The Great War in family history

Since these pages were first written, the Great War has begun to pass beyond the limits of living memory. The death of its last surviving combatants marks its final passage into myth and (often commodified) history. Those whose lives spanned three centuries represented a link with another world, a world of certainties now alien and incomprehensible. In the lives most of us now lead, what certainties do we still retain that would let us march off lightly, from Leeds, York, or Ossett, to risk all for Queen and country?

This war dominated the 20th century mind - psychology and imagination - just as it changed the map of Europe. It exposed the ordinary folk of an ebullient Empire to the realities of war, the ignoble wounded, and the missing dead. For my great-grandparents in the 1970s and 80s the Great War was still part of a contemporary history. For a generation which had known the optimism, stability and limitations of the Edwardian era, in Yorkshire towns for instance, the displacement of 1914-1919 was not even overshadowed by the century's later tragedies.

My great grandmother, Alice Clayton (1901-1990, née Dews) of Ossett, spoke fondly of her uncles, George and Willie Gawthorpe. This site retraces the wartime movements of these ordinary working men, minor participants in that world-changing adventure, who left their country and perhaps even county for the first time; and who, like so many hundred thousands, did not return.