Northumberland history. War memorial – Falstone (North Tyne)

By Geoffrey Dagg, Donald Clegg and Clive Dalton

Falstone

Today’s small village of Falstone at the top of the North Tyne valley and at the foot of the Kielder dam, was a much larger and busier place before the 1914-18 war than it is today.

Photos of the local school  before 1914 show over 50 pupils, and these numbers of young folk would grow up to work on local farms and estates, go into domestic service and work in the local coal mines, quarries and maintaining the roads in their part of the valley.

The Forestry Commission was not fully in business till much later with the first trees being planted on Smale around 1926.

So when the call went out in 1914 for young men to fight for King and Country, there would be no shortage of volunteers from the Falstone Parish to join what promised to be a great and short-lived adventure, and be ‘home by Christmas’!

Sadly 28 volunteers left and did not return, and after making the ultimate sacrifice were buried in foreign soil rather than in their quiet Border valley.

Nine young men gave their lives in the 1939-45 conflict, when conscription was the order of the day.

1914-1918 fallen

These would probably all be volunteers

Frank Armstrong
John Darcy
Walter Dodd
Robert Newton Familton
James Hymers
David Jackson
William Moscrop
David Rolfe
Frank Steele

1939-45 fallen
It’s not clear who of these were conscripts and who were volunteers.

Andrew Fletcher
Hector Inglis
Alex Philip Weir
John Lambert Bird

Thomas George Grimwood
Edward Fiddler
James Telfer Cowan
Raymond Terry

Request for information – The authors would greatly appreciate any information on the lives of these brave men before they went to war.

FURTHER READING
Grint, A.I. (2011)  In Silent Fortitude. The memory of the men of the North Tyne valley who fell in the Great War.   Ergo Press.  ISBN 978-0-9557510-9-7.