Letters

WAR HORSE

Many families, like Herbert and Ellen Orpwood, sent their children to fight in World War One. Jim, Thomas and Jack Orpwood went to France. Jack went to the front on 20 May 1915 and was shot dead on 22 June; Thomas and Jim returned. Twenty-six men from Ewelme joined up; 20 never returned. The devastation for a small village must have been awful.

Thomas, who was in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, Winston Churchill’s regiment, took Nancy, his horse, with him to the front [pictured below]. The Hussars were keen to enlist farmers as they knew how to ride and had their own horses. At the outset of the war, the British Army owned 25,000 horses; they compulsory purchased others under the horse mobilisation scheme, shipping out 500 to 1,000 every day. Eight million were killed, a quarter dying from gunfire or gas; exhaustion and disease killed the rest.

Nancy was one of the exceptional ones: she survived and was decommissioned back home. Thomas was a farmer and we are sure his experience with animals was