J. CLARK - ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY

John Carfrae Clark (Gunner No. 630936) - C Battery 255th Brigade Royal Field Artillery

John was not a local lad; he had been born in Aberdeen around 1898, spent much of his life in Montgomery Street, Edinburgh and returned to Aberdeen to enlist. We know very little of his life before he joined the army, except that The Windsor and Eton Express dated 22.5.17 stated he was the second son of Mr & Mrs W.G. Clark of 2, Ada Cottages, Eton Wick, and after two years service in France he was killed in action on the 23rd April 1917 at the age of 19 years. Allowing a period of training, and two years in France, he was probably 16 years old when he falsified his age for acceptance into the army.

Until 1913 Ada Cottages were occupied by T. Lovell, where he ran a successful bakery, general stores and the village Post Office. It was about this time, perhaps one or two years later, that the premises may have been let to Mr Clark. There were several families named Clark in Eton Wick at the time, but no apparent relationship between them. It seems very likely Mr & Mrs W.G. Clark moved to Eton Wick and Ada Cottages during the first year of the war.

A former Eton Wick resident, whos e maiden name was Clark, has declared no knowledge whatsoever of John Carfrae Clark, though her own father's name was Albert Shiel Clark. He lived in London, but because of Zeppelin raids on the capital, he moved to Eton Wick around 1916, to live at Ada Cottages. Their address in Eton Wick and the fact that both men had, for second names, Scottish place names (Shiel and Carfrae) points to a family relationship. Nevertheless, in later years, Albert Shiel never made mention to his daughter of his own dead brother, or cousin.

A few years later there were plans to use part of Ada Cottages as a shop again. Mr & Mrs W.G. Clark moved to 28, The Walk, Eton Wick, and A.S. Clark moved to 5, Albert Place, Eton Wick.

John was in the Royal Field Artillery, 255th Brigade as part of the 51st (Highland) Division, originally the 1st Highland Field Brigade from Aberdeen. An artillery Brigade was numerically very different to a Brigade of infantry but was not dissimilar to an infantry Battalion.

By 1917 the R.F.A. batteries of guns on the Western Front, were either of 6 field guns or 6 x 45 Howitzers. There were 4 batteries to each Brigade and 2 Brigades to each Division. On the 23/24th April 1917 the 255th Brigade R.F.A. (John's) were in support of the 51st Highland Division (Artillery), taking part in the Battle of the Scarpe. Specifically their attack was aimed on the village of Roeux, with its chemical works. The official history (1917) states:

"a great deal had already been asked of the 51st Division"

 and in Roeux they undoubtedly met with fierce opposition.

It was on April 23rd John Carfrae Clark was killed. He is buried in the nearby cemetery of Anzin-St-Aubin. The cemetery was first used in July, 1917 by John's Division, the 51st. It records a total of 358 graves: 291 being from the United Kingdom, 63 from Canada and four others. The cemetery is situated three miles north west of Arras. The local paper of May 22nd 1917 reported:

Clark, John Carfrae, second son of Mr and Mrs W.G. Clark of 2 Ada Cottages, Eton Wick and formerly of Montgomery Street, Edinburgh, and of Aberdeen. Gunner Killed in Action 23.4.1917 after 2 years service in France.

John was a single man.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission have his records showing "No Next Of Kin". This is not an uncommon entry and several village men are likewise recorded. After the war, letters were sent to the homes of the fallen. This would state place of burial etc., and invite the next of kin to submit a text to be included on the headstone. To many, the form filling and the pain, was more than they wanted, so they declined to answer.

When no reply was sent, the records were marked as "N.N.K." Sometimes men may have declared no next of kin at the time of enlisting, in the same way that others chose to serve under an assumed name.

John C. Clark is commemorated on the Eton Wick Memorial and on the Eton Church Memorial Gates and he was possibly Eton Wick's youngest fatality.

This is an extract from Their Names Shall Be Carved in Stone  
and published here with grateful thanks to the author Frank Bond.

John Clark: Commonwealth War Graves Commission page 

John Clark: For King & Country page 

Gunner Clark is not recorded on the Lives of the First World War website at this time.

The Eton Wick War Memorial page on Buckinghamshire Remembers website  

Registration Records CWGC

Headstone Records CWGC

War Diary page

Further information found about John C. Clark. 

We have discovered very limited further details about John Clark by way of online search. The family tree records by Nicholas Ferrar indicate that John was born on 27th January 1898 in Edinburgh to William Glen and Charlotte Clark. Why the family was living in Eton Wick when he joined the Army has not yet been discovered, but his father, William is recorded as a pupil at Eton College in the 1881 Census living in a House in Keats Lane. 

Farmhouses and Cottages part 2

How much the village had grown has not been possible to find out, but probably, in spite of the rebuilding, not a great deal. As yet there was no real heart to the village. The ten houses and   cottages already described lay dispersed along the edges of the commons and not far way from the brook or one of its tributaries. In the eighteenth century this changed and the area now thought of as the old village became the centre of the community for the first time. A parish map of 1797 (itself a copy of an older one of 1742) shows about ten cottages in the short stretch of common from Wheatbutts to Sheepcote, while in the rest of Eton Wick, to the east, north and west there were only about another dozen, and most of these were the older timber-framed houses.

Two of these houses can be dated with reasonable certainty as having been built within the first quarter of the eighteenth century - Wheatbutts and Hope Cottage (now part of nos. 37 and 39 Common Road). Wheatbutts was built for William Lyford, a butcher from Eton, between 1704, when the land was described as 'all that close of arable land called Wheatbutts', and 1716; by which time the house had been built in the corner of the close and the rest converted into an orchard. Whether William Lyford ever lived there is not clear, but by 1716 he was living at Old Windsor and the property sold to the Eton Poor Estate. Hope Cottage was built a few years later in about 1725. At that date a small close of just over an acre was bought from William Lyford by Anthony Warwick, a yeoman of Eton. It seems unlikely that he ever lived there, for he owned several cottages including five in Dorney, and when he sold his cottage in Eton Wick in 1732 to Elizabeth Griffin, a widow, she was already living there. She and her married son, William, converted it to an alehouse known as the Bull's Head. Probably about this time the cottage was divided into two. William bought the property from his mother in 1745 and continued to be the victualler there for the next eleven years. It takes little imagination to conjure up the convivial and perhaps drunken scenes spreading out on to the common.   Three years, however, before the sign of the Bull's Head was finally removed for ever, William sold the property to a husbandman of the Wick, John Fennel.

John's widow, Elizabeth, continued to live there until her death in 1785, and from her will we learn a little more about the property.  She left one of the cottages to her niece, Anne Hope, from whom it seems the cottages  took  the  name  by  which they were known until recently. At the time of Elizabeth's death this cottage was the home of Robert Tarrant. The other cottage, in which Elizabeth herself had been living, she left to her kinsman, Robert Wilkins, and his wife and son, for their lives. To Anne Hope she also left a green iron bedstead and her furniture: to Anne Hope and Mary Wilkins together she left the rest of her goods and chattels.

Even before the Bull's Head had closed its doors another alehouse had opened in the village. This was the Three Horseshoes.  Exactly when it received its first licence is unknown but, like the Bull's Head, it is recorded in the Victuallers' Recognizances of 1753. The house itself was built sometime   before 1705 when it was purchased by Joseph Johnson, yeoman of Eton Wick, from John and Mary Bell. It is intriguing to speculate which of these two inns was the first in the village, though it is possible that neither was as is suggested by an isolated reference in the parish registers to 'The Small Fox' at Eton Wick. Perhaps the village simply could not support two inns.

Entries from the Vituallers’ Recognizances, 1753

In spite of being built within a short time of each other, these three houses were very different. The Three Horseshoes still retains its original L-shape though much alteration has taken place and only a very small area of the pleasant red and blue brickwork that was so popular in this part of the country can still be seen. Its first-floor windows are probably original. Wheatbutts was built as a substantial small cottage with two rooms on each floor and the dormer windows made it possible for the roof space to be used as an attic.  The front of the house is of brick with a symmetrical arrangement of door and windows which was then fashionable, but the back displayed a timber-frame. The closely spaced, vertical studs until recently could still be seen within the house though countless layers of whitewash and plaster had disguised their thickness. Hope Cottage was rather larger with four rooms on each floor but with no attic. It had a central chimney, and during alterations the huge beam above the fireplace in no. 37 and a bread oven to one side were revealed.  Originally there was also probably a symmetrical arrangement of door and windows and a centrally placed staircase, but when the cottage was divided the window which had lighted the stairs was blocked and new doorways must have been made. Sadly none of the eighteenth century brickwork can now be seen on the exterior of these cottages, for they and the adjoining nineteenth century ones have been encased in a twentieth century brick shell. Inside much of the original construction still remains   including a low doorway in one of the bedrooms of no. 37 which is thought to have once led from William Griffith's own cottage to the room above the alehouse.

Various deeds show clearly that both Wheatbutts and Hope Cottages were built on land that had once been part of Wick Farm. This farm can almost certainly be identified with Dairy Farm in Common Road. How old the present farmhouse is, or whether it is the first on this site, has not been established but since it is entirely brick-built it is likely to b6 after 1650. The oldest deed known is dated 1704, but refers back to previous owners so that the house is likely to be seventeenth century.   In 1704 the farm consisted of five closes of arable and pasture land and sixteen strips dispersed in North Field, the Hyde and Waterslades, making forty acres in all. Within a few decades, however, it had been reduced to a mere seventeen acres.  The greater part of the land had been lost to other farms. In 1776 the remaining acres were bought by Mary Woolhouse and added to Bell Farm.  The Woolhouse family in fact acquired several properties including Long Close house, other cottages by Little Common and the house built on part of Nut Close, now demolished, but replaced by Eton Cottage. 

Of the other houses shown on the 1797 map nothing is known at all about those that stood  between Harding's Cottage and Sheepcote.  On the other hand Ye Olde Cottage, which stood next to Hope Cottage, was not demolished until 1951 and the description and photograph of it suggest it was also built in the eighteenth century. Like Wheatbutts it had a large projecting chimney and stood with its back to the common. This is curious, for the gardens all stretched as far as the Eton Wick Road, though at this date it was still within the South Field and perhaps not yet the main road of the village.  The only other house built at this date was Manor Farmhouse.

This is an extract from The Story of a Village: Eton Wick 1217 to 1977 by Judith Hunter. 

J. J. NEWELL - HOUSEHOLD BATTALION

James John Newell (Trooper No. 1232) - Household Battalion - 10th Brigade 4th Division (Formerly Trooper No. 3831 - The Life Guards)

James (Jim) Newell was most probably born in the village, and continued to live there until he joined the Army during the Great War. He was born on May 21st 1896 and would have attended the Eton Wick Infant school until, at the age of seven years, he went to Eton Porny school, starting there in September 1903. He left school one month before his 14th birthday, at Easter, 1910, and the reason he gave for leaving is recorded in the register as "intention to work in a garden".

Jim had at least two brothers, Arthur and William, and a sister Nancy. Arthur was two years older than Jim. William became well known in later years when he and his wife "Lil" became landlords of The Greyhound public house. Nancy married a Dorney man, and as Mrs Jacobs lived out her long life in Alma Road. The Newell family home was 2, Bell Cottages, Alma Road in Boveney Newtown and the father, William John, was a local farm worker. It is believed there was a fourth son named George and he was four years younger than Jim.

Jim enlisted in Windsor, but we don't know when. The local paper regularly printed the names of service volunteers, but this depended entirely on families notifying the editor and sometimes they didn't. There were three families of Newells living in the village in 1914 and certainly five Newell men serving by 1916, but Jim was not in the listing. His family was not related to the other two. He may first have joined the Life Guards and later been drafted into the Household Battalion. This was formed at Knightsbridge Barracks on September 1st 1916 as an infantry Battalion, drawing personnel from reserves of the Household Cavalry (which included the Life Guards).

On November 11th 1916 the Battalions landed in France, as part of the 10th Brigade, 4th

Athies Communal Cemetery Extension 

Division. By this time the family home was at No. 1, Beaconsfield Place, Alma Road. On Easter Monday, April 9th 1917, British forces began an intensive attack in the Arras sector of the front with particular success by Canadian forces assaulting Vimy Ridge. The Household Battalion, as part of the 4th Division, took part here in the Battle of the Scarpe. 

Two days later Jim was dead. The circumstances of his death have not been established, although undoubtedly attributable to the very fierce fighting at that time.

Jim was killed in action on April 11th 1917 just three weeks before his 21st birthday. Six weeks later on May 26th The Windsor & Eton Express reported:

Newell, Jim, son of Mr & Mrs Newell of 1, Beaconsfield Place, Boveney Newtown, Eton Wick. Trooper with the Household Battalion. Killed in action, April 11th 1917.

Two years later the same paper printed in memoriam:

James John Newell. To the killed in action April 11th 1917. From his devoted brother Bill: Though lost from sight, to memory - ever dear.

Jim Newell was not married, and was 20 years old. He is buried in the Athies Communal Cemetery Extension in France. The cemetery is situated approximately three miles east of Arras. His grave is number 29 in Row F. There are 310 recorded burials there from the Great War: 287 soldiers from the U.K., 21 South African, one Australian and one German. Jim is commemorated on the Eton Wick Memorial and on the Eton Church Memorial Gates.

This is an extract from Their Names Shall Be Carved in Stone 

and published here with grateful thanks to the author Frank Bond.

James Newell: Commonwealth War Graves Commission page 

James Newell: For King & Country page 

James Newell: Live of the First World War page.

The Eton Wick War Memorial page on Buckinghamshire Remembers website  

Household Battalion War Dairy pages
from the start of April 1917.

Record of Soldiers Effects

Graves Registration

Report Form dated 30/6/1921

IWGC Report of Headstone

Inscriptions

Page from Graves Register

Additional information: The 1901 and 1911 census records show that James Newell was born in Boveney.

Private Herbert Pithers Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

Herbert Pithers (Private No. 24307) - 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry - 5th Brigade - 2nd Division

Herbert was born in Burnham, Bucks in 1885, and probably did not move to Eton Wick until he was a married family man. No record has been found in the Porny School registers of him having attended school there. Home was at "Farm Cottages", The Common, Eton Wick and there were five children, Steve, Billy, Emily, Martha and Ada.

The cottage they moved into was certainly very old and inadequate for the family of seven. It was the middle house of three, situated on the west side of Little Common. There was one main living room and a back room which also served as the larder, with just two bedrooms. The uneven earth floor was covered with rickety tiles, and when in the 1920’s the roof needed repairs, it was discovered that beneath the tiles were tell-tale elm poles of one time thatched roofing. The houses were later demolished and were replaced with a modern bungalow for Mr and Mrs Cooley. It is not known what work Herbert Pithers found when he came to Eton Wick or when he enlisted at Slough. His youngest son, Billy, later worked for Mr George Tarrant at Manor Farm.

War diary for late February 1917

The 2nd Battalion. Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry were at Aldershot Barracks on 4th August 1914 when war was declared. On the 14th August they were landed Boulogne as part of the 5th Brigade, 2nd Division, and they remained on the continent throughout the war. It would be some time after this that Herbert joined the Battalion. The Bank the Somme opened on July 1sh 1916. On July 25th the 2nd Oxford & Bucks L.I. were marched to Corbie and went into reserve trenches at Montauban. On the 28th they relieved the 2nd Highland L.I. at Waterlot Farm. “B” and “C” companies suffered over 200 casualties while making repeated attacks at Guillemont Station. During the next two months they were in support at Trônes Wood, then entrenched again at Méricourt-l'Abbé, then in reserve at Bus-lès-Artois; trenches again at Beaumont; into the front line at Mailly Maillet and then trenches at Redan. In November 1916 they were in support of the 24^th Royal Fusiliers during operations along the Redan Ridge. On November 18^th they moved back to Bertancourt. The battalion casualties during this period were a further 248. All these moves had been in an area a few miles north and north-east of Albert; subsequent moves during the following weeks were believed to have been in the same area.

Herbert was killed on February 28^th 1917, and having no known grave he is commemorated on the great Thiepval Memorial, five miles north-east of Albert. The memorial records the names of 73,412 "Missing" soldiers with no known graves, who fell in the Somme Battles of Albert, Bazentin Ridge, Delville Wood, Pozieres Ridge, Guillemont, Ginchy, Flers Courcelette, Marval, Thiepval Ridge, Transloy Ridge and the Ancre Heights in 1916 and of the battles at Miraumont, Thilloys and at Bapaume in 1917. These latter places are 10 to 15

Herbert Pither soldiers effects record

miles north-east of Albert and five to ten miles north-east of Thiepval Memorial. Herbert Pithers' name appears on pier 10. His family remained in the Little Common cottage until around the early 1930s when those still at home moved to Old Windsor. It is believed Mrs Pithers married again while in Eton Wick. Herbert was 31 years old. In addition to the commemoration on Thiepval Memorial, Herbert's name is on the Eton Wick Memorial and on the Eton Church Gates.

The Thiepval Memorial

Details of the Thiepval Memorial can be found on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website.

This is an extract from Their Names Shall Be Carved in Stone 

and published here with grateful thanks to the author Frank Bond. It has been amended to include information that was not available to Mr Bond when he was undertaking his research in the 1990’s.

Herbert Pithers is remembered on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website

Herbert Pithers is remembered on the For King & Country website

Herbert Pithers is recorded on the Buckinghamshire Remembers website

Herbert Pithers is remembered on the Lifes of the First World War website.

Extra information

Herbert's wife's name was Harriet Mary Maidment who was born in Windsor in 1882, they were married in October 1903. They had 5 children of which three are recorded as living on the 1911 census, Emily, 5, Martha, 2 and Herbert, 1. The children are shown as being born in Dorney. The census records 2 New Cottages, Dorney Common as the family home. Herbert's occupation is stated as a cowman.

Harriet remarried in the 3rd quarter of 1920 to George Smith.

Eton Wick Census 1851

The United Kingdom Census of 1851 was taken on the of 31st March 1851 and was the second of the UK censuses to include details of household members. The total population of England, Wales and Scotland was recorded as 21,104,072 persons including those serving in the Army, Navy and Merchant Seamen.

Details collected include: 

Place: street name, house number or house name.

Houses: inhabited, uninhabited or a building.

Names of each person who were resident in the house on the night preceding the census.

Age and sex of each person: Unlike the 1841 census the actual age in years or months for babies under one year are recorded in the 1851 census.

Occupation: Profession, trade or employment.

Birth place, county and country are recorded for the first time.

The Superintend Registrar's District was Eton, Bucks and the Registrar's district was Eton. Enumeration District No. 6.

The area classed as Eton Wick for the 1851 census was the remainder of the Parish of Eton west of the Great Western Railway. The Enumerators report was initialed and dated Nov 7th 1851.

The 1851 Census reveals that there were 72 households and 333 people resident in the village on the 31st March. The oldest person, Thomas King age of 88, he was born in 1763. There were two other residents in their 80’s. The youngest at three days old was a daughter of John and Lucy Dobner who had not been named at the time of the census. There were 3 babies born in the first three months of 1851.

Click on this link to see our transcription of the 1851 census records for Eton Wick. We will be looking deeper into what the census reveals about Eton Wick and publish our findings in future articles. 

Eton Wick in the 19th Century: The Village Grows

One of the most important features of the nineteenth century was the tremendous rise in the population and the growth of the towns and villages; Eton Wick was no exception.  It was by no means a constant or steady increase, nor was this to be expected but, crowding apart, it was the decades when the village saw an increase in the number of houses that also saw a rise in the village population. However, there was very little building land available; the jealously guarded Lammas rights saw to that. The alternatives were to divide the land already used for housing by either squeezing houses in between the older ones, or by shortening the gardens and building on them, or to dig up the orchard and meadow still within the village area. Of course, the reasons why any one of these things happened depended on the wishes, interests and, perhaps, the business sense of the individual owners of the land as well as the pressing need for houses.

The years after the Napoleonic wars were lean years, slump years when over the country as a whole there was a dearth in the building of cottages. Many were allowed to fall into ruin and people who had to make the best of such homes suffered.  Yet in Eton Wick at least seventeen houses had been built before the end of the 1820s. By 1841 when the first house-to-house census was taken, there were sixty-two houses, three times the number at the beginning of the century. Several were built by the owner-farmer of Bell Farm, John Atkins, such as Bell Farm Cottages, Prospect Place which used to stand between the Three Horseshoes and the Grapes, and the oldest of the Clifton Cottages opposite the Greyhound.  Others were built by Eton townsfolk who owned land in the village - Hardings Cottages which were demolished to make way for Clifton Lodge old people's flats and the Parsonage.

Most of these were rented working class cottages - the earliest were built of red bricks with peg-tile roofs, but as the century progressed yellow bricks and purple slates became ubiquitous. They were very plain houses with either one room up and one down, or more usually two; each house had a garden, though it was smaller than those of earlier centuries.  This is the housing that has mostly been demolished since the war - perhaps rightly so, for by today's standards it had many defects. Yet in its time it was very good accommodation, comparing princely with the back-to-back houses and cellar homes of so many industrial towns, or the one-room hovels of many country villages.  Several of the houses had wells and others pumps, though no doubt the brook was still used for water. Cottages were expected to share facilities as is clearly shown in a deed of 1833 which specifies the rights of the occupiers of the ten cottages making up Prospect Place to use the one well, one pump and one privy.'  

Two houses did not fit into this general pattern. One was the large six bedroomed house, built 1826 as a gentleman's residence, 'convenient to Windsor and Eton and with a very pleasant view of the Castle'. Today this is the Parsonage; but if it was built as a speculative venture, which seems possible from the advertisement in the contemporary 'Windsor and Eton Express', it does not seem to have been successful, for within a decade the house had been divided to form three dwellings. The other was Thatch Cottage, built in 1833 by Isaac Deverell for his own use. It had quite a large garden and a shed probably used as a cow stall for he was a cowkeeper.


This is an extract from The Story of a Village: Eton Wick 1217 to 1977 by Judith Hunter. 

The Eton Wick census record for 1841 can be found in this article 

Eton Wick Census 1841

The United Kingdom Census of 1841 was taken on the of 7th June 1841 and was the first of the UK censuses to include details of household members. The total population of England, Wales and Scotland was recorded as 18,844,434 persons.

Details collected include: 

Place: street name, house number or house name.

Houses: inhabited, uninhabited or a building.

Names of each person who were resident in the house on the night preceding the census. For individuals where the given names was unknown N.K. was recorded.

Age and sex of each person: Ages up to 15 are listed exactly as reported/recorded but ages over 15 were rounded to the nearest 5 years (i.e. a person aged 53 would be listed on the census as age 50 years).

Occupation: Profession, trade or employment.

Birthplace, but only if the person was born in the county where the census was taken usually recorded as a yes or no. If they were not born in the county there would be an entry such as S for Scotland or even an F for "born in foreign parts".


The end of each building is shown with two slashes // and the end of each household in a building is shown with one slash /.

The Superintend Registrar's District was Eton Union, Bucks and the Registrar's district was Eton. Enumeration District No. 6.

It should be noted that Eton Wick in 1841 only included the houses on the northern side of the Eton Wick Road as far west as Bell Farm. The 1841 record of houses and households is mainly limited to the roads they were on with only the three farms: Bell Farm, Manor Farm and Saddocks Farm named.

The 1841 Census reveals that there were 63 households and 322 people resident in the village on the 7th June. The oldest person, Thomas Davis with a recorded age of 85, for the 1841 census he is likely to have been born between 1751 and 1756. There was one other resident in their 80’s. The youngest at one day old was a daughter of George and Sarah Deverill who had not been named at the time of the census. There were 7 babies born in the first six months of 1841.

We will be looking deeper into what the census reveals about Eton Wick and publish our findings in future articles. This is the third part of our Census Project.

Click on this link to view the 1841 census transcription for Eton Wick.