Dick ARMITAGE

180126, Gunner. b. 1888, Clayton d. Fri. 26th October 1917 (aged 29).

A local lad from the village, Dick had grown up in Clayton and by the age of thirteen was working as a worsted spinner in one of Clayton’s many mills. He attended the local schools and church there before leaving for the neighbouring community of Great Horton when he married his wife Ethel. The couple settled at 14, Cragg Lane where they lived happily until January 1916.

At this point the government of the time realised that the losses on the battlefields of France were totally unsustainable for a volunteer army, and found the supply of volunteers had all but dried up. With the war looking like it might last for several more years, they decided that their only option was to introduce conscription so that every able bodied man between the ages of 19 and 36 who wasn’t engaged on essential war work was required by law to join the armed services.

Dick was ‘called up’ into the Royal Field Artillery and was drafted as a reinforcement into the 22nd Battery, 106th Brigade, where he was part of a team of Gunners under the command of a Bombardier (similar ranks to a Private and a Corporal in the regular infantry regiments) operating one of the heavy guns that symbolised much of the scenery of the Western Front. Although still behind the British lines this job was just as dangerous as trench life because firstly, the enemy guns would target the Allied guns and vice versa and secondly, because of the many faulty shells and problematic ammunition that could cause instantaneous death to anyone nearby should they go off accidentally.

Although he was in France for the most part of a year, Dick’s luck eventually ran out, and he was killed in the Hooge Crater region around Ypres in October 1917. His parents, Briggs and Amelia Armitage (who still lived in Clayton) were informed as well as his wife, and he was laid to rest in the Hooge Crater cemetery, Belgium. His gravestone carries the inscription ‘In the morning & the evening we remember him, from a loving wife’.

This page is currently being updated by the author, Dan Eaton.