Three Welsh villages recognised as 'Thankful' for bringing their soldiers home
Tregolwyn, Herbrandston and Llanfihangel-y-creuddyn are Wales's 'Thankful Villages', communities that came through the First World War without losing a resident, as a historian's Remembrance Sunday look back explains.
Wales has three “Thankful Villages”, communities where, as far as the records show, everyone who went to the First World War came home again. They are Herbrandston in Pembrokeshire, Llanfihangel-y-creuddyn in Ceredigion and Tregolwyn in the Vale of Glamorgan.
The achievement stands out against the scale of the loss. Of around 280,000 Welshmen who served in the armed forces in the war, 40,000 died, and hardly a village or town was untouched. Across Wales and England, only a little over fifty parishes got through without losing a single resident. There appear to be none in Scotland or Ireland and just one in France.
The historian Elin Tomos has looked at the experiences of people in these villages for Remembrance Sunday. In Tregolwyn, 23 men and boys joined up, and every one of them returned. Among them were the three Arthur brothers, John Windsor, William David and Arthur Wyndham, who served in the Machine Gun Corps. That branch of the army was nicknamed “The Suicide Club” because so many of its members were killed, which makes the brothers’ safe return no mean feat.
Herbrandston is regarded as “doubly thankful”, having lost nobody in either world war. George Leonard Hughes, the rector’s son, served in both. He won the Military Cross in 1919 for his courage in the First World War. In the Second, he commanded a mountain artillery regiment in South-East Asia and spent more than two years as a prisoner of war in Changi after the fall of Singapore. He survived and returned to Pembrokeshire.
Llanfihangel-y-creuddyn’s status is a little less clear-cut. No man living in the area was killed in either war, but some with strong links to the parish were, including Private David Samuel Roberts, who died on the Somme in 1918 aged 27.
Tregolwyn did lose four soldiers in the Second World War.
Why it matters
Thankful Villages are a reminder of how rare it was for a community to escape the First World War’s toll, and they give Remembrance Sunday a different angle. Even so, as Tomos notes, these places were not spared everything: families endured anxious waits, and those who returned had often been through harrowing experiences. Surviving a war, her account suggests, is not the same as leaving it entirely behind.
