THE CARILLON MEN FROM BRUSH
Brush Group, whose huge works overlook Loughborough railway station, is one of the town’s most famous companies, and this year it celebrates its 150th anniversary. Charnwood Museum is currently showing an exhibition about the company. Known locally as ‘The Brush’, it was founded in 1856 and opened its Loughborough premises in 1889. For a time, this was known as the Falcon Works.
Brush has always been a major employer in Loughborough, and no fewer than 37 men commemorated on the Loughborough Carillon, who lost their lives serving in WW1, worked there.
A memorial lost and found
After the war, Brush created its own handsome roll of honour on two slabs of slate. They were originally attached to the factory gates but many years later, during building work, ended ignominiously in a skip. Fortunately, someone spotted them and saved them, and as they await a new home, are currently stored out of sight in the Carillon tower. (The Falcon sculpture, which used to stand over the gates, can now be seen at the National Tramway Museum in Crich).
In this blog I’m going to investigate some of ‘our’ men who worked at Brush. Many were young when they were killed, and had no doubt been looking forward to careers in electrical engineering and related skills, an increasingly important industry.
Families at Brush
Brush could be an employer through the generations in some families. George Hague was an only child, but became the father of a very large family with his wife Charlotte, who he married when he was 24. Between 1903 and 1918 the couple had ten children (the youngest died in infancy) and George supported them by working at Brush as an iron machinist. His death in battle on 8th October 1918, serving with the Leicestershire Regiment, just a few weeks before the end of the war, left this young family without a father and an income. Charlotte would have received an army widow’s pension, but these were not generous. The 1921 Census shows that George’s eldest son, also called George, was at the age of 16 working at Brush as a core maker. On the 1939 Register we find Charlotte living in Middle Avenue with her son Douglas, 23, who was a capstan lathe hand in engineering, and in the same street, her son Arthur, now 26 and married, a sheet metal worker on coach bodies. It’s quite likely that these two young men were also at Brush, meaning that the company had given work to at least four members of the Hague family.
Alfred Biddles and Harry Hopewell were cousins. Alfred was born in 1889 but by the time he was ten, both his parents were dead. He went to live with his uncle Henry and aunt Alice Hopewell at 98 Leopold Street. The Hopewell’s son, Harry, was seven years older than Alfred and had worked at Brush as a fitter. Alfred Biddles too was working at Brush as an engineer’s fitter by 1911, when he would have been in his early 20s. Perhaps his cousin put a word in for him? Both men served with the Leicestershire Regiment and died in France. Alfred was 29, and Harry 37.
Bertie Diggle and Henry Kealey were related by marriage, as Henry was married to Bertie’s sister Constance. Bertie was a coach painter at Brush, and Henry a mechanic. The two men served in the Leicestershire Yeomanry, and were killed during the Battle of Frezenberg on 13th May 1915, along with 92 others from the regiment.
A bad boy at Brush
William Ford, born in Suffolk in 1885, was the son of a professional soldier who was awarded for good conduct. This didn’t seem to have rubbed off on his son William. In 1899 he was birched for stealing boots, and sent to a reform school for three years for stealing potatoes. In 1906 he served a month in prison with hard labour for poaching and for assaulting a police officer. In 1908 he was sentenced to one month for stealing coal, then ten months with hard labour for numerous offences including poaching, malicious damage and breaking excise laws. By 1911 he had moved from his home town of St Edmunds to lodge in Loughborough with a Mrs Alethea Boutell. (This name, or one very similar, appeared on William’s army pension documents as ‘wife’ but no record of a marriage can be found). It must have been around this time that he was employed at Brush. William enlisted in the Leicestershire Regiment in May 1915, served in France, and died eighteen days after the Armistice, having been discharged in March of that year as no longer fit for service. Despite his rocky start in life, William Ford was given a military funeral after his death in Loughborough in November 1918.
They also served
Morton Metcalfe was a sharp contrast to William Ford. Morton worked as a commercial clerk at Brush, a white-collar job, and in his spare time was a church organist and choirmaster at Holy Trinity, Barrow upon Soar. He married Ellen Wilkins in 1917; around the time he enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery. He was 26 when he died of wounds in France in May 1918.
Many of the Brush men served in the Leicestershire Regiment, but Albert ‘Chas’ Green enlisted in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Prior to that he worked at Brush as a woodworking machine hand. Although he’d signed up in the RNVR, Chas ended up in the trenches in France as part of the Howe Battalion, one of eight naval battalions which came under the aegis of the War Office rather than the Admiralty. He was killed in action in France in February 1917, aged 19.
John Chapman reached the rank of Captain in the Leicestershire Regiment. John’s family seems to have been fairly prosperous, and he attended Loughborough Grammar School where he excelled in Latin. After school he worked at Brush as an electrical engineer. Fighting in France, John Chapman was shot through the head and died on 30th May 1915, at the Third London General Military Hospital in Wandsworth. He was 26 and buried with full military honours in Loughborough Cemetery.
At the Carillon, the former Brush employee we know a great deal about is Harry Cutts. We are fortunate to have many of Harry’s cheery letters home in the collection in our care, and these can be viewed in the Carillon museum. He served in the Lancashire Fusilliers and died of wounds in France in July 1918, aged 19. After his death, Brush agreed a payment to his mother from the Mutual Aid Fund. Rather humiliatingly, she had to collect the weekly five shillings in person every Saturday morning from the factory gates.
