Barely a family or community across the UK escaped World War I untouched by loss, except that is for the “Thankful Villages.” The term was first used by journalist Arthur Mee in The King’s England, a guide to the counties of England in the 1930s. A Thankful Village was said to be one which lost no men in the war, as all those who had left to serve had come home again. The scale of their good fortune is extraordinary. A million British lives were lost in World War I. Mee's initial list identified 32 villages out of the tens of thousands of villages in the UK. Of those villages, 14 in England and Wales are considered “doubly thankful” because they also lost no service personnel during World War II. Through history lessons, war poetry and popular culture, the abiding modern portrayal of World War I is as a devastating event of industrial-scale carnage.
The Thankful Villages of the UK
Barely a family or community across the UK escaped World War I untouched by loss, except that is for the “Thankful Villages.” The term was first used by journalist Arthur Mee in The King’s England, a guide to the counties of England in the 1930s. A Thankful Village was said to be one which lost no men in the war, as all those who had left to serve had come home again. The scale of their good fortune is extraordinary. A million British lives were lost in World War I. Mee's initial list identified 32 villages out of the tens of thousands of villages in the UK. Of those villages, 14 in England and Wales are considered “doubly thankful” because they also lost no service personnel during World War II. Through history lessons, war poetry and popular culture, the abiding modern portrayal of World War I is as a devastating event of industrial-scale carnage.