Historical society

AT JANUARY’S meeting, members of the society’s study group gave a fascinating presentation on men of Harlech in the First World War. Opening the presentation, Dr Neil Evans described how local men were recruited as war broke out and later conscripted as the conflict deepened. Ironically, just after the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey remarked, in August 1914, that “the lights are going out all over Europe” electric street lights were lit for the first time in Harlech! Initially, despite patriotic support for the war, recruitment in rural areas such as Ardudwy was much slower than urban areas. This could have been because of the need to care for often isolated and ageing families, the demands of farming and the need to provide food, and also local resentment at the gratuitous reference to men of Harlech in recruitment advertisements. Despite this, the Cambrian News noted on 20 November that about 60 Harlech men had joined the army or navy.Conscription was introduced in stages during 1916 although there were exemptions for certain “reserved occupations” vital to the war effort. Dinah Pickard then described the fate of the 21 men whose names appear on the Harlech War Memorial and others who survived the conflict, based on her own research. Local men fought and died in most of the major campaigns from the western front (including Loos, Passchendaele, Ypres and The Somme) where 14 died, to the Dardanelles (three deaths), Palestine (one death) and at sea (one death). Two men also died from their wounds in hospitals in Britain. The bodies of six men were never found. Most had been in the Royal Welch Regiment and their ages ranged from 19 to 37. Two families in the area lost two sons and five children were left fatherless.In contrast J Evan Lloyd, who was killed in Palestine aged 21, lived all his life in this area. He was probably born in Frondeg, where his parents were living, and was a cowman at Tynllan prior to joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He fought at Gallipoli and was in the same battalion as Jack Williams (Jackie Chips), also of Harlech, during the second Battle of Gaza. Although severely wounded on 26 March 1917, Jackie survived. However Evan was killed on the same day. On 18 May, the Cambrian News reported that his parents had been notified that he was wounded and missing, but it was not until 17 August, five months after he was killed, that his death was finally reported. Of those who survived the war, very few came through without being wounded physically or mentally and among those cited by Dinah was Evan Arthur Pugh a grocer’s apprentice in Harlech who was blinded in 1918 and John Humphrey Williams, also of Harlech, who was wounded and gassed at Loos in 1915, wounded again the following year at Beaumont Hamel and finally honourably discharged in June 1917. Such were the horrors of “the war to end wars.”