ONE in five of Knutsford’s male population served in the First World War, which corresponds closely with the national statistic of one man in four.

They came from families rich and poor, from different educational backgrounds and occupations. They fought in every theatre of war, served on land, sea and in the air in a variety of regiments and corps, and in a variety of ranks and roles.

Royal Navy Lieutenant-Commander John Allan Pennington Legh, a descendent of the Legh family of Norbury Booths, joined the Royal Navy in 1905, and at the outbreak of war was serving as an officer in the rank of Lieutenant.

On 15 March, 1918, Legh was in command of M Class destroyer Moresby when it was involved in the destruction of the German U-boat U110.

He was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross in September 1918 for ‘services in action with enemy submarines’.

In December, 1918 Legh was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. He is commemorated on the Second World War Memorial Scroll at the War Memorial Hospital and on the Centennial War Memorial as he died in October 1944 in service as Commander (retired) HM Coastguard Inspector.

He was swept out to sea in a storm off Chesil Beach while attempting to rescue the crew of United States Landing Craft (LCT 2454), the wreck of which is still visible today.

Royal Flying Corps Captain Charles Leigh Pickering of Bramley, Legh Road, had a keen interest in aviation from an early age.

An article by his father in the September 1911 edition of Flight magazine describes how he and a friend built, at the age of 16, a model glider of wingspan 26ft and length 20ft in the grounds of his home.

Charles was commissioned into the Cheshire Regiment in 1914 and in 1916 attached to the 30th Squadron Royal Flying Corps. He was killed in aerial combat on April 15, 1917 at Samarro, Mesopotamia (Iraq).

Army Lieutenant Tom Darlington was a choir boy at St Cross and the son of a nursery gardener, who lived in Sparrow Lane.

Tom won a scholarship from St Cross School to Knutsford Grammar School. He went on to be employed by the Knutsford solicitors Messrs Sedgley, Caldecutt and Co before emigrating, in 1911, to Canada to take up an appointment with the Canadian Railway Company.

At the outbreak of the war he returned and enlisted in November 1914 with his brother in the Manchester Regiment. He was awarded a Military Medal for Bravery in the field in September 1916.

He was awarded a commission in January 1917 in the Queens Royal West Surrey Regiment, serving with them in Italy before returning to France in the spring of 1918.

He was awarded the Military Cross for which the citation read “For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty.

“When shelters were blown in by enemy shelling, and several men were buried, this officer and four men, after nearly three hours’ digging under heavy shell fire, which necessitated their taking refuge several times, succeeded in rescuing one man alive. This rescue was due to his example of energy and determination”.

Lieutenant Tom Darlington was killed in action on October 1, 1918 just a month before the war ended.

Lieutenant John Baldwin Hoyle, serving with the Prince of Wales Volunteer, South Lancashire Regiment, was another Knutsfordian to be awarded a Military Cross.

He was born in ‘Brae Cottage’ Legh Road into a branch of the family of Joshua Hoyle and Sons, a cotton spinning and manufacturing company in Manchester.

The family was later to move to Pott Hall, Pott Shrigley. John was a scholar of Rugby School and a Classics graduate in 1914 of Cambridge University.

On June 5 he wrote: “On getting in about half past six, Lane, who acts as a sort of adjutant here, told me I was to dine with the Major on the strength of an announcement in the paper, which you will have seen (his Military Cross).

“It fair took my breff away, and it was some minutes before I was quite sure they were not pulling my leg… For myself I wish that Harvey could have recognition; he was left alone that night with his awful device in front of the wire, the whole venture still before him full of the risks and horrors of scrapping, while I crawled cushily back.”

A month later John was killed in action on the first day of the battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, almost a year after his brother Lieutenant Geoffrey Morgan Hoyle of the Sherwood Foresters was killed in action.

Private John Venables was absent from his home in King Street in 1918 serving with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. John was a nursery gardener.

He enlisted in 1914 and served until he was gassed and discharged in 1918. He died of the flu that was epidemic amongst soldiers at the end of the war and is buried in a Commonwealth war grave in Tabley Hill Cemetery.

His parents were eventually to occupy one of the houses built by Knutsford Urban District Council in 1922 in Heathfield Square as part of a nationwide scheme of ‘Homes for Heroes’.

Private Andrew Murphy, a blacksmith by trade, was absent from his home in Old Market Place, still serving with the Imperial Camel Corps at the end of the war.

He returned home, and the 1939 Register records him as a resident of one of the terraced properties in Egerton Terrace, built by the Egerton family of Tatton Hall on Manchester Road.

He was still employed as a blacksmith. His brother Peter Murphy, a driver with the Royal Field Artillery, did not return as he was killed in action at Ypres in October 1917. Egerton Terrace bears one of Knutsford’s memorials to the fallen – a stone inscribed to those who died in the First World War.

Lieutenant Douglas Marshall Rigby was schooled at home, then Marlborough College, leaving at the age of 17 to pursue his lifelong ambition to become an artist by training at an artist’s studio in Kensington.

After a year he felt that he was not going to ‘make the grade’ so he left London to enter an uncle’s iron and steel business in Manchester.

The family moved to Knutsford from Buxton in 1911. Douglas enlisted in 1914 and in July 1915 sailed as a commissioned officer with the 6th Cheshire Regiment as part of the British Expeditionary Force.

He was injured and hospitalised a couple of times but returned to France in the autumn of 1918 keen to be with his men. He was killed by a sniper on September 4, 1918.

His letters home and his paintings are the subject of a book entitled She Makes No Fuss When I Go, compiled and published in September 2018 by his great nephew.