In May, browsing online, I bought a postcard of Muggleswick Church. I did not know it would uncover the story of a young Weardale man who never came home.
Muggleswick has had a church for around 800 years. The present All Saints’, rebuilt in 1728 and restored in the Victorian period, stands on the site of a medieval church once considered the most important building in North West Durham.
W. Bainbridge was an early twentieth-century photographer who ran a shop in the village of Castleside. His images of local landmarks, farms and villages now provide a valuable record of the Derwent Valley before the First World War.
The message on the back
“The show is on, on Saturday First. Will expect you? Drop me a card to say what time you will come as I can come to meet you. Yours etc. Frank.”
Close inspection, aided by photo enhancement, shows the card was addressed to Mr Thompson Maddison at an address in Frosterley. It was posted from Castleside on 8 August 1913.
The recipient was almost certainly Joseph Thompson Maddison, 1896 to 1918, son of Joseph and Sarah Jane Maddison of Gladstone House. The show was probably the Castleside Flower Show, held the following day. “Frank” was probably his friend John Francis Baillie Leithead.
Joseph enlisted on 4 December 1915, serving with the Scottish Horse before transferring to the Machine Gun Corps, one of the most hazardous units in the British Army. He was killed in action on 28 September 1918, aged 22, less than six weeks before the Armistice. He rests in Bellicourt British Cemetery in France.
An invitation to a flower show, and a link to a lost generation.
Words and images submitted by Paul Heatherington
