World War One At Home - Yorkshire
Listen to the stories in full from February 24th on your local BBC radio station or by visiting www.bbc.co.uk/ww1
Scarborough, Yorkshire: A Target For Bombardment. The devastation that followed what is thought to be the first German attack on home soil. Image courtesy of Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre
From 1916 an elephant called Lizzie was employed to haul heavy loads of steel and machinery through the streets of Sheffield.
She worked for scrap merchant Thomas Wards Ltd based at Albion Works on Savile Street in Attercliffe. It was busy feeding a thousand tons of recycled metal a day to the country’s steel firms for the allies war effort. Wards own horses had been taken off to the front by the military. Lizzie was leased from a travelling menagerie, Sedgewicks – like many travelling circuses and zoos its men had been called up for service and it faced restrictions on travel and shortages of feed.
The animal taken on by Wards was an Indian elephant who was stabled nearby at Lady’s Bridge. The records are full of anecdotes about her - eating a schoolboy's cap, pinching food through a kitchen window using her trunk and pushing over a traction engine.
Image credit: SHEFFIELD ARCHIVE & LOCAL STUDIES
The love story of WW1 soldier Henry Coulter and his childhood sweetheart Lucy Townend was revealed after more than 100 love letters were discovered in an attic nearly a century after they were written.
Henry and Lucy were regular chapel-goers at Gledholt Methodist Church in Huddersfield and enjoyed a courtship at home before the onslaught of war pulled them apart.
Henry wrote from the training camps as he trained with the 17th (Leeds) Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment calling her “Beauty” and ”The sweetest girl in the whole world”. Lucy who lived in Birkby, where the letters were eventually found, wrote to her “Darling Boy” of how she longed to be back with him again.
Sadly, Henry died in France in 1916 from injuries when a trench fell on him and Lucy’s last letter was returned unopened.
Memorial plaques with Henry’s name can be found in Gledholt Methodist Church and also Huddersfield Town Hall.
