Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

St. Paul's Church - WWI Centenary Website

Hi folks,

At St. Paul's Church on Wightman Road, we've been doing a lot of research into our parish records, most of which are at the London Metropolitan Archives, to find out about the church and the parish during the First World War.  We've been working on this for quite some time and mulling over ideas for how to share our findings.  We're hoping to put on an exhibition in the autumn, but in the meantime we've set up a website, called "Harringay Remembers" to showcase some of the things we've found out.  The website has just gone live and you can find it here - it is definitely a work in progress, so look out for new things over the coming weeks and months!

We chose to use the name "Harringay", rather than just linking it to the church, because the information relates to the whole parish and not just to those people who were churchgoers or thought of themselves as C of E - the records relate to people of all faiths and no faith.

We appreciate that not everyone is keen on commemorating the First World War and we understand that all commemorations carry with them the risk of glorifying war - that is certainly not our intention, and we really just want to share information about the parish and its people during the war as a topic of social history and, of course, in the hope that remembering the horror of war will help to promote peace. In order to achieve these goals, we'd love to have your help.  If you have any information that might help us to build upon what we already have, then please get in touch.  We're also very happy to list other groups' commemoration events on the site, so please let us know about those, too.

We hope that you find the information interesting and that we can expand the site further to include more about how people dealt with the war at home.

Happy reading!

Tags for Forum Posts: First World War, St Paul's Church, centenary, church, history, local history, war, website

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Permalink Reply by Hugh on July 11, 2014 at 10:05

Good job Bethany, thanks to you all.

I'm attaching an example of a the case papers of an appeal to be a non-combatant, downloaded from your link to the National Archives. It concerns a George Hardy of 39 Mattison Road. Working as a 'technical film editor' for Pathe in Wardour Street, he seems to have successfully delayed his call up form March 1916 till early 1918. 

Whilst the outcome of the case is not clear from a quick rummage through the papers, his name did not appear on the local war memorial, so perhaps he succeeded.

Fascinating peek into a life a hundred years back.

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Permalink Reply by Bethany Burrow Atherton on July 11, 2014 at 11:04

If he was conscripted, then he would have been on the war memorial if he died, but he would not have been on the Roll of Honour (the list of all those who joined up) - the powers that be in the church (consistent with the Defence of the Realm Act, I suppose) decided that if you waited to be conscripted and didn't have a really good reason for it, then you weren't honourable enough for the Roll of Honour. I'm guessing that the test applied on the reasons was pretty subjective, but unfortunately I haven't (yet) come across anything which expands on the decision-making process.

So, if he ended up having to fight, but didn't go willingly and didn't have a good enough explanation for the person holding the pen on the Roll of Honour, he wouldn't appear on it (and of course wouldn't be on the memorial if he survived).

Permalink Reply by Hugh on July 11, 2014 at 10:37

Damn you Bethany, I'm now hooked on the National Archives records of Harringay appeals against military service. I just read another interesting file from the tobacconist at 1 Grand Parade - who also worked in aircraft manufacture for Waring and Gillow. (attached)

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Permalink Reply by Bethany Burrow Atherton on July 11, 2014 at 10:41

Ha ha ha!  Sorry about that!  They are completely fascinating. I've been looking through to see if there are any families where one person was a conscientious objector and another went off to fight, but I haven't found any yet.  The nearest is a father and son where the father appealed on the grounds of ill health - I will write a bit about that for the blog section of the site.

Permalink Reply by Bethany Burrow Atherton on August 4, 2014 at 12:53

Hi folks, just bumping this up to the top, given what day it is today. Since I first wrote, we've done a ton more research and we're writing posts for the blog section of the site every few days. In addition, we've set up a "Community" on the Imperial War Museums' "Lives of the First World War" website (community 768, called "Harringay Remembers"), to which we've added all the soldiers we could find from our old War Memorial. We're in the process of adding more detail to their profiles and photos where we have them and, one day, when we've got through those who didn't come back, we'll start on the other 500 or so who did come back.

I'll also sneak you an exclusive - we'll be holding an exhibition of our research, at St. Paul's church, on the weekend of 8 and 9 November - you heard it here first.

Here's one of the Harringay men who lost his life in the war, Herbert George Barrenger. He was a submariner whose vessel was lost in the North Sea in early December 1916. We've written a bit more about him and his brother here.

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