Thankful Villages is a term for the small number of villages in England and Wales which lost no men in World War I, and which are sometimes called "Blessed Villages"[1]. The term Thankful Village was popularised by the writer Arthur Mee in the 1930s. In Enchanted Land (1936), the introductory volume to "The King’s England" series of guides, he wrote that a Thankful Village was one which had lost no men in the Great War because all those who left to serve came home again. His initial list identified 32 villages.
In their Thankful Village website at http://www.fylde.demon.co.uk/thankful.htm Norman Thorpe,Tom Morgan and Rod Morris have identified the following 50 parishes in England and Wales from which all soldiers returned:
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In France, where the human cost of war was higher than in Britain, Thierville was remarkable as the only village in all of France with no men lost from World War I, nor any memorials constructed in the subsequent period. Amazingly, Thierville also suffered no losses in the Franco-Prussian War and World War II, France's other bloody wars of the modern era.[2]
Remarkably, the two Lancashire villages of Arkholme and Nether Kellett, only 5 miles apart, sent between them some 80 men to fight in the Great War - and all came back.
References
- ^ St Cyrus - an example of the use of "Blessed Villages"
- ^ Jérôme Duhamel (Paris 1990). Grand Inventaire du Génie Français, p.196: "Between 1919 and 1925, a war memorial was erected in every community in France, with one single exception: the village of Thierville in the department of the Eure, the only French village which had no dead to mourn, not in 1870, nor in 14-18, nor in 39-45"
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