Wartime [leisure trust, arts heritage, sports centres, fitness health, rochdale, link4life, entertainment, Rochdale Boroughwide Cultural Trust, museum, middleton arena, gallery, touchstones, local studies, central, bowlee, springhill, marland, heywood, littleborough,]
Soldier's camp at Hollingworth Lake (c.1914)
Waterloo Veterans, Rochdale (c.1855)
Munitions workers, Brierley's Brassworks, Rochdale (c.1915)
Wars have always been times of disruption, distress and upheaval for people. They bring family partings as men (and latterly women) leave to fight, and perhaps to be wounded or die.
Middleton sent archers to Flodden Field when Henry VIII's wife, Katharine of Aragon marched north with an army to defend England from a Scottish invasion. Rochdale sent pikemen to the same battle. No doubt men from the area also left to fight in battles from the Wars of the Roses to Trafalgar.
Records indicate some involvement in the Civil War, with an 800 strong guard on Blackstone Edge, plus a garrison of 1200 men in Rochdale. In 1745 a small contingent of rebels passed through Rochdale, recruiting one follower, Valentine Holt, who was later executed at Penrith.
There are reports from the Crimean war in the Rochdale Sentinel, and of course, Roger Fenton, one of the earliest photographers, whose family lived at Crimble Hall, went to the Crimea to record the war with his cameras.
The twentieth century began with the Boer War still raging in South Africa. It ended in 1902. A plaque on Rochdale Town Hall records the deaths of forty-two Rochdalians at Paarberg and Spion Kop. World War 1 broke out in 1914 with great loss of life for the troops and deprivation for civilians due to food shortages etc. It was, however, a time when women were to find many new job opportunities, from munitions work to postal deliveries - and it resulted in them gaining the vote.
World War 2 saw bombing raids and rationing, salvage drives, holidays at home, evacuees, refugees, the A.R.P. and the Home Guard. Once again, as in World War 1, women 'plugged the gaps' in industry as men went away to fight, but this time many women also joined the armed services.
In the years since, we have had the Falklands War and wars in the Gulf, and troops from the UK have served in a 'peacekeeping' role in places in the former Yugoslavia and other countries.
