Pelsall during The Great War

Prior to the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, Pelsall was a relatively poor but very hard-working village. When the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, made his famous enlistment appeals, of the men from Pelsall who went to war, sixty-five per cent were miners, a dangerous and not-too-well-paid job. Yet the records reveal a striking fact – at least ten lads from Pelsall served in the elite Foot Guards regiments, notably in the most senior of all the infantry regiments of the British army, the Grenadier Guards. The Grenadiers can trace their origins back to 1656 when Thomas, Lord Wentworth, raised a Royalist regiment at Bruges in the Spanish Netherlands to act as a bodyguard to the exiled king, Charles II. The regiment fought at Dettingen in 1742 on the last occasion that a British monarch, George II, led troops in battle and seventy-three years later famously defeated Napoleon’s hitherto invincible Imperial Guard on the field of Waterloo in June 1815. Among the ten young Pelsall villagers to serve with the descendants of these celebrated foot guards were four miners, a bricklayer, two men from other manual jobs and two career soldiers.

Guardsmen Morgan and Dennant enlisted pre-war as regulars in the Grenadiers and thus were fully trained and suitably experienced when the army was mobilised. The first Pelsall guardsman to land in France at Le Havre on 13th August 1914 was Guardsman Morgan of the 2nd Battalion, the Grenadier Guards, who was destined to be wounded at Ypres before Christmas and invalided home to Pelsall. Morgan’s future would be intertwined with that of Guardsman Dennant of the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards who would also be invalided home from Ypres before the turn of the year. Dennant was especially lucky to survive as his battalion, 1st Grenadier, was reduced to just 104 men (from 1,000 who crossed the Channel) by 28th October. Though still recovering from their wounds, the two guardsmen shared a platform in February 1915 back home in Pelsall when they gave an eager audience some idea of what the early months of the war had been like. It appears that the two guardsmen were wounded during the First Battle of Ypres, in desperate actions at Langemarck or Gheluvelt in late October, where the German Army attempted, unsuccessfully, to turn the flank of the British Expeditionary Force. From this point onwards, the Western Front began to settle down into the deadly grind of trench warfare. Morgan and Dennant were both awarded the 1914 ‘Mons’ Star for their part in the first fourteen weeks of the war and both were awarded the Silver War Badge for disabled soldiers. Even so, more Pelsall lads would join the guards and some would pay the ultimate price.