Highclere Castle is the setting for the popular drama series, Downton Abbey. During WWI, Downton is turned into a convalescent hospital. The story is fiction but the hospital established at Highclere Castle in 1914 was real.
The Great War was on a scale that hadn’t been seen in living memory. It tore families apart, forcing the men into the great mincer of the war machine and spitting some of them out at the other end. Nearly a whole generation of men was lost and those that did return home would never be quite the same again.
Many of us have been told stories of family members who served in WWI and the difficulties and privations they faced. Many of these ordinary men rose to the challenges of war to became heroes. Both my grandfathers may be counted amongst them.
An insight into my grandfather’s military service with a Searchlight Unit in WWI.