The brave Black Country boys buried at Cliveden War Cemetery
More on the lives of Thomas Page and Leonard Garland
IT was a surprise when I turned the page to Clive Corbett’s article “The fallen Black Country boy…” (Bugle, November 9 2022) regarding Cliveden War Cemetery, as I had made a similar visit in September.
I had also spotted the graves of Wolverhampton man Thomas Page, and Wollaston man Leonard Garland, both having served in the Canadian army.
In my trips to the graves of the Tipton men killed in WWI I have visited around 200 Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemeteries in France, Belgium and Italy (www.tip tonremembers.net), but Cliveden War Cemetery is unusual. The gravestones are not the standard vertical Portland gravestones with a curved top, but of a different stone, laid horizontally, and are rectangular.
The cemetery was within the Astors’ private estate, now the property of the
National Trust, and is within an Italianate-style setting. Quite beautiful, and unexpected as I had no idea it was there – a bonus to our visit to Cliveden.
John Thomas Page
Thomas, actually John Thomas, was born in Wolverhampton in 1879. In 1900 he married Florence Faulkner and they had two children, Florence and George.
In 1908 the Page family, along with a significant number of the Faulkner family, emigrated from Wolverhampton to Canada, settling in London, Ontario.
Florence Page was not a lucky woman. In May 1914 her parents were taking a trip back to the ‘old country’ aboard the Empress of Ireland. Before the vessel reached the mouth of the St Lawrence river she was hit amidships by a Norwegian collier vessel and within 30 minutes sank, with the loss of over 1,000 lives. Both of Florence’s parents drowned.
As well as her husband, Florence’s brothers John, William, Charles, James, Samuel and George all enlisted in the early years of WWI. John and William, who had also emigrated, joined the Canadian forces; both were killed in 1916. The other brothers were all wounded during the war but survived.
Thomas enlisted on 30 September 1915 with the 2nd Canadian Pioneer Battalion. As Pioneers were concerned with labouring activities, training was shorter than for the infantry. He landed in England on 14 December 1915, and then in France on 9 March 1916.
Just a month
later, on 8 April, Thomas was digging trenches near St. Eloi (3 miles south of Ypres) when he was badly wounded. A piece of shrapnel entered the outside of his right thigh, narrowly missing his femur and grazing the main artery, and exited on the inside of his thigh.
On 10 April he was admitted to the Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne, and on 21 April arrived at the Duchess of Connaught Canadian hospital in the grounds of Cliveden House, Taplow, Buckinghamshire. He was reportedly healing well, but on 20 May he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage from a thrombosis originating in the wounded right thigh, and he died within five minutes.
Thomas was buried 3,000 miles from his adopted home, but his sacrifice has not been forgotten. I have been in contact with a great-granddaughter living in Ontario, she made a pilgrimage to visit Thomas at Cliveden just a few years ago.
Leonard Herbert Garland
Another gravestone in Cliveden caught my eye, that of Leonard Herbert Garland (mis-spelt Lenard) with the additional information “Born Wollaston”. Clive Corbett thought this likely to be Wollaston, Northants, and there is also a Wollaston (Wollaston Lake) in Canada. However, Leonard was born in Wollaston, Stourbridge in 1888, the fourth of seven children of Thomas and Frances Garland. In the early 1890s the family moved to 15 Wood Street, Wollaston, and his
parents were still there at the time of Leonard’s death. Leonard emigrated some time after 1911, and enlisted in Niagara on 5 August 1915 when he was 26 years old and a gardener. He arrived in England in 10 October 1915 and embarked for France on 17 February 1916, joining the 24th Battalion of the Canadian Infantry. After a spell in hospital with “debility” he joined his unit in Belgium. On 14 April 1916, Leonard suffered a serious gunshot wound whilst at St. Eloi, 3 miles south of Ypres. It was also St. Eloi where Thomas Page had been wounded while digging trenches just six days earlier – maybe the same trench? The bullet had entered Leonard’s back, cut his spinal cord and damaged his lungs; he was instantly paralysed.
Leonard was admitted to the 18th General Hospital at Camiers (about 12 miles south of Boulogne) where he stayed for 11 days until sufficiently stable for transportation back to England. He arrived at the Duchess of Connaught Canadian hospital at Cliveden on 1 May 1916.
He was recorded as “Seriously ill, may be visited”, this was rarely good news.
After an uncomfortablesounding few weeks, Leonard died on 24 May 1916. It would be nice to imagine that his parents were able to visit, but we do not know.
The parallels between the journeys of Thomas Page and Leonard Garland are striking. Two Black Country men who had decided that their futures would be brighter in Canada, but felt an obligation to enlist and serve their mother country. They enlisted in August/september 1915, were back in England within two months of their enlistment, and in France in February/ March 1916. They were both wounded at St. Eloi within a week in April 1916, were at Cliveden within two weeks of being wounded, and died within four days of each other in late May 1916.
Thomas’s mother and Leonard’s parents were still living in the Black Country but neither elected to have their son’s body brought back home, an option that was frequently taken for deaths in service in the United Kingdom.
Their stories can be pieced together because the Soldier’s Papers in Canadian WWI Archives were not damaged during WWII as the British equivalent were. Also they are freely available online, again unlike the British WWI archives where paid membership of Ancestry or Findmypast is required.
He was recorded as ‘seriosly ill, may be visited’ ... this was rarely good news