the cabinet, and Lieutenant Raymond Asquith, the son of the Prime Minister.

Plus there is the death Captain Thomas Sowerby Rowlandson, 36, of Newton Morrell, near Barton. A Military Cross holder, he died five days after Capt Wilson and is buried in the same French cemetery.

Capt Rowlandson was educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, where he fell in love with football. He played for Corinthian FC, in London, and his obituary in the Despatch says that he captained “an English team” on a tour of South Africa, and in matches against Hungary, Norway, Sweden and Canada.

He was not, though, a full international.

The Despatch says that he died racing his men across no man’s land towards the German trenches. He was armed only with a walking stick.

FLICKING through the back copies of the Despatch was done last Friday evening while the proper journalists were preparing the front page stories concerning news of the latest crisis to hit Darlington FC – the Quakers.

But, by coincidence, exactly the same headlines appeared on September 15, 1916: “Fate of the Quakers: Darlington FC faced with extinction.”

The article began: “The Quakers’ Football Club is threatened with extinction.

Indeed, such an unfortunate occurrence seems inevitable.”

The Quakers were officially formed in 1883, although there are local newspaper reports telling of the exploits of “Darlington Football Club”

dating back as far as 1865. The club turned professional in 1908, and ran out of money in 1916. Difficulties caused by the war meant that £300 was owed to the bank and £188 was owed to sundry other creditors.

At the annual meeting in September 1916, the newlyelected chairman, George Zissler – presumably from the family of butchers – said: “I believe we are in such a position that we must consider the question whether we want to carry on the club or not. Personally, I think it would be advisable to bring the business to an end now.

We cannot get ourselves into better circumstances by going on.”

However, the report ends enigmatically. As ever with the Quakers, there was a figure in the background. In 1916, it was a Mr Whitwell.

The board agreed to put “certain suggestions” to him, and to adopt a “certain course” if he accepted those certain suggestions.

Details, though, “were withheld for the present from the press”, which was also the course of action being adopted last Friday.

But it wasn’t the end for the Quakers. Mr Whitwell agreed to the certain course, and the Quakers lurched off along it towards their next crisis.

If you had a tenner for every time a journalist has written “extinction seems inevitable” in connection with Darlington Football Club in the 95 years since, you’d probably have enough money to run a lower league team yourself.

WE’VE steadily been collecting names since the front cover of Memories 58 showed men starting the last shift at Mainsforth Colliery, Ferryhill Station, on December 6, 1968.

Percy Boughen is the latest name. He’s third from the left.

His son, Kenneth, says he was born in Dean Bank and worked in Mainsforth before going off to fight in the Second World War. He was captured and held as a Prisoner of War until he managed to escape over the Alps into Switzerland, where he was held until peace.

Then he returned to Mainsforth, where he worked until it was closed down around him.

He died 25 years ago.

An anonymous caller tells us that the tall man on the right is George Ryder, a former coal-cutter at Dean and Chapter, and we already know of Charles Johnson, in the centre of the picture in the white shirt; Billy Whithorn, fourth from the left, and Brian Atkinson, far left.

WHILE in Ferryhill, George Field of Hurworth asks for information about a fire which happened at Thrislington brick or iron works in January 1870. His great-great-great-grandfather, William Field, 72, died on January 28, 1870, at his daughter’s home in Stockton, as a result of the “fire and accident”. If anyone can help, either contact Echo Memories or email georgefields07@aol.com