YORK railwayman Charles Hudson fought in two world wars. He survived the first ... but his luck ran out in the second, as this special Press report reveals.

As the nation focusses on those lost to the First World War, spare a moment for the veterans sent back to its battlefields to fight there again more than 20 years later. Second time around, the luck of some didn’t hold.

Having survived the trenches and the Somme, and after contributing to the first era of aerial combat, Charles Hudson had successfully rebuilt his life. He’d resumed his civilian job on the railway, got married, become a father of seven, and been made a Freeman of York.

When war again overwhelmed Europe he found himself in the familiar surroundings of northern France, this time amid the chaotic British retreat to Dunkirk. But this time he had set off to war with a very different mindset to his thoughts in 1914 when, in his unthinking youthful enthusiasm, he’d tried to enlist straight away.

That first time around, the young Charles was initially prevented from joining up by his grandmother, who ran a haberdashery from the front room of the family home in Oak Street, off Poppleton Road.

Charles finally got his way in December the following year just after turning 18. He began the war as a machine gunner with the Northumberland Fusiliers and emerged unscathed from the deadliest of frontlines.

Then he was transferred to a new challenge. By the time of the Armistice the skills he’d been developing pre-war as an apprentice fitter in York’s rail industry were being employed in the engine repair shops of the Royal Flying Corps at Pont de l’Arche near Rouen.

Among his medals the family has a letter of gratitude sent to all those who kept the planes of the fledgling RAF in the sky during the final decisive months of the war.

Charles was finally demobbed in March 1919 and the following year married Doris Gekill, who also lived in the Poppleton Road area. They’d met at a dance and according to a diary kept by their daughter, Joyce, Doris had been to typing school and was earning 34 shillings and fourpence a week in the York stationmaster’s office.

There’s a remarkable group photograph from her wedding day - August 28, 1920 - taken outside the bride’s family home in Poplar Street where a two-up, two-down terrace with an outside loo could be bought for £250 according to Joyce’s diary.

The image illustrates the strength and density of local communities at the time. There are more than 60 in the group, mainly, says the caption on the back, ‘the children from the street’.

Many are dressed for the occasion – several of the girls are wearing bonnets and their best frocks, the older boys in jackets, shirts, ties and flat caps, and one in a bow tie and wearing his school cap. Among the surnames listed on the back of the picture are: Bailey, Rapson, Ditchfield, Franks, Winterburn, Musgrave, Pheasby, Rothwell, Bogget, Howden, Coulson, Sanderson, Kettlewell, Maguire, Harmson, Machen, Rogers, Ellis, Granger, Robson and Lee.

So began Charles and Doris’s life together in the area. Their own family grew and their daughter Joyce had fond memories. She wrote: ‘Dad always wore his cap as he went bald in his thirties. I thought he was wonderful. He loved us dearly and was kind to everyone. He mended things and was the concert secretary at the local working men’s club…’

But the Nazis’ rise in Germany was particularly ominous for him. His experiences in the Great War hadn’t dulled his sense of duty and before the Second World War began he’d enlisted in the Royal Air Force Reserve with the rank of leading aircraftman.

On the day the Germans invaded France he was on the Continent among the ground crew supporting the Hurricane fighters of 87 Squadron which formed part of the British Expeditionary Force.

They’d gone first to Rouen, where Charles had been based in 1918, and then Lille before being forced back to Merville, where the two world wars became entwined. It was the scene of bitter fighting during the First, and again in May 1940. Eventually his Squadron limped home and regrouped at Church Fenton where it received new aircraft in readiness for the Battle of Britain.

The Hudson family records suggest that at some point during the fighting in France Charles became very ill and never recovered. He was declared medically unfit for service in 1941 and died in December of that year, aged 44. He is buried in York Cemetery, one of more than 200 military graves there from the two world wars maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

The cause of his death was recorded as acute inflammation of the brain, perhaps brought on by his second exposure to the extreme stress of warfare.

His son Raymond, a retired hotelier who lives in Bootham, says: “We’ll never know for sure of course but we suspect he suffered more than we ever knew in the First World War and there was a hidden legacy from that. He endured life in the trenches, poisonous gas attacks and close combat and then went back to face new perils little more than twenty years later. We’re proud of what he did twice for his country but maybe we asked too much of men like him.”

He’s equally proud of his mother. The combination of war and being widowed with three sons and four daughters made family life so traumatic that for a few months Raymond, then aged about four, lived in the workhouse in Huntington Road, and two of his sisters spent time in a children’s home. Eventually they were all reunited.

“Like countless other women on the home front, our mother was as much a hero as those fighting the war,” said Raymond. “She had to cope with air raids and rationing and all the other privations of a country at war, but somehow got us all back together and gave us the best possible start in life. She was remarkable, and it was only when the stories emerged much later that we realised just how remarkable.”