11-11-11 2018. George, Thomas and Roland.....

My paternal grandfather was the youngest of six children born to Ambrose and Henrietta Juckes. Ambrose was the son of a Shropshire farmer, who became a doctor and spent much of his working life in Horsham, in Sussex.

Ambrose and Henrietta's four sons were dispatched to King's Canterbury. The eldest, Ralph, went on to Cambridge and then signed up for the Royal Engineers. The second, George, went to St Bart's to study medicine and on to Cambridge before signing up with the Rifle Brigade. The third son, Thomas, finished school in the summer of 1914 and signed up for the Sussex Regiment. The fourth, Richard, was 16 years old when the war ended. He survived the war along with his two sisters and Ralph, who was awarded the Military Cross in 1916, by which time both his brothers had been killed in 1915  Richard was my grandfather and told me stories of long summers in the 1920s when he rode horses, played cricket and tennis. It seemed idyllic when described that way, but perhaps not so much for the broken-hearted mother of two dead sons.

Ralph and Richard both become schoolmasters and after the second world war, farmers in Gloucestershire. Ralph's eldest son, Roland, joined the Royal Engineers like his father, and was also awarded the Military Cross, in 1944, but died soon after the commendation was made. My father, eldest son of the youngest of the Dr Ambrose Juckes' sons, was too young to fight in that war, and so her survived and so here I am. A beneficiary of the good fortune to have a grandfather too young for the first war and a father too young for the second. My mother's father signed up for the first war by lying about his age and survived but that's a story for another day. My father had four brothers and between them, they had seven sons and eight daughters, none of whom have had to fight in any wars at all. Not that there haven't been wars and sacrifices since 1945 - but by their scale they haven't caused the same devastation to a generation of young British men as the two big wars did.

Nor has anything we have done since wreaked the kind of economic devastation that the two wars did. I enjoyed David Smith's column in the Sunday Times this morning. If you don't like the paywall here's the link to his webpage. Citing Nick Crafts of Warwick University, he writes... 


“Britain incurred 715,000 military deaths (with more than twice that number wounded) and the destruction of 3.6% of its human capital, 10% of its domestic and 24% of its overseas assets, and spent well over 25% of its GDP on the war effort between 1915 and 1918.” 

But, as he points out, this was only part of the effect, as “economic damage continued to accrue throughout the 1920s and beyond”. The Great War ushered in a period of high unemployment and high government debt, with the last of the latter not paid off until three years ago under George Osborne’s chancellorship. Government debt rose above 100% of GDP in 1916 and did not come back down below that level (having hit 259% of GDP in the immediate aftermath of WW2) until 1963.

100 years after the Armistice, 10 years after the start of the global financial crisis,  and 4 1/2 months away from our self-imposed exit from the European Union, I can't hep thinking that the lesson for policy-makers is walls that it's better not to absolutely mess things up, than to search for some impossible utopia.

These three share my name and my heritage and made sacrifices on my behalf long before I was born. So I won't forget them.





The memorial to Thomas Roland Juckes, next to Le Pont du Capitaine Juckes, in Bures sur Dives.