David and Edward Bowen

Three Bowen brothers, David, Richard, and Edward, fought in the Great War, all enlisting in 1915. But only Richard came home alive.

The Bowen family

In 1901 John and Jane Bowen, were living in Glascwm Cottages in Meifod, with six of their seven children living with them, and their oldest, 15 year-old Alfred (always known as Alf) working just down the road at Ceunant Farm as a cattleman for farmer David Jones. At the time of the census in April 1901 40 year-old John Bowen was a labourer, and the older children, David, aged 12, Jane Ann, aged 10, and Richard, aged 7, were all attending Meifod village school. Edward, aged 6, would start school with them in the next month, while the little ones, Mary Ellen, aged 3, and Catherine Elizabeth, just over 1, were at home with their mother. And three years later, in January 1904, a fifth son, Thomas John, would complete the family. The family was Chapel, and Welsh speaking and it is clear from the 1901 census return that the younger children didn’t speak English until they started school.

It is sobering to think that within twenty years, Jane, still in her 50s, would be a widow, and four of her sons and one of her daughters would be dead.

Going back a generation

John Bowen’s father, Ellis, came from Llangadfan, and in 1857 married Jane Rogers, a widow in her twenties with two young daughters. Ellis and Jane were living in Cynhinfa in 1861, Ellis working as an agricultural labourer. The couple went on to have six further children, John the oldest, being born in 1858.

By 1871 Ellis and his wife Jane were living at Ty Mawr, in Dolanog. Ellis was described as a farmer, and one of his younger brothers, William, was working for him as a labourer. By 1881, Ellis and Jane had moved to Llanfair, where Ellis was working as a farm bailiff, and another of Ellis’s brothers, another John, was farming Ty Mawr. Living nearby at Garthhiling was the Evans family. Evan Evans was a farmer and Wesleyan lay preacher, and it seems possible that his daughter Jane met her future husband, John, when John visited his uncle and cousins on the next farm.

At any rate, John Bowen married Jane Evans from Llanfair in the early summer of 1888 – though their oldest son, Alf, was born in June 1885.

The Bowen boys at school

The family lived in Llanfair until about 1889 – where Alf and David were born – then moved to Newbridge (in Llangynyw) where Jane Ann and Richard were born. In 1894 they moved to Glascwm, in Meifod, where the younger children were born. In about 1906, they moved to Clawdd, on the Guilsfield side of the river.

In 1891 when they were living in Newbridge, John working as a general labourer. Alf started at Meifod school in 1892, aged 7, and progressed reasonably well through his standards, leaving school when he was 13 or 14 to work on the farm at Ceunant.

David was born in January 1889, and started at Meifod school in May 1894, when he was 5½. The school records suggest that the young David did not take comfortably to school.

When children reached about 7 they left the infants’ class and joined the junior classes – called ‘standards’ as the children had to reach specific standards to progress from class to class, rather than go up year by year according to their age. David entered Standard 1 in 1896, when he was 7, but took two years to progress to standard 2 but there are no records to show what his subsequent progress was. The boys were taught ‘drawing’ – that is, technical drawing, which would have been useful for any boy becoming, say, a carpenter or blacksmith – by the headmaster, William Everall. The boys had 1¾ hours of tuition a week, and were entered yearly for an ‘inspection’ (examination) to decide their standard in drawing. We have records for the boys entered for the inspection in 1896 and 1897, which show that in 1896, David, aged 8, was entered for standard 1 – and a year later, in 1897, aged 9, was entered again for standard 1. The same records show that Alf, David’s older brother, aged 11 in 1896, had passed standard 1, and was sitting standard 2, and the following year, having passed 2, sat standard 3.

David’s lack of enthusiasm for school is also reflected in the school log book kept by the headmaster. In November 1900 William Everall records: ‘David and Richard Bowen played truant this morning. Punished David.’ As David was nearly 12, and Richard only 8½, it was probably a fair assumption that Richard had been led astray by his older brother.

David left school in 1902, when he was 13 and went into farm work.

Tragedies in the family

The next few years were difficult for the family. In September 1904, Thomas John, John and Jane’s youngest and last child, died aged nine months.

And in January 1907 their oldest child, Alf, was killed in a farm accident, aged just 21.

Since May 1906 Alf had been working as a waggoner for farmer Thomas Francis at the Gaer Farm in Castle Caereinion. Alf had been ‘going about his work as usual, looking after the horses’ one Sunday morning early in January. He came in to dinner at 1pm, and after his meal went with John Rimmer, the cowman, to take the horses from the stable to a field to water them – something he did every day, usually by himself. The horse Rimmer was leading played up and broke away, and Alf left the horse he had in the stable, ran to catch Rimmer’s horse, and started to lead it back. ‘The horse reared, got out of his hold, and kicked him down.’ It was said that the horse – a four year-old – had ‘not done much work that week, and was a bit playful, but had never kicked anyone before’.

Alf was unconscious on the ground. Farmer Thomas Francis tried to stem the bleeding, had Alf carried into the farmhouse kitchen, and sent Rimmer for the doctor. Dr Hawksworth said: ‘There was a punctured wound with a depressed fracture about the size of a shilling immediately above the left ear. There was considerable bleeding; the ear was lacerated, and brain substance was on his coat and also exuding from the wound. He was more or less unconscious.’ Alf was moved to the local hospital on the Monday, but died two days later, on Wednesday night.

The jury returned a verdict of ‘Accidental Death’.

[Taken from the account of the inquest reported in the Montgomeryshire Express.]

At the inquest, Alf’s father John, described his son as ‘a strong, healthy man, and fairly sober’. The comment about ‘fairly sober’ may have referred to Alf’s custom of going drinking with friends in Welshpool. In the previous November there was an account in the Montgomeryshire Express of Alf accusing a man of robbing him on his way home from the pub – though the details suggested that Alf was too drunk to have been thinking straight.

Both baby Thomas John and Alf are buried in Meifod churchyard. 

David

During these years David had jobs on various local farms, but by 1911 he had left Meifod, and was living with his uncle and aunt in Patricroft, on the outskirts of Manchester. His uncle, Richard – one of his father John’s younger brothers – and his aunt, Martha Ann, lived on Moss Farm with the younger two of their four children. They had lived before in Berriew, Buttington, Welshpool, Guilsfield and Uppington, near Forden. David and his uncle worked as teamsmen – that is, men in charge of teams of horses that pulled ploughs or heavy loads.

In 1915 David was still living in Manchester when he enlisted with the Royal Field Artillery. As so often happened, as military needs dictated, he was transferred to the 2nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment).

David fought with the Royal Fusiliers in Gallipoli in December 1915. The regiment was evacuated to Egypt in early January 1916, and in March sailed to Marseilles and travelled by train to Pont Remy in the Somme. On 1st July they took part in the first day of the battle of the Somme, suffering very heavy casualties at Beaumont Hamel.

The battles of the Somme ended technically in mid November 1916, but fighting continued in the area. David was killed in action on 7th December. He was 27.

He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France, and on the Meifod war memorial. The Thiepval Memorial is the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, and bears the names of more than 72,000 officers and men who died in the Somme sector before 20 March 1918 and have no known grave.

In March 1917 his back pay of £7 8s 1d was paid to his Aunt Martha, who also received his War Gratuity of £8 10s 0d in October 1919.

Richard and Edward

Both of David’s younger brothers, Richard and Edward, also enlisted in 1915. Both were living at home with their parents in 1911, when John, their father was described as a farmer and part time roadman (repairing roads), working for the County Council. Both Richard and Edward were described as farm labourers.

Richard

Richard was born in May 1892, and started at Meifod school in 1899, when he was 7. He left to go into farm service in 1906, when he was 14. We know very little about Richard’s war service, apart from the fact that he was a gunner in the Royal Field Artillery – and that he survived the war.

Edward

Edward was born in February 1895. He started at Meifod school in 1901, when he was 6, and left in April 1909 when he was 14. Like his older brothers he too managed to make his way into the headmaster’s daily record of what had happened at the school. On February 1st 1909 Mr Everall’s log records: ‘Caned Edward Bowen and Edward Jones for insubordination. Each four strokes.’ William Everall frequently noted that life at school was easier when the ‘older farm lads left’.

Edward attested – that is, declared himself willing to serve in the army – in Welshpool on 11th December 1915. He was nearly 21, and working as a waggoner at Trefnant farm, Maesmawr – beyond Clawdd where his parents were then living, on the way to Guilsfield. The notes from his medical examination record him as being 5’10’’ tall and weighing just under 10 stone. He was described as of ‘average’ physical development, but with ‘carious teeth’.

Training at Park Hall Camp, Oswestry

He went into the 4th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, part of the Welsh Reserve Brigade, for training, and was mobilised a year later, on 18 January 1917, going to Park Hall Camp, Oswestry for training.

Early in 1917 Park Hall Camp was swept by a virulent strain of pneumonia and during February and early March several hundred men were admitted to the camp hospital with respiratory illnesses. Forty-three subsequently died – including, on 27th February, Edward, whose military papers record him as having died of bronchitis. He was just 22.

Local rumours of German doctors working at the camp and inoculating the soldiers with a deadly virus led to the military authorities undertaking an enquiry. The official report declared that there had been an outbreak of ‘influenza pneumonia’ which was aggravated by the severe cold weather conditions at that time. The report also commented ‘that many of the recruits affected are men of poor physique who are put through a course of drill which probably exhausts them so that, what in the normal course would be only a slight cold, rapidly becomes very serious’.

Edward’s body was brought back to Meifod, and he was buried in the churchyard four days after he died. His is the only First World War Commonwealth war grave in the churchyard. The inscription reads: The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.

Edward is commemorated on the Meifod war memorial.

His back pay of £2 11s 10d was paid to his father John in June 1917.

Hard to bear

The deaths of four of their five sons in the space of 13 years must have been hard for the family to bear: ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away’ was perhaps the only way through.

But then, two years later, in February 1919, their youngest daughter, Catherine died, aged 19. It is possible – given the date – that she died in the influenza epidemic that swept the country. It is very clear from the records of Meifod school that because of the lack of food during the war, families were becoming increasingly vulnerable to illnesses, so it would have been hardly surprising that the influenza epidemic claimed local victims. She too is buried in Meifod churchyard.

After the war John and Jane Bowen, with Richard, their only surviving son, moved to Upper Maesgwyn, which is in Guilsfield parish, but not very far from the Clawdd. In May 1920 John Bowen died, aged 55, and he too is buried in Meifod churchyard.

Life goes inexorably on

In 1921, after John’s death, Richard, aged 29, and unmarried, continued farming at Upper Maesgwyn – a farmer employing workers. His mother, Jane, now 62, was running the house for him.

Richard married Mary Owen, from Forden, and they had six children, Richard naming four of his five sons after his dead brothers, Alfred, David, Edward and Tom.

By 1939 Richard and Mary were farming at Trawscoed Bach, also in Guilsfield, and Jane still lived with them, now aged 79. Richard (now 47) employed at least two young men on the farm – a horseman, and a cowman. Jane Bowen died in 1948, aged 88. Richard died in Guilsfield in 1955, aged 62, and Mary in 1991, aged 96. ‘Cwsg a gwyn dy fyd’