A town at war
When war broke out in August 1914 Wantage was a small market town of about 3,600 people. Its men enlisted or, from 1916, were conscripted, and many served with the county regiment, the Royal Berkshire Regiment. The regiment raised sixteen battalions during the war and lost 7,140 men. At home the war was run through the minutes of the Wantage Urban District Council, now at the Royal Berkshire Archives. They record war charities, a War Savings Association, the billeting of troops in the town, claims for compensation for war damage, and meetings held on the anniversaries of the outbreak of war.
The town was asked to pay for the war as well as fight it. A surviving appeal leaflet from 1918 describes ‘Wantage’s special effort’ to raise money for aeroplanes, one of the savings drives in which towns competed to fund particular weapons.
A Red Cross connection
Wantage had a particular link with the care of the wounded. In 1870 Robert Loyd-Lindsay, later Lord Wantage, had led the founding of the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War, the forerunner of the British Red Cross. By 1914 the Red Cross, with its Voluntary Aid Detachments, was running auxiliary hospitals across the country. His widow, Harriet, Lady Wantage, still lived at Lockinge; her diary for 1919, now in the Royal Berkshire Archives, discusses the Lockinge war memorial.
Counting the cost
The names of the Wantage men who died are recorded in several places rather than one. A framed list of the fallen of 1914–18 hangs inside the parish church of St Peter and St Paul. King Alfred’s School has a memorial to thirty former pupils, and Wantage Baptist Church a plaque to eight men from its congregation and Sunday school. The villages around the town put up their own memorials.
A memorial for the living
Instead of a monument, the town’s first large memorial was a park. On 13 May 1920 the Wantage War Memorial Recreation Ground, fifteen acres given by E. B. Ormond, was opened, with gates given by John Nicholas Arbery. Those gates were taken for scrap in the Second World War and replaced in 1948. The stone cross in the churchyard, which commemorates the men of Wantage who died in both world wars, was not dedicated until 1949.
What is not known
Much of Wantage’s wartime story has yet to be written up. Some popular accounts claim that military camps were built outside the town in 1914–18; the airfields at Grove and nearby date from the Second World War, not the First. Anyone researching a family name should start with the parish church list, the Royal Berkshire Archives and the Vale & Downland Museum.