By the time the First World War ended in November 1918, Clayton had given more to the front than any small district should have had to give.
The terraced streets running off Ashton New Road were home to colliers from the Bradford and Clayton pits, workers at the ironworks and engineering shops that stretched east from the city, and their families. When the men of those streets marched away, the losses that came back were not statistics in a national newspaper. They were the sons of next door.
It is no accident that when Clayton decided to remember, it did so on a scale that surprised even Manchester.
Clayton in 1914
Clayton in 1914 was a district of factories and back-to-back streets on the eastern edge of Manchester, which had absorbed it in 1890 and let it grow as an industrial area alongside its neighbours Bradford and Newton Heath. Chemical works, engineering shops and a metal box factory stood along Ashton New Road, and the main thoroughfare ran east past the Bradford Colliery towards Ashton under Lyne.
One of the district’s claims on the wider world was football. Manchester United began their League career at Bank Street in Clayton, staying there from 1893 to 1910 before moving to Old Trafford, winning the First Division in 1908 and the FA Cup in 1909, when an estimated 100,000 people lined the streets of Clayton as the cup was carried home (Maguire, no date).
Among the crowd, the writer John Maguire notes, were future soldiers of the Great War, and perhaps many of the men whose names now stand on the park memorial.
The call to arms
When Lord Kitchener’s Call to Arms appeal was published in the Manchester Evening News on 11 August 1914, the city’s Lord Mayor, Daniel McCabe, called a meeting of employers at the Town Hall and resolved to raise and equip a battalion from the warehouses and offices of Manchester, asking employers to guarantee jobs and wages to men who enlisted (Maguire, no date).
The conditions offered, including pay while absent on duty and re-employment after discharge, proved a powerful draw, and the first Manchester battalions were formed within days. A month later the City Battalions had grown into a whole brigade, and in April 1915 some 4,400 men of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th Battalions of the Manchester Regiment, the City or Pals battalions, moved into Heaton Park to train (Maguire, no date).
For working men of Clayton, enlisting alongside workmates, brothers and cousins from the same streets, these were the natural regiments to join.
What the names tell us
The cost of that way of raising an army came home quickly. By the end of the war 4,776 men of the Pals battalions had been killed or died of wounds, out of some 13,000 losses for the Manchester Regiment as a whole (Maguire, no date). The names on the Clayton memorial tell the same story in local terms.
Maguire’s analysis of the panels shows the Manchester Regiment accounting for 38 per cent of the traced names and the Lancashire Fusiliers for 8 per cent, with the rest spread across dozens of other regiments and services. Of the Manchester men, the Pals battalions recruited 65 per cent, which is to say a quarter of all the names on the stone belong to men of the City Battalions (Maguire, no date).
The calendar is as telling as the arithmetic. The two worst years were 1916 and 1917, and the deaths of July 1916, the first month of the Battle of the Somme, account for almost 35 per cent of the traced losses, with twenty-one of that month’s thirty-eight falling on a single day, 1 July.
Only October 1917, in the Passchendaele fighting, and March and April 1918, the months of the German spring offensive, reach similar double figures (Maguire, no date).
July 1916
On 2 June 1916, “A” Company of the 22nd Battalion had carried out a trench raid at a German strongpoint called Bulgar Point, south-east of Mametz, as part of the preparations for the Somme offensive. The bombardment failed to cut the wire as intended, the raiders fought their way in against the odds, and when the party tried to get back through the undamaged wire the Germans counter-attacked.
Two lieutenant and a sergeant were among the dead, with further men dying of wounds in the days that followed (Maguire, no date). Three weeks later the same battalion went over the top on the Somme. On the morning of 1 July 1916 the 22nd Manchesters formed the right-hand battalion of the attacking line between Fricourt and Mametz. Their leading companies took the first objectives, Bucket Trench and Danzig Alley, but the cost was terrible.
Eighteen of the twenty officers were killed or wounded, with 120 other ranks killed, 111 missing and 241 wounded. Only two officers and 282 other ranks came through the day unharmed out of some 774 who began the attack. Mametz was taken, but the battalion was wrecked (Maguire, no date).
For the families of Clayton the cost was registered in cemeteries with names that became painfully familiar. The Dantzig Alley British Cemetery at Mametz holds men of the 22nd Battalion, and Maguire records that many of the headstones there carry the carvings of the Manchester coat of arms, including that of Alfred Andrew Humble of the 22nd Battalion, killed on 1 July 1916 (Maguire, no date).
Herbert Stafford, Albert Teltow, Joseph Woolley, William Hall, William Pollitt, Amos Allott, Henry Oatway, James Booth and Joseph Wardley of Clayton are among the men whose dates of death are 1 July 1916, some lying in Danzig Alley itself, others with no known grave and their names carved on the great memorial to the missing at Thiepval (Maguire, no date).
The families behind the names
Behind each name stands a household, and this is where the research becomes something more than a list. Maguire traced details of 82, about a third, of the names on the memorial, working mainly from the 1911 Census and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records, and his biographies put families back into the terraced houses they came from (Maguire, no date).
Two of those names are his own family. “Two of my grandfather’s brothers, George and James Swindell, are on the Memorial”, he writes, having grown up a few hundred yards from the stone in the 1950s (Maguire, no date). Private James Henry Swindell of the 22nd Battalion had been employed as a bleacher in Clayton before enlisting in November 1915. He was wounded by shrapnel in June 1916 and died of wounds on 1 July, the first day of the Somme. The Manchester Evening News casualty list of 6 July 1916 carried his death, and he lies buried at Abbeville (Maguire, no date).
Other families lost more than one son. Watkin and Walter Wilson of Flint Street, boiler scalers for Manchester Corporation, both served with the 16th Battalion. Walter died on the Somme on 30 July 1916. Watkin survived almost to the end, dying on 27 March 1918 in the defence of Manchester Hill during the German offensive, and lies in the St Sever Cemetery Extension at Rouen (Maguire, no date).
George Henry Greatbanks of Malcolm Street, a wireworker at Richard Johnson and Nephew, won the Military Cross in August 1916 and died on 21 May 1918; he is buried in Philips Park Cemetery, close to home. His brother Albert, a fitter at Bradford Colliery, had been killed in 1915 and is named on the Menin Gate at Ypres (Maguire, no date).
Joseph Ousbey of Ashton New Road was seventeen years old when he died on the Gallipoli peninsula in October 1915, serving with the 8th Battalion, the Welsh Regiment (Maguire, no date).
The sea took its own toll. Frederick James Campbell went down with HMS Good Hope at the Battle of Coronel off Chile on 1 November 1914, and George Edward Barlow died when the battleship HMS Bulwark exploded near Sheerness in November 1914; Thomas Harris, a naval reservist, was killed when the collier he was aboard was torpedoed off Whitby in December 1917 (Maguire, no date).
Private George Jonas Swindell, his relative, of the 2/7th Battalion, was killed at Nieuport in Belgium on 2 August 1917, along with his comrade William Hansell of Dargal Street, and both are named on the Nieuport Memorial to the missing of the Yser Bridgehead (Maguire, no date).
One of the most moving documents in the Hall’s Memories Room is not about a death at all. In May 1948 the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Mary Latchford Kingsmill-Jones, wrote to Mrs V. Birch of Braddon Street, Clayton, thanking her for a ten-shilling donation to the Manchester War Memorial Fund, and adding that she had been deeply touched to learn that so many members of the family had served in both world wars, and that Mrs Birch had lost three sons in the First War and two grandsons in the recent war (Maguire, no date). A copy of the letter sits in the Hall’s display alongside the condolence letter a platoon commander wrote to the same family from the Somme in 1916.
The unveiling, August 1921
The memorial was unveiled on Saturday 20 August 1921. The Manchester Evening News reported it the following Monday under the headline Clayton’s War Heroes, a memorial to 230 who made the supreme sacrifice (Manchester Evening News, 1921).
The cenotaph rises 26 feet from its four-stepped base, a pillar with a pediment and a lantern, and the sculptor H. Jones signed his work at its foot. The names are carved on four faces, each headed with a single word. Peace on one side. Honour on another. Victory and Liberty on the other two (Maguire, no date).
The unveiling drew a crowd so large that not everyone could fit inside the park, with crowds spilling out onto Ashton New Road and blocking the horse-drawn trams.
A procession made its way to the memorial with a firing party of the Ardwick Battalion of the Manchester Regiment and the band of the Lancashire Fusiliers, along with local societies, school children and scouts, and several hundred ex-soldiers and sailors took part.
The memorial was unveiled by Captain Frank M. Hilton of the Lancashire Fusiliers, and the service was conducted by the Reverend E. T. Kerby, M.C., chaplain to the 42nd Division. Mr J. A. Lidgett, chairman of the Memorial Committee, presented the memorial to the city, where the Deputy Mayor, Alderman Fox, accepted it on behalf of the Corporation, saying he handed it over and accepted it with great pleasure. Buglers sounded the Last Post and the Reveille, and a large number of wreaths were laid at the foot of the memorial (Manchester Guardian, 1921, reproduced at Clayton Hall).
How many names?
One detail in Maguire’s research deserves particular attention. The Guardian reported 230 names at the unveiling, and that figure has been repeated ever since, but Maguire’s count of the four panels finds 262 names.
The lists, he notes, were collected by door-to-door visits, leafleting, church announcements, articles in the local press and word of mouth, so the stone itself is the most complete record of the local men who died, not the newspaper accounts of the day (Maguire, no date).
By the centenary of the unveiling in 2021 the Friends of Clayton Park counted 268 names on the memorial, and other counts of the panels put the First World War names at 246 with 15 from the Second World War and one from a later conflict (Friends of Clayton Park, 2021; TracesOfWar, no date). The stone kept growing after 1921, and each addition was another family in Clayton with someone to look for on the panels.
A Clayton Victoria Cross
One Clayton name belongs in any account of the district’s war, whether or not it can be found on the panels. John Readitt was born in Clayton in January 1897 and educated at the local St Cross day school. He was a private in the 6th Battalion, the South Lancashire Regiment, when, on 25 February 1917 in Mesopotamia, he went forward alone under heavy fire, worked his way to an enemy position, and attacked it with grenades until it surrendered.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry, and lived on in Clayton after the war, dying at Clayton Bridge in June 1964. He is buried in Gorton Cemetery. The War Memorials Register’s transcript of the memorial’s names does not include Readitt (Imperial War Museums, no date).
Maintaining the memorial
Time has not always been kind to the memorial. The Imperial War Museums’ War Memorials Register, which records the memorial’s condition, notes that organic growth had covered some of the names at on one of its inspections. However, recent renovation works of the memorial, supported through the neighbourhood investment fund and the work of the Friends of Clayton Park and the Clayton Hall Living History Museum, has been about more than cleaning stone. It has been about keeping the names readable, because a memorial with unreadable names is a memory half lost.
That work bore fruit in August 2021, a hundred years almost to the day after the unveiling, when the Friends of Clayton Park, Clayton Hall Living History Museum and St Cross Church held a rededication service at the memorial, led by the Reverend Christopher Moore, Rector of St Cross. The Friends asked beforehand for anyone whose relative was commemorated on the memorial to come forward and read a section of the Roll of Honour during the service. (Friends of Clayton Park, 2021).
Tracing your own
The names on the memorial remain a working record for anyone tracing Clayton family history, and the Hall’s own research shows what can be done with the sources that are open to everyone. John Maguire found some details of 82 of the names using mainly the 1911 Census and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, which take a name from the stone to a regiment, a battalion, a date of death and, in most cases, a cemetery or memorial somewhere in the world where that Clayton name is carved in the same way (Maguire, no date).
Photographs and transcripts of the panels are also held in the War Memorials Register of the Imperial War Museums and in the war memorials database of the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society. If your family has lived in Clayton for a few generations, the odds are better than you might think that one of the 268 belongs to you.
Every year, the community will gather at the memorial in the park. It is a small gathering by the standard of 1921, when the trams could not get through for the crowds. But the words said there are the same ones said that August day, the Last Post and the Reveille, the wreaths laid at the foot of the stone. The 268 names have not gone anywhere. Clayton built them a place to be remembered, in its own park, beside its own medieval hall, and Clayton has kept faith with them ever since.
Acknowledgements
This article draws throughout on the research of John Maguire, who wrote the material on the Clayton Park war memorial held by Clayton Hall Living History Museum, where it can be seen in our Memories Room.
We are very grateful to him for the years of patient work behind it, from the panel-by-panel count of the names to the biographies of the 82 men he traced, and to everyone who has kept the Hall’s collection of photographs, letters and documents together. Any errors in how his material has been used here are ours and not his.
List of names on the Clayton Park War Memorial
The names below are given as they appear in the transcript of the memorial held by the War Memorials Register of the Imperial War Museums, which lists 265 entries in alphabetical order (Imperial War Museums, no date). A few points are worth noting. Alan Buckley appears twice in the transcript, as printed. Several spellings differ from those in Maguire’s research tables, most likely because the transcript was compiled from photographs of worn stone: the transcript gives W Cartner where Maguire has Cartrer, Joseph Wooley where Maguire has Woolley, George and James Swindles where Maguire has Swindell, G R Fizpatrick where Maguire has Fitzpatrick, and Albert Clabourgh where Maguire has Clabrough. Families checking a particular name should treat the stone itself as the final authority.
| Joseph Abbott | Dyson Flint | A Nicholson |
| Walter Abrams | Hugh Flint | R Nolan |
| Harry Allen | Dennis Flynn | Patrick O’Hare |
| John Allen | Thomas Fraser | Richard O’Neill |
| William Allott | George Freeman | Henry Oatway |
| Amos Allott | James Frith | F Oldham |
| T E Appleton | Wilfred Furphy | Thomas Oldham |
| Percy Arden | William Gent | Joseph Ousbey |
| John Armstrong | G W Goldstraw | Albert Parker |
| George Ashcroft | Robert Graham | Thomas Parker |
| William Ashton | Albert Greatbanks | William Pollitt |
| R E Ashworth | G H Greatbanks | Edward Pritchard |
| Robert Atkinson | William Greenhalgh | James Ralph |
| Edward Bailey | Cyne Greenwood | Harry Richardson |
| A Bailey | Ernest Grey | Thomas Richardson |
| Frank Balfe | William Griffiths | J R Ridgard |
| William Balfe | James Guiton | Alfred Ridgeway |
| Charles Ball | Albert Hadfield | John Riley |
| W Balmforth | William Hall | A Roberts |
| E Barker | A Hampson | Alfred Roberts |
| George Barlow | George Hancock | A B Roberts |
| L R Barnfield | William Hansell | James Roberts |
| Harry Barton | Ernest Hansell | G W Robinson |
| Frederick Beech | A Hardacre | Hughy Rogers |
| Harold Bell | Albert Harding | R Rogers |
| Henry Belliss | Henry Harding | J Rooth |
| Walter Benbow | James Hardman | Harry Roper |
| James Bennett | Arthur Harper | Charles Rose |
| Charles Best | Sydney Harper | Thomas Rothwell |
| Charles Beswick | Thomas Harris | George Royle |
| Archie Birch | W Harrison | John Salt |
| Albert Birch | John Harte | W Schofield |
| William Birch | F W Hayes | Charles Scott |
| John Birch | Faithful Healey | Arthur Scragg |
| Cornelius Birch | Samuel Heap | Patrick Sealby |
| E Boardman | Joseph Heap | George Seddon |
| John Booth | John Heaton | Ralph Seel |
| Arthur Bowles | Thomas Hennock | F Shakeshaft |
| George Bradbury | William Hesketh | W Shufflebottom |
| John Broderick | J Hibbert | S Skarratts |
| James Brown | Charles Hicks | Harry Smith |
| J E Brown | James Hinchcliffe | Herbert Stafford |
| Robert Buckley | F Hodkinson | John Steel |
| Alan Buckley | James Hooley | Harry Summers |
| W Buckley | Edward Hooson | George Sutton |
| Alan Buckley | Charles Howard | George Swindles |
| A Butterworth | Fred Howarth | James Swindles |
| Robert Bywater | H M Hutchinson | A Taylor |
| W Callender | Harry Isherwood | Edwin Taylor |
| Fredk Campbell | Charles Johnson | George Taylor |
| W Cartner | R E Johnson | William Taylor |
| Robert Chapman | John Johnson | E Templeton |
| Austin Charters | Arthur Jones | A Tetlow |
| Albert Clabourgh | Ernest Jones | J Tetlow |
| Harold Code | Frank Jones | James Thompson |
| J Collier | H Jones | Harold Thorpe |
| F Collier | Richard Jones | S Thorpe |
| Eric Collins | Thomas Joy | Thomas Timperley |
| Thomas Cosgrove | G W Kirby | F E Tomlinson |
| William Crompton | Joseph Knowles | James Tonge |
| Alfred Cummins | George Lake | John Turner |
| Jonathan Cunliffe | James Laville | J E Turner |
| Percy Dakin | Frank Lawson | Ernest Urwin |
| J Dalton | John Limb | R Valentine |
| William Darby | William Limb | Arthur Waite |
| J A Davidson | Thomas Loftus | Joseph Walker |
| George Davis | John Lomas | Gilbert Wallwork |
| Joseph Deary | Gilbert Long | R Walsh |
| Stanley Dewhirst | John Longley | Frank Wardley |
| Norman Diggle | John Mallinson | T H Warhurst |
| J Doherty | J A Martin | Henry Watts |
| Robert Done | James Matthews | Joseph Wells |
| Arthur Douglas | Albert Mawson | E G Whitehead |
| Stanley Dunn | John Mawson | George Whittaker |
| Hugh Dunn | Amos Mayer | Walter Whittaker |
| W Dunnett | Charles McCluskie | John Williams |
| Thomas Dyson | Charles McGuire | L J Williams |
| Albert Evans | Arthur McLay | Thompson Wilson |
| Fred Evans | Thomas McNally | Walter Wilson |
| George Evans | James McNicholls | Watkin Wilson |
| Alfred Ewart | Clement Mercer | James Winder |
| Edward Faulkner | Edward Mercer | John Winter |
| Alfred Fellows | F Meredith | W H Wolstencroft |
| James Fenton | James Mills | W Woodroffe |
| Arthur Finney | John Mills | Ernest Woodward |
| G R Fizpatrick | John Mitchell | Joseph Wooley |
| Edward Fleet | Walter Moores | Stephen Worrall |
| John Flint | Percy Morter | |
| W E Flint | H Mountfield |
References
Friends of Clayton Park (2021) ‘Help commemorate 100 years of history at Clayton Park this August’, InYourArea Community, 23 July. Available at: https://www.inyourarea.co.uk/news/help-commemorate-100-years-of-history-at-clayton-park-this-august (Accessed 7 November 2026).
Imperial War Museums (no date) Clayton – WW1 and Other Conflicts. War Memorials Register, memorial 13086. Available at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/13086 (Accessed 7 November 2026).
Maguire, J. (no date) Clayton War Memorial. Unpublished research binder. Clayton Hall Living History Museum, Manchester.
Maguire, J. (no date) Clayton War Memorial. Research display boards, Clayton Hall Living History Museum, Manchester.
Manchester City Council (1921) War Memorials, Unveiling of Clayton War Memorial, Manchester. Manchester Image Collection, accession number m52036. Available at: https://images.manchester.gov.uk/collections/ (Accessed 7 November 2026).
Manchester City Council (no date) Clayton Park Memorial. War memorials in Manchester. Available at: https://www.manchester.gov.uk/directory_record/429771/clayton_park_memorial/category/1820/clayton_and_openshaw (Accessed 7 November 2026).
Manchester Evening News (1921) ‘Clayton’s War Heroes. Memorial to 230 who made the supreme sacrifice’, 22 August, p. 2.
Manchester Guardian (1921) report on the unveiling of the Clayton war memorial, 22 August. Excerpt displayed at Clayton Hall Living History Museum.
Traces Of War (no date) War Memorial Clayton. Available at: https://www.tracesofwar.com/sights/19831/War-Memorial-Clayton.htm (Accessed 7 November 2026).
Lord Ashcroft Medals (2015) John Readitt VC. Available at: https://www.lordashcroftmedals.com/collection/john-readitt-vc/ (Accessed 7 November 2026).
Victoria Cross and George Cross Association (no date) John Readitt VC. Available at: https://vcgca.org/our-people/profile/390/john (Accessed 7 November 2026).
Further sources for family research Commonwealth War Graves Commission (no date) War Dead database. Available at: https://www.cwgc.org
Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society (no date) War Memorials database. Available at: https://mlfhs.uk/databases/war-memorials