Percy Horsfield
Percy Horsfield of Boothfold was killed at Ypres, age 23, mourned by eight family members spanning three generations. Percy died when, having been sent to a ‘Listening Post’, a shell struck the trench and buried its occupants. For generations a poem written about Percy by a former pupil, William Hoare, who served in the Second World War has been read in our Remembrance Services:
Percy Horsfield of Booth
Whistling, where the Whitewell wanders
Through the dark, enfolding Pennine hills,
Making his reluctant way to school,
He dreamed all the high-flown dreams
Of boyhood bound by home hearth
And shaped by class-room adventures:
Of Tom Brown at Montezuma;
The lure of far-beckoning mountains,
Unconquered yet, and challenging;
Eastern cities and sand-blown forts;
To soar amid the fleecy clouds
And plumb the ocean-depths unknown.
Yet young dreams are airy things,
And, marching by the Somme, he dreamed
Of the old, chuckling Whitewell
Gurgling past the humming mills,
Past his own cottage where Mother
Smoothes the soothing linen sheets,
Bakes sad-cake, and brews huge pots of tea.
Thus, trudging through the cloying mud
Of anguished Flanders, forward to meet
The heroes of last year’s history books,
The men of Agincourt and Crécy,
Who had left, like him, their noble hearts
In some beloved nook of England,
And ached, like him, in vain, for home.
Now, at one with ten million yesterdays,
He is remembered who was never known;
Whilst we, fodder for tomorrow’s guns,
Anonymities in yet unwritten history books,
Listen, heads bowed, to the solemn voice:
“ Percy Horsfield, of Booth.”’
William Hoare, whilst at Agedabia in the Western Desert in the winter of 1941, found himself thinking of the school and those old pupils who had died in the 1914 -18 War. He remembered how the school used to assemble at eleven o'clock on the eleventh day of November to observe the two minutes' silence for the fallen and how the names of the 37 old boys who had given their lives were read out. The only name he could remember was Percy Horsfield of Booth, but this name of a man killed before he had been born and known only as a name recited from a school platform "became representative of all ordinary, unheroic. good people who, without evil or malice in themselves. are called upon to become part of all the death,
misery and heartbreak of war".
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