Millions of families throughout the UK suffered the loss of close family relatives in the Great War of 1914 -18. Losing one family member must have been truly devastating but try to image the grief of William and Julia Souls, of Great Rissington in Gloucestershire who lost five sons.
It appears that barely a family or community across the UK escaped World War I untouched by such terrible loss, except that is for the “Thankful Villages”.
The term “Thankful Villages” was first used by the British writer and journalist Arthur Mee in his King’s England, a guide to the counties of England in the 1930s. A Thankful Village was said to be one which lost no men in the Great War as all those who had left to serve ‘King and Country‘ came home again. For instance, in Yorkshire East Riding he writes about Catwick, “Thirty men went from Catwick to the Great War and thirty came back, though one left an arm behind.” Incredibly, Arkholme in Lancashire saw 59 of their sons go to war and all returned. It was also suggested that such villages had no war memorials, although some had monuments, usually in the church, in gratitude for their good fortune.
Among the 16,000 villages in England, Arthur Mee estimated that there were at most 32 Thankful Villages, although he could only positively identify 24.
More recent and ongoing research by Norman Thorpe and Tom Morgan, has identified 41 parishes throughout England and Wales from which all soldiers returned, these are listed below;
| Buckinghamshire | Stoke Hammond, south of Milton Keynes |
| Ceredigion, Mid Wales | Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn, southwest of Aberystwyth |
| Cornwall | Herodsfoot, northwest of Looe |
| Derbyshire | Bradbourne, north of Ashbourne |
| Essex | Strethall, west of Saffron Walden |
| Glamorgan, South Wales | Colwinston, south of Bridgend |
| Gloucestershire | Brierley, south of Ross-on-Wye |
| Coln Rogers, north of Cirencester | |
| Little Sodbury east of Chipping Sodbury | |
| Upper Slaughter | |
| Herefordshire | Middleton-on-the-Hill, north of Leominster |
| Hertfordshire | Puttenham, near Tring |
| Kent | Knowlton, near Canterbury |
| Lancashire | Arkholme, east of Carnforth |
| Nether Kellet, east of Carnforth | |
| Leicestershire | Saxby, east of Melton Mowbray |
| Lincolnshire | Bigby, east of Scunthorpe |
| Claxby, north of Market Rasen | |
| Flixborough, north of Scunthorpe | |
| High Toynton, east of Horncastle | |
| Northamptonshire | East Carlton, west of Corby |
| Woodend, west of Towcester | |
| Northumberland | Meldon, west of Morpeth |
| Nottinghamshire | Cromwell, north of Southwell |
| Maplebeck, north of Southwell | |
| Wigsley, south of Newark | |
| Wysall, south of Nottingham | |
| Rutland | Teigh, north of Oakham |
| Shropshire | Harley, southwest of Telford |
| Somerset | Aisholt, north of Taunton |
| Chantry, west of Frome | |
| Chelwood, west of Bath | |
| Rodney Stoke, near Cheddar | |
| Stocklinch, near Ilminster | |
| Tellisford, south of Bath | |
| Woolley, north of Bath | |
| Suffolk | Culpho, north of Ipswich |
| South Elmham St Michael, in the Waveny Valley | |
| Yorkshire | Catwick, north of Beverley |
| Cundall, east of Ripon | |
| Norton-le-Clay, near Ripon | |
| Scruton, south of Catterick |
