There’s now two easy ways for you to help raise funds for

Craven Community Projects Group!

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Craven Community Projects Group has received sponsorship from Tarmac Ltd. 

This invaluable support will enable the group to develop outreach work with volunteers in the district of Craven

Tarmac has a long and proud tradition of charitable and community support and is committed to helping and improving the communities in which we operate.

Our vision, mission and values
To be the first choice for building materials that meet the essential needs for the sustainable development of the world in which we live.

 Our Values

- Reliable
- Responsive
- Understanding
- Straightforward

Our values are not empty promises. They help us to carry out our work day in, day out; they guide us in our dealings with each other and with our customers and stakeholders; ultimately they are the bedrock of the culture of our company.

Society
Wake up in the morning and our products will be in the very fabric of your home; the toothpaste you brush your teeth with; the bridges you cross; the floor you walk on; the office you work in; and even be in the sports pitches you play on. So if you thought Tarmac was just about roads, think again...

Tarmac in our Society
Many products we take for granted - from paper to glass, cosmetics to toothpaste - are manufactured using materials derived from quarrying. Aggregates provide the raw materials for the world we live in. So not only do aggregates give us places to live, places to work and places to play, but they also underpin our society.

Communication
We seek to promote and maintain open and honest dialogue with all of our stakeholders, not least the communities in which we operate, and we take pride in being a good neighbour.

Understanding
It's important to us that the local communities where we operate understand what we do and why we do it. So we hold open days and exhibitions, issue newsletters, set up local liaison groups and take part in local events. We also have strong links with schools - giving talks on careers in construction, and advising education bodies on construction qualifications. We've even set up our own education website - Quarryville [link through to Quarryville]

Support
Tarmac sponsors and supports community groups, environmental projects, and a variety of charities and trusts. Projects to date have included those that encourage and develop community involvement and spirit, and create and enhance habitats for birds and wildlife. We've funded agricultural shows and school football strips and maintained public footpaths and bridleways among many others.

For further information please visit www.tarmac.co.uk

Helping our volunteers to see IT clearly

For a proactive and friendly service visit

www.gritstone.co.uk

Tel: 01756 730030

The Fleets, Fleets Lane, Rylstone, Skipton, BD23 6NA

Craven Community Projects Group is proud to be supported by

Skipton Building Society

Skipton Building Society is the UK’s sixth largest building society. Founded in 1853, Skipton enjoys a national presence represented by its 79 branches, covering Aberdeen to Plymouth, with over 600,000 customers.

An innovator in the field of mortgage and investment products, the Society stands apart from its counterparts as the parent to 19 subsidiary companies, many of which operate in the financial market.

Why Mutual Matters

Doing it for the right reasons matters
Skipton Building Society is a mutual organisation which operates in the interests of its members. It is run by a board of directors who are responsible for deciding the strategy. They act as trustees, safeguarding Skipton’s assets so that future members will have access to cheaper mortgages and higher interest rates for savers.

Being able to have your say matters
Being a mutual means that most of our customers, who have a mortgage or savings account, are members and have certain rights to vote and receive information. They can also attend and speak at our AGM. Each member has one vote regardless of how much money they have invested or borrowed, or how many accounts they hold.

Offering a better service matters
Building societies differ greatly from banks that are often listed on the stock market and are owned by and run for their shareholders. Building societies such as Skipton have no shareholders requiring annual dividends because they are not companies.

This enables us to run on much lower costs and offer cheaper mortgages and better rates of interest on savings than banks.

The smallest of differences matters
A way of examining how much value a customer is getting from a financial organisation is to look at the difference between the interest rate a customer receives for their savings and the interest rate they pay for their mortgage. The narrower the difference between the two, the better value the organisation is offering.

This is called the net interest margin and, as of 31 December 2006, Skipton’s was 0.72% - one of the lowest in the industry. Most building societies operate on margins of less than 1.5% whereas banks tend to have margins above 2%.

As a mutual organisation we recognise the importance of supporting the community. Through Skipton Building Communities, we support numerous types of good causes throughout the country, not only through financial support and sponsorship, but through staff volunteering and fundraising. It’s all about giving something back to the communities in which our members live and work.

Craven Community Projects Group is indebted to Skipton Building Society for their support since November 2006, which is helping to train and support our volunteers to work with people in the local community

For further information, please visit www.skipton.co.uk

Our initial plan for the project was based on the information provided in the commemorative publication Craven’s Part in the Great War (Craven Herald, 1920). From this we extracted the basic information on 1,555 servicemen (including, at that time, one nurse) from the Craven area who had either given their lives for their country between 1914 and the Armistice of 1918, or had died as the direct result of their service during the immediate post-war period.

Craven’s Part in the Great War was therefore the inspiration and the starting point for our project: but we always knew that this was just the beginning. In the introduction to the data on the website we have provided a fairly detailed explanation (to which the reader is referred) of our subsequent progress and our rationale for the development of the data collection. First and foremost we needed to verify the basic information provided in Craven’s Part in the Great War by extracting the relevant entries from Soldiers Died and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Throughout we have been at great pains to clear up discrepancies regarding the name and the precise status of the serviceman at the time of his death, i.e. his (or her) final regiment, battalion, division and rank, and to this end we have made extensive use of the information provided by additional sources such as the National Archive Medal Cards and the divisional information given on the Long, Long Trail web-site.

Of course, it had always been our intention to expand on the bare details on the servicemen that we found in Craven’s Part… Our first task, therefore, was to go through the pages of the Craven Herald (the local newspaper for this area) from August 1914 to our cut-off point of December 1921 (to coincide with the cut-off point for the First World War in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database), and to extract and transcribe all articles that mentioned any of our initial 1,555 entries. In so doing we very quickly discovered that we were coming up with the names of servicemen and women who had not been included in Craven’s Part… Right from the outset we had always wondered what had been the criteria for the inclusion of a soldier in Craven’s Part…, as many appeared to have had only a tenuous link with the area  – especially officers who may only have briefly attended one of the local schools (Ermysteds, Giggleswick, Sedbergh), and people described as ‘formerly of…’ Moreover, Craven’s Part… also contained soldiers who had been born and lived in the towns and villages of Wensleydale which has never been considered a part of ‘Craven.’ But both the Craven Herald and the West Yorkshire Pioneer regularly contained news from Wensleydale, as well as from Ilkley. As a result of this we therefore made the policy decision to record every serviceman or woman listed as a casualty by the Craven Herald and the West Yorkshire Pioneer  – regardless of where they came from – as their inclusion in the newspapers implied some sort of connection with the Craven area. Many of the new names that we came across in the Craven Herald and the West Yorkshire Pioneer confounded us even further as they turned out to have been both born and resident locally but – for whatever reason – had not been included in Craven’s Part…

When the site first went on line on our official launch date of the 11th November 2006 the total number of entries in our master database had risen from the 1,555 names listed in Craven’s Part… to 1,867 names. We started to refer to these additional 312 names as Craven’s ‘lost soldiers’ – but more was still to come…

Twelve months on from the launch of the site our initial dataset of 1,555 names, as recorded in Craven’s Part…, has now grown to a staggering total of 2,615 entries. This means that we have located a total of 1,060 servicemen and women who were not (for whatever reason) recorded in the original Craven’s Part… We can now give a detailed breakdown of where we have found these additional ‘lost’ soldiers:–

Between August 1914 and December 1921 we located, scanned and transcribed 4,842 Craven Herald entries relating to 1,718 servicemen and women. 414 of these have only one article/entry each, whereas the remainder have from 2 to 13 articles/entries each, ranging from a brief notice of death or an ‘in memoriam,’ to a series of letters or a lengthy article on the circumstances of their death. Of these 1,718 servicemen and women 298 were names not recorded in Craven’s Part… Conversely 845 of our total number of servicemen and women have never been mentioned in the Craven Herald.

In addition to the Craven Herald we have, to date, been able to locate, scan and transcribe 1,018 West Yorkshire Pioneer entries from August 1914 to December 1916. We hope to complete our survey of the West Yorkshire Pioneer (January 1917 to December 1918) in the next few months, and when we have finished this task we will provide statistics as we have done with the Craven Herald articles.

Another part of our research was the job of linking the servicemen and women we had found in Craven’s Part…, the Craven Herald and the West Yorkshire Pioneer to local war memorials. Once we started looking at local memorials we soon discovered we were finding more names that had not appeared elsewhere. Many of the names found in Craven’s Part…, the Craven Herald and the West Yorkshire Pioneer were of lads from Wensleydale, from over the border in Lancashire and from the Keighley/Bradford area and were therefore commemorated on war memorials outside our ‘Craven’ area. Because we found that many of our local lads also appeared on Wensleydale memorials and, sometimes, vice versa, we decided to include all the Wensleydale memorials in our survey. In all the war memorials from 125 towns and villages in the ‘Craven’ and Wensleydale areas has yielded a further 471 names of servicemen who had lost their lives in the war. As with all other entries in the database every effort was made to flesh out their details with information from Soldiers Died and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database, along with confirmatory evidence from the National Archive Medal Cards and – in a great many cases – from both the 1881 and 1901 Census records.

A further 19 additional names were found on headstones or gravestones in local cemeteries, 2 were found by chance in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database whilst searching for other soldiers, and 3 more came from miscellaneous sources.

In an attempt to try and be really thorough about finding war fatalities in our area we decided to make use of the facility in Soldiers Died to search on places of birth and places of residence as a way of carrying out a final sweep of the available records. This has given us another 241 names. In cases of uncertainty the names were checked in Census records to determine whether there were definite links to the area.

During our researches we have been fortunate enough to come across two additional sources of information. The first was the West Yorkshire Pioneer’s equivalent to Craven’s Part…, a 52-page, paper cover publication entitled the West Yorkshire Pioneer Illustrated War Record (WYPIWR). Like Craven’s Part… it consists of a listing of all the servicemen and women (a total of 1, 368 names) from the area who gave their lives in the War, along with 271 photographs that appeared in the pages of the Pioneer. Clearly the Pioneer’s attempt to ‘keep up’ with the Craven Herald’s commemorative publication the WYPIWR contains many more serious errors than Craven’s Part…, many of which must have been rather embarrassing and regretful at the time. As was the case with Craven’s Part…, we have simply transcribed the entry and added it to the database as it stands (with a few judicious editorial corrections of the more serious errors.)

Our second extra source of information was the extremely handsomely produced Skipton and District Liberal and Conservative Clubs Roll of Honour. It was created by Shuttleworth (the man responsible for several of the more ornate and attractive local memorials) and consists of a beautiful hand-written roll of honour of all Members and their relatives (sons, nephews, grandsons, etc) who served in the war decorated by highly elaborate border work based on regimental insignia. It must, originally, have all been in colour, but the copy we had access to is reduced to greyscale with only the title page in colour (enough to give a taste of just how sumptuous it must once have been). From this we extracted 45 names (including one new entry) and all the relevant entries can be seen in the Additional Information section for individual soldiers.

Both publications have been copied in their entirety and will soon be available on the site as browseable features like the original Craven’s Part… publication.

Throughout the process of linking servicemen and women to local war memorials we were constantly asking the question of what had been the criteria for including names on a local war memorial. Was it due to place of birth, place of residence or employment (or even, occasionally, enlistment), or merely an association like having attended a church or chapel, or being somebody’s relative? We have found numerous examples of all these criteria.

We have now visited a grand total of 125 locations in the ‘Craven’ area and have photographed every extant war memorial and roll of honour we can find – so we think we have now found the names every serviceman and woman that there are to find.

However, apart from the 471 ‘new’ names that we found, one of the most surprising things to come out of all this is the fact that we have found no fewer than 479 servicemen who are not commemorated on any of the local war memorials. Doubtless there will be many instances of men who were born in the ‘Craven’ area but who either moved away at an early age, or subsequently, are probably commemorated on a war memorial outside of our area. Needless to say, we would be delighted to hear from anybody who can tell us where these men are remembered. But we are still left with a significant number of men who were both born and resident in the ‘Craven’ area who do not appear on any local memorial. For example, we have 68 men who were born in Skipton but do not appear on any of the 19 memorials in Skipton. Many of these men turn out to have been resident outside of the area; but 6 of them were both born and resident in Skipton. Why are they not on local memorials?

So, to conclude, after over 2 years of (sometimes) extremely hard and tedious work we have now reached the stage where we have completed the greater part of what we initially set out to do. Our work on the Pioneer articles continues, and we are also continuing to track down all relevant information from Divisional, Regimental and Battalion histories and diaries on the actions in which our men met their deaths. All the Craven Herald articles are being carefully checked (something we simply did not have the time to do prior to the launch of the site) to make sure that they are accurately linked to the correct servicemen and women. Many corrections have already been made and much new information – which initially was not noticed – has come to light which clarifies many previous uncertainties: but it is a slow and exacting job, so please bear with us…

Most importantly though, we are still wanting to hear from members of the public who might be able to supply us with additional information on any of their relatives that they find on our web-site. We have already received a great deal of fascinating extra detail and much of this has now been incorporated into the site: but we need so much more to help us flesh out the lives of the local lads and lasses who made the ultimate sacrifice in that dreadful conflict, and whose names must never be allowed to fade from memory.

(Trevor Croucher, keeper of the Database, November 6th 2007)

The course of the twentieth century was shaped by two world wars, and in particular by the changes to society that followed the Great War of 1914 -1918.
 
Most local families have been touched in some way by this war and although most of this generation has passed on, the memories of this traumatic period in British history survive in oral accounts, handed down to children and grandchildren who are still alive today.

In most communities there is at least one war memorial that commemorates the names of local men and women who fell during the conflicts. There are also more personal and tangible pieces of evidence - medals, photographs, letters and postcards sent back from the Front Line, and remnants of military uniform such as regimental cap badges.

These clues, passed down through a family as heirlooms, or often still hidden in boxes waiting to be discovered in attics and cellars, can provide a gateway into the world of some of the individuals commemorated on this website.

If you can provide us with any memorabilia or information, then please contact us on info@cpgw.org.uk or write to:

The Secretary
Craven Community Projects Group
The Ives
Chapel Lane
Hebden in Craven
Skipton
North Yorkshire
BD23 5DT

Keith Taylor
Swaledale and Wharfedale Remembered;

Aspects of Dales Life through Peace and War

The book not only traces the lives of all 340 servicemen - killed in both the First and Second World Wars from Arkengarhdale, Swaledale, Langstrothdale, Littondale and Wharfedale - but also attempts to place them back into the Dales that they would have been familiar with. Many of the 520 photographs Keith has obtained provide an evocative look at the way of life in the villages and towns, prior to the Great War, and also the years leading up to the Second World War.

For more information please contact Keith Taylor on 01629 732622 or Mobile 07790 575077

William Mitchell MBE
Skipton and the Craven Dales

 Skipton, in the Craven district of North Yorkshire, has a plexus of small valleys but is almost ringed by heather moors. The town was established when a Norman lord built a motte and bailey castle on a rock above a beck to keep an eye on traffic in the Aire Gap, a natural route through the Pennines. Skipton (literally 'sheep town') was given a regional character through the influence of Robert de Romille. The Cliffords, lords of Skipton from 1311 until the death of Lady Anne in 1675, subsequently enhanced the town's importance, but its further growth was afterwards inhibited by the Castle Estate refusing to make land available on long leases.

In the early 1840s, as steam engines began to replace waterpower in local textile mills, a mob of disenchanted handloom weavers, known as 'plug-drawers', visited the town to stop industrial production. But in 1870, the new Dewhurst mill alone had work for 800 people. Less than a century later, outpriced by imports, Skipton's textile trade began a rapid decline until it was virtually non-existent.

To the south of Skipton, the landscape is now blighted by industry (mineral exploitation, especially of lead, besmirched the moors of Grassington and Greenhow), but northwards are the unspoilt Craven Dales - notably Wharfedale and Ribblesdale - where you might travel for miles and not see a mill chimney. This book relates Skipton to the Craven district, an area of outstanding natural beauty which has the largest outcrop of limestone in the country. The area's farming story is told, beginning in prehistory, when breeds of sheep and cattle were first kept as stock, to the current climate of uncertainty in the agricultural world. With the Romantic Age came the first tourists, who flocked to admire the breathtaking cliffs, gorges and caves of Craven. Craven's cultural heritage, which survives in poetry, painting, prose and music, is also explored. Richly illustrated, this book will be welcomed by local historians and the region's many visitors alike.

Available from www.phillimore.co.uk

 Andrew Rawson
British Army Handbook 1914 – 1918

In 1914, the British Army fielded an Expeditionary Force of seven divisions totalling 150,000 men in support of France and Belgium. From these modest beginnings over seven million men eventually volunteered or were conscripted. Nearly a million of them came from the Empire and Dominions. British Army Handbook is a highly illustrated and comprehensive guide to all aspects of the British Army in the Great War.

It covers the men who fought for Britain, from the ‘Old Contemptibles’ – the professionals who stemmed the German advance at the beginning of the War – to the Territorials, Kitchener’s ‘New Army’ volunteers and the conscripts who eventually defeated the Kaiser’s armies four years later.

Andrew Rawson examines all aspects of a soldier’s everyday life including training, trench life, life behind the lines, uniforms, and weapons. He charts the growth of the Army from a small professional body into a huge civilian Army and the steep learning curve it had to follow. Unique detailed divisional histories are also included, an invaluable tool for researchers and family historians.

Included in this new book are details on how the Army constantly strived to introduce technological, tactical and logistical improvements in the Arms and Services. Personalities – commanders and prominent veterans – are discussed as well as the legacy of remembrance, cemeteries, fiction and poetry, making this an indispensable guide to Britain’s Army of the First World War.

Andrew Rawson is a self-employed civil engineer. He has written six books for the ‘Battleground Europe’ series and three for the ‘Images of War’ series; both with Pen & Sword’s. This is his first book for Sutton. Andrew lives in Skipton, North Yorkshire.

ISBN 0 7509 3745 9 Publication Date: 1st June 2006 Hardback £25.00
               
To request an interview with Andrew or to order a review copy, please contact Victoria Carvey on 01453 732 423 or email vcarvey@haynes-sutton.co.uk

A Grammar School at War

Steven Howarth

A new book featuring Craven and the Great War has been written by Ermysted’s teacher Steven Howarth, it is entitled ‘A Grammar School at War – the Story of Ermysted’s Grammar School during the Great War’. The Grammar School was one of the major secondary schools of the Skipton and Craven district of Yorkshire at the time of the War, taking in boarders as well as local boys. The main focus is on 54 Old Boys and Masters of the Skipton School who died serving in the armed forces, predominantly the Army. Nearly half these individuals held commissions, whilst many of the other ranks were NCOs. Whilst a sizeable proportion served with the local Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) Regiment, there was a wide range of other regiments represented.  The individual profiles help relate the story of the full span of the War and covers key battles such as Loos, Somme, Arras, Passchendaele, Cambrai, the German Spring Offensive and the 100 Days Campaign of 1918.

Each individual receives a detailed account of his background, school days, civilian career, military service and circumstances of death. Detailed research for the book has utilised School records, local newspapers, battalion war diaries and service files at the National Archive. There is a full ‘Roll of Service’ – listing 232 individuals – and details of 16 individuals who were decorated. Also included are letters written to the School by serving Old Boys and an account of the War’s impact on School life itself.

The book is soft-back, A-4 size and 208 pages long. There are 120 photographs, the bulk being of the ‘Fallen’ Old Boys; where available photographs of individuals both as boys at School and as servicemen have been included. The retail price is £15 per copy.

To purchase a copy – Send a cheque for £18.00 (includes cost 2nd Class postage and packaging inside UK)  made payable to ‘EGS Old Boys Society’, to Steven Howarth, Ermysted’s Grammar School, Gargrave Road, Skipton, North Yorkshire, BD23 1PL or call in at The School Office, Ermysted’s Grammar School, Gargrave Road, Skipton, North Yorkshire, BD23 1PL. (Tel. 01756 792186)

On Parade

The Octagon Theatre

John Sutherland

Helen Parsons, Community & Information Officer, Skipton Library

 Author, Keith Taylor and Andrew Brooks

Volunteers John Richardson and Trevor Croucher - Website Workshops

'Last Post' played by Members of Skipton Royal British Legion Band

Stan Grosvenor (Chairman: Western Front Association, Cleveland) presents Chris Foster, Chairman of Craven Community Projects Group with a commemorative medal

Visitors and display stands

Pipe Major Jim Sharpe - 'Piper's Lament'