Six brave brothers from Brompton, who served in the First World War

Oswald said he was in the “pink of condition”, but that the Yorkshire soldiers had been engaged in a “terrible struggle”.

He finished: “Keep your hearts up, dear parents, and trust in Higher Powers. There is one consolation, however, Sep died doing his duty for King and Country – a most honourable death.”

The six gallant boys of Brompton, from a local newspaper in December 1914. On the top row are William and Annie, their parents. William had moved to Brompton to work in one of the village’s textile mills beside the beck. Completing the top row is Alfred Marshall, Annie's father and so grandfather to the six. He had served throughout the Crimean War in the 1850s, getting a bayonet through his jaw. On the middle row are Arthur (a weaver in Brompton), Septimus (worked at Romanby creamery) and Henry (who was a policeman in Bishop Auckland and had been wounded in the ankle at Mons). On the bottom row are John William (Janet’s great-grandfather), Oswald and Joseph Septimus, Oswald and four other Garbutt brothers made up the “six brave boys of Brompton” who featured under that headline in a local newspaper shortly before Christmas 1914 when all had been called to the front.

The newspaper – perhaps the Northallerton & Thirsk Times – said: “Mr and Mrs Garbutt must be proud but anxious parents. Their anxiety is, however, much relieved by numerous letters and cards which they receive almost daily from their loyal and devoted sons.”

Knitted poppies decorate the top of Brompton's post box next to the lychgate with St Thomas's Church behindAnd so, another son, John William, whose great-grand-daughter Janet Stephenson lives in Darlington, also composed a letter about Sep’s death. John was in a field hospital where, he said, his arm was “a bit stiff and painful” after he had been struck but he was making good progress.

Then he said: “You will have heard about poor Sep being killed. It quite unnerved me for some time afterwards. He was shot by a sniper while doing duty in the communication trench. It was all over in a second or two.

“We lost a good few the night before, when the Germans used the gas. It is simply awful – it makes your eyes smart and you gasp for breath. It was gas that killed poor Joe Burn. I was close to him when he died, also George Chapman.”

John William Garbutt, one of Septimus’s brothers. John's second button on his army tunic is black, which, unofficially, indicated that the soldier had lost a close relative in the conflict. In Jul 1918, the War Office deemed the practice “irregular” and said it “will cease forthwith”Septimus, who worked in a creamery at Romanby, died on May 2, 1915, the only one of the six brothers not to make it home. Like his brother John, he was in the 4th Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, which was in the thick of the fighting in the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium.

The battalion had a strong representation from Northallerton, and it is believed that the town lost Septimus and four others of its young men on that same day.

Another Brompton lad in the 4th Yorkshires was Pte Maxwell Whittaker. He survived the carnage of May 2, 195, and wrote home to tell his parents in Amber Terrace about it: “We lost some good officers and men. Our platoon sergeant was killed and one man wounded, so we were lucky. I could just fancy Brompton when you got the news. I'll bet all the newspapers were soon bought up.

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“The Germans used that gas and Joe Burn was killed with it, poor lad and Sep Garbutt was shot by a sniper. You have to watch out for them chaps, they are such good shots.”

Two weeks earlier at Ypres, the Germans had unleashed chlorine gas on the Allied lines for the first time, and so the Yorkies were the first British battalion to experience it. Heavier than air, it sank into their trenches, suffocating them – their faces went grey, their eyeballs protruded and they grabbed at their own throats, gasping for air.

In those early days, the soldiers were completely unprotected. The only advice was to urinate on a piece of cloth and place it over the mouth and nose – the urea in the urine neutralised the chlorine.

St Thomas's church, Brompton, in December 1949Victim Pte Joseph Burn, 22, left his parents in Brompton’s Primrose Terrace. Pte George Chapman, 24, left his wife, Elsie, and parents in Romanby.

None of their bodies were recovered so their names are among the 54,000 on the Menin Gate in Ypres.

Septimus and Joseph – or Sep and Joe as their friends knew them – are also on the remarkable war memorial in Brompton. Most villages have a stone cross on which they commemorate their fallen but Brompton has a lychgate at the entrance to St Thomas’s Church.

The lychgate at Brompton church is a war memorialThe names of Brompton's fallen - 34 from the First World War and nine from the Second - inside the lychgate. The names of Joe Burn and Sep Garbutt are third and fourth from the topAlso commemorated in the lychgate is Pte Maxwell Whittaker, whose letter back to Brompton told of the demise of Sep and Joe. He lasted a year longer until his number came up: a shell caught him in no-man’s land. After lying for hours, he was rescued and ended up having a spinal operation in King George Hospital in London, where he was visited by his mother and sister.

He died in great pain shortly after the operation, on July 10, 1916, and was buried four days later with full military honours in the Brompton churchyard.

• With many thanks to Tim Stephenson, of Darlington, for sending in details of the “six gallant Brompton boys” following last weekend’s remembrance Looking Back. Septimus Garbutt is the great-uncle of his wife, Janet. “It puts Saving Private Ryan in the shade,” he says. “Six brothers from one family in Brompton fighting across Europe in the First World War at the same time, and all but one surviving the carnage.”
• Additional information from the Northallerton Memorials Project website, northallertonmemorials.org.uk

READ MORE: THE SELF-SACRIFICING BRAVERY OF THE NAMES CARVED ON A VILLAGE'S WAR MEMORIAL