ASKHAM Bryan Patriots ran the headline in the Yorkshire Herald of January 3, 1916. Below it, spread out across a broadsheet page, were photographs of 30 young men from the village who were all serving their King and Country in the Great War.

Beneath the photographs, the newspaper carried biographical details of each. One – 33-year-old Private Charles Powell – had already been killed in action by the time the newspaper was published.

A farmer and veteran of the Boer War, he had joined the 3rd West Yorkshire Regiment in August 1914, and went to the front in November 1914.

“Unhappily his service at the front was very short, for on December 31 he was shot through the head and instantly killed,” the newspaper reported.

Several more of the young men pictured were also to lose their lives by the war’s end. Their names are inscribed on the village memorial to the First World War.

Among them was Charles’ younger brother Duncan, also a private in the West Yorkshire Regiment. He was killed in action on July 16, 1916, leaving behind a widow, Annie, and a mother, Martha, grieving the loss of two sons.

Happily, many of the young men featured in that edition of the Yorkshire Herald of January 3, 1916, did survive the war.

They included three brothers: Private Charles Gibson, of the Mechanical Transport, Army Service Corps, who at the time the newspaper was published was in France, his younger brother Sgt William Gibson, 28, of the Army Service Corps and Corp Ernest Gibson of the Coldstream Guards, the youngest of the three, who was also at the front.

Also among the list of Askham Bryan patriots fighting for their country was 21-year-old Signaller Charles Dales.

He was the son of a farming family which had come to the village in 1898, when he was just a toddler. His parents were Mr and Mrs AJ Dales of Manor Farm, Askham Bryan.

Charles joined the 1st Life Guards in September 1914, at the age of 19 or 20. And it is thanks to his daughter Mary that we still have a copy of that haunting page from the Yorkshire Herald of 1916 listing all the village’s patriots.

She was researching a book on the history of the village in the early 1990s – Askham Bryan Remembered – and managed to track down a woman who had kept the page as a cutting.

Now 83, she still has, framed and hanging on the wall of her Askham Bryan home, a copy of that cutting.

Her father did occasionally speak to her about his war experiences, she said. He told her about crossing rivers in France with the horses under his care, swimming side-by-side with them.

And he explained to her why he had a small tattoo of a Union Jack. The young Mary didn’t like it, and used to try to rub it off.

“He used to say “we all had one in case we were killed, so they would know we were English”,” she said.

Her father fought all through the war. Afterwards, he was for a while a recruiter for the Guards, before becoming a farmer.

In the Second World War, he worked as an Air Raid Warden, trying to teach local young men to recognise enemy aircraft in the sky.

They were all farmers’ sons who were worn out from a day’s work in the fields, Mary remembers, and who tended to fall asleep during her father's lessons. “He used to say he could have dropped a piece of chalk in their mouths.”

Mary is Mary Carbert now, having married Allan Carbert. And three of Allan’s uncles are also mentioned in that very same Yorkshire Herald article from 1916.

All three survived the war, thankfully.

The eldest brother was Allan’s uncle Thomas, a former railwayman who joined the Royal Army Service Corps. After the war he returned to work on the railways.

The third son was Allan’s uncle George. Before the war he had worked as a footman at the Yorkshire Club on Lendal Bridge in York. He joined the Royal Field Artillery.

“He served at Gallipoli, and he got gassed, although not badly,” said Allan, an 84-year-old retired firefighter.

In between these two brothers was the second son, Allan’s uncle Colin.

Colin Carbert seems to have been the black sheep of the family. He ran away at the age of 14 to join the Navy, Allan said.

After 12 months, Colin’s father managed to track him down in Portsmouth, and brought him back home. But he quickly ran away again, and joined the Royal Navy once more. “This time his father said he could stop there!” Allan said.

He saw action in three wars, the Balkan War, the First World War and the Second World War.

“He was serving on the ill-fated Good Hope in the Mediterranean during the last Balkan War,” reported the Yorkshire Herald in that edition of January 1916, “and was aboard HMS Gurkha when that ship sank the German submarine U8 on March 4th last.”

In the course of service in three wars, he saw action on battleships and submarines, and also worked as a deep-sea diver, Allan said. “And he lived to the ripe old age of 96.”

Which leaves Allan’s own father, Hubert – the youngest of the four Carbert brothers.

He was too young to be featured in the Herald in 1916. He joined the Royal Marines towards the end of the war and was posted to the Isle of Wight, but he never got to do any fighting.

Hubert became a farmer, and in the Second World War joined the Home Guard, though he was declared medically unfit to see active service.


Roll of Honour

The names of eight young Askham Bryan men who died for their country in the First World War are inscribed on the village war memorial.

They are: John Albert Ellis, Private, 30 William Jackson, Private, 34 James Johnson, 21 Frederick Morley, 21 Charles Powell, 33 Duncan Powell, 28 Ernest Walker, 21 Lieut Cecil Wellesley Ward, 40.
 

York Press:
Charles Frederick Dales, Florrie Dales, Teville Dales