His headstone doesn’t give much away. His number, his rank, an initial and a surname, his regiment and date of death. No personal inscription, a last declaration by loved ones. William Hodges, who died aged twenty-one at Hanwell Asylum in November 1919, did not have the family network that generated the kind of records that might shed light on his origins. Where they do exist they offer more questions than answers. There is just enough of a paper trail to connect the man whose headstone is at Greenford Park Cemetery with a child born in Hillingdon but there is a fog of uncertainty around the rest. Identity, personal and national, how we define who we are and what we are, how we record and access that information is now a matter of intense debate. A century ago the transfer of personal information might take several weeks, or fail to reach the right person, files placed on the wrong desk or, perhaps in this case, an envelope that was ignored or never received.

In the years after the First World War, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) sent forms to all next-of-kin asking for the verification of information they held on those whose graves were in their care, as the process began of organising cemeteries and memorials across former theatres of war. Hundreds of thousands were posted but not all were received by someone who might complete them. It was an opportunity for relatives to add their own details to the entry in the register, and have some say in what was on the memorial. Anyone who has looked at the inscriptions on the white Portland headstones that stand row upon row in burial grounds in France and Belgium will have seen messages that must have been painful to compose, but perhaps the most poignant are the empty spaces.

William was born in an institution and died in another, and most of what I have learned about him came from the records held by a third, the army. In the twenty-first century he might be described as having been in care, an abandoned child. At the turn of the twentieth, however, he could have been regarded as one of the lucky ones.

In March 1898 Annie Hodges, a cook and housekeeper living in Ickenham, gave birth to a son at the workhouse in Uxbridge. She was not married to his father so his identity was not recorded. It is not unusual that William was born in what was then the closest thing to a maternity hospital. What does mark him out is that no attempt was made to disguise the fact by giving an administrative address on his birth certificate rather than mentioning the workhouse in question. Most of the buildings of Hillingdon East Union are long gone, in their place is a Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing development. If you stand with your back to Entrance B of Hillingdon Hospital in busy Pield Heath Road you are facing what was the entrance to the driveway and beyond it the place where the chapel once stood, where William was baptised two days after his birth. The event is recorded in the parish records of the church of St John the Baptist, less than a mile away, but the information appears to been passed on, along with details of other baptisms, around two years later by the chaplain at the workhouse. It was, perhaps, an oversight that these children had not been included at the time.

To be there Annie must have fallen on hard times, hard enough to have to enter a workhouse, part of a system designed to support those in need whilst deterring them from a reliance on the public purse. Mothers were kept away from their children for the duration of their stay there, and they would also have been denied contact with their spouses if they had one. Workhouse buildings were designed to ensure categories of inmate were separated. It is difficult to exaggerate how tough your circumstances had become if you felt the only option was to enter a workhouse. Working class families often lived close together, within a few doors or streets of each other, and tried to be self reliant. This meant taking in children and vulnerable or older people when illness, unemployment or bereavement occurred. An unrelated neighbour might be generous for a time but in the longer term official charitable support, originally based on the parish of your birth, was the only alternative. The characteristic footprint of the workhouse, with its wings and exercise yards, began to appear on maps of the 19th century, a physical manifestation of the regulation of parish assistance, following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

The establishment of Poor Law Unions, concentrating support available to the unemployed, the destitute, the elderly and the orphaned was controversial and contested bitterly by political and public figures such as Charles Dickens, the author. Until then parishes had provided financial relief to those assessed as needing it but it varied considerably in how it was managed and the degree and quality of provision. These arrangements were swept away in favour of a system that deterred all but the desperate who would be obliged to wear clothing that marked them out as “pauper inmates”, eat the meanest rations the workhouse manager could get away with, and carry out exhausting and unpleasant tasks. Stone breaking and bone crushing was usually the reserve of men but they could be expected to pick oakum alongside women and children. Worn rope caked with tar was the by-product of a shipping industry powered by sail. Pulled apart the loose fibres could be sold back to ship builders as a medium for caulking, to seal gaps between a ship’s timbers. It may have been less physically demanding work but it left hands raw and it could be difficult to meet the required quota.

While the workhouse regime was a harsh experience there had been a considerable improvement in the sixty years since its inception by the time William was born. This had largely been down to scrutiny by inspectors, official or otherwise, as well as concerned members of the public, appalled by insights into the daily lives of workhouse residents, often gained by visiting retired servants. The Poor Law reforms had caused outrage but many rate payers, who were obliged to support those in their parishes who could not find work, or had become pregnant by irresponsible men, felt it was overdue. In one case around a hundred of them were supporting over seven hundred fellow parishioners, some of whom could be heard spending their money noisily at a local inn. It was certainly not the case that all claiming parish support were scroungers, or that all young women did not care how often they became pregnant as long as others paid for it, however some observers felt there had been a change in behaviour as a consequence of the changes, such as a downturn in the number of marriages taking place out of necessity rather than choice. In the years following the introduction of workhouses some employers, such as farmers, found that labourers showed a greater inclination to work and retain their jobs after they had experienced a short time there.

The “one size fits all” system was intended to put off the workshy. For the aged, who prior to this may have enjoyed fairly benign treatment in the company of their peers at a parish run home, hard benches without backs to rest against and inadequate clothing or warmth in winter, were undeserved punishments. It took many years for professionally trained nurses to be employed and for the cost of any medication to be funded by the institution rather than the underpaid doctor appointed to care for inmates. In the early days those caring for the vulnerable were drawn from the female population, often with the incentive of alcohol, as described by Dickens in “Oliver Twist”, published in 1838.

It seems to have been a particularly difficult environment for younger women. Widows who entered the workhouse to prevent their children from starving were often sharing accommodation with those who had chosen charity temporarily over prostitution, or who had become pregnant while they were employed as domestic servants. Resentment at their treatment by the authorities, obliged, in some cases, to wear clothing that marked them out as “fallen women” and reminded constantly of their failings, they were hard to handle.

“Whatever the path that brought them there, the inmates of the able-bodied women’s wards were traditionally the noisiest and worst-behaved part of the workhouse population. Every workhouse master dreaded above all sounds to hear, as he looked out from the parlour window over the exercise yards and worksheds of his small empire, the “peculiarly ferocious screams, really worthy of wild beasts… commonly known as the workhouse howl”.”
“The Workhouse”, Norman Longmate/”Macmillan’s Magazine” 1861

It is no great surprise that Annie did not stay and it may be that she was reunited with William’s father after his birth. She certainly was out of the workhouse and in a relationship long enough to become pregnant again, as another son, Henry, was born about two years after William. As far as I can tell, William, Henry and their mother now found their way to Brentford Union Workhouse, close to the Syon Park Estate, on what is now the site of West Middlesex University Hospital, in Twickenham Road. At some stage Annie moved on without them. It may have been that she intended to return for them, or that she was not in a position to support them and felt the best place for them was the residential school at this union. Whatever the circumstances, she disappears from the story at this point. William and Henry now became pupils at Percy House School, built on land to the west of the Brentford workhouse that was provided by the Percy family, the owners of Syon Park.

Very young workhouse inmates were contained and managed rather than reared. Outsiders who had the opportunity to observe life in the workhouse were reminded of why they might make strenuous efforts to avoid admittance. A builder, George Hewins, recognised children he knew who were now pauper inmates:

“I was doing a job at the workhouse, slating the roof. It was a bitter cold morning when we started, frost was in the sir. The door opened and the slummocky woman they’d got for a nurse brings the babies out, one by one. They’d messed themselves. She peels their clothes back and swills them under the pump. November and ice-cold water! How they screamed! Those screams echoed round that square yard, then later the older kiddies started to congregate. Who should I see but Hilda Rose and Violet. They’d had their hair chopped off, they were wearing long Holland pinnies with big red letters: STRATFORD-ON-AVON-WORKHOUSE. They did some sort of drill and then they was marched in a straight line to the National School across the road. The babies’ screams and those red letters haunted me all day. If I weren’t hearing the one, I was seeing the other.”
“Lost Voices of the Edwardians”, Max Arthur

Separation from parents who you could see but not speak to, as well as being tended by carers who were detached and busy was bound to have an effect on young children, as can be seen from this account by a charitable visitor.

“We began with the nursery, where the babies and children under three years old are kept. It was a cheerless sight enough, though the room was large and airy, and as clean as whitewash could make it, and the babies – there were about twenty altogether – showed no signs of ill-usage or neglect. Most of them looked healthy and well fed, and all scrupulously neat and tidy. But it was the unnatural stillness of the little things that affected me painfully. They sat on benches hardly raised from the floor, except a few who were lying on a bed in a corner of the room. All remained perfectly grave and noiseless, even when the basket of toys was brought in and placed in the midst of the circle. There was no jumping up, no shouting, no eager demand for some particularly noisy or gaudy plaything. They held out their tiny hands and, and took them when they were bid, just looked at them listlessly for a minute, and then relapsed into quiet dullness again, equally regardless of the ladies’ simulated expressions of delight and surprise made for their imitation, or the good clergyman’s exhortations to them to be good children, and deserve all the pretty things the kind ladies gave them.” I saw only two children who looked really pleased, and understood how to play with the toys given them; and they, I was told, had only been in the house a few days.”
From “Macmillan’s Magazine” 1861, taken from “The Workhouse” by Norman Longmate

Those institutionalised infants were at least safe. The number of neglected children, in some cases left to fend for themselves once they were old enough to earn money, was difficult to ignore in British cities during the nineteenth century. The public, politicians and the press had opinions about boys in particular, and what should be done about them. There were concerns about the number being sent to prison while there were few opportunities to educate them and divert them into more worthwhile endeavours. Too many “Artful Dodgers”, too many “crossing sweepers” (the equivalent of windscreen washing “squeegee bandits”, who raced to clear the ground for pedestrians in return for money). Cholera epidemics left thousands of orphans on London’s streets during the 1850s. Rather than send to prison those who stole to survive, there were a range of efforts to provide accommodation, education and routes to employment for both boys and girls, who were at risk of the worst kinds of exploitation. Industrial schools, where trades were taught to underpriviledged boys, gained government support, and for those caught up in the justice system there were reformative schools, an alternative to prison, with opportunities to learn a trade. The last years of childhood in a workhouse were spent preparing to survive in the outside world, lessons in housekeeping for girls with the hope of a placement in a respectable home as a servant. The basics of trades for boys, or far more rigorous training that could lead to a career at sea, as merchant seamen, in some cases to such a high standard that they found places in the Royal Navy.

The introduction of drill to schools was the first attempt at organised exercise, sometimes under the instruction of veterans of the Crimean war. For workhouse boys it brought them a step closer to a career in the army, as did musical training – they often formed bands that paraded in public. Those managing education at workhouse schools believed that learning to play one or more musical instruments, such as a clarinet or bugle, increased their chances of being accepted by army bands and gave them a skill which would support them after they left the military. We are so accustomed to hearing recorded music on demand now that we forget there was a time when all music was live, and that musicians were nearly always in work.

It comes as no surprise that in 1912, at the age of fourteen, William enlisted as a boy soldier with the Somerset Light Infantry, giving his trade as “musician”. Today it seems shocking that details that might help identify his body on a battlefield – a mole on his left shoulder, a scar by his left eye, grey eyes, fair hair – were recorded for a teenager. He was now a bugler, still an important role in an army that was changing with the times and becoming mechanised. They were used to communicate orders, more likely to be heard than drumming amongst explosions and gunfire. In the event that the Somersetshire Light Infantry went to war William would be in the thick of it. Or so he thought. Shortly after joining the regiment he was struck so hard on the side of the head by a football that he was concussed and injured to the point where he lost the hearing in one ear. It became painful to play the bugle. William remained with the regiment for two years, attaining a certificate of education at Colchester but in December 1914, five months after the start of the First World War, he underwent a medical assessment at Devonport. Aged sixteen he was found to be physically unfit for service and discharged in January 1915. He must have been devastated. A career path that had seemed so certain had fallen away and he would have to fend for himself.

At this point he seems to have come into the care of a woman called Sarah Gammond, who lived with her family in Acton. It is possible that she had been offered as a foster carer by Percy House School, as by the time he left there had been a change of policy and the children were being placed with foster families rather than living there in dormitories. His younger brother may have been cared for in this way but although Henry had been mentioned as William’s next-of-kin when he joined the Somerset Light Infantry (Annie had been recorded as “address unknown”), I could find no mention of him after that. What I did find suggested that William had no intention of missing out on a military career. On his seventeenth birthday, in March 1915, he enlisted at Shepherd’s Bush, stating that he was eighteen years old and that Mrs Gammond was his aunt. Two days later he attested at the depot of the Middlesex Regiment at Mill Hill. The same details were recorded, a scar by his left eye, a mole on his left shoulder, fair hair, grey eyes. He was around two inches taller than he had been in 1912. He gave his trade as barman, which may well have been true. There were plenty of pubs in Acton. No mention was made of his loss of hearing. Within days he was posted to the 5th Battalion and three months later he was in France with the 4th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment as part of the British Expeditionary Force.

He may have been one of about ninety men drafted in and he was certainly in the thick of it as the Battalion had recently been involved in an action at Sanctuary Wood that had brought them nominations for a Victoria Cross and other awards. Its war diaries suggest that men were lost almost every day even when they were not engaged in an assault, picked off by snipers or caught by shell blasts as they went about repairs and improvements to the trenches. I could not find any mention of gas attacks, other than concerns that they had taken place, however something happened that left William so unwell that he may have believed that he had been affected by one. Less than a year after arriving in France, and ten days before his actual eighteenth birthday in March 1916, he was discharged as being physically unfit for a second time. This time the effects would be hard to hide.

Back in Acton, Sarah Gammond sought help for her foster son. The National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers (NFDDSS) was founded in 1917 with the aim of preventing the re-conscription of men who had been discharged as unfit for duty. By now, in William’s case, it must have been evident that the military authorities had allowed an underage soldier to re-enlist despite his disability and youth. The NFDDSS assisted William’s appeal for assistance and he was awarded a Silver War Badge which would indicate that he had served and been discharged in case it was not evident to young women who handed out white feathers to men who were not in uniform. As it was, it was unlikely that they had much of a chance to do so. William spent his last days under medical care, first at a sanatorium and then at Hanwell Asylum, where he was treated for shell shock. On the 6th of November 1919 he succumbed to the terrible assault inflicted on his body and mind. According to the Middlesex County Times, his coffin was brought to Greenford Park Cemetery on a gun carriage, volleys were fired over his grave and the Last Post was played by a bugler. All this was arranged by the Acton branch of the NFDDSS. I wonder how many others, unlike William, slipped through the cracks in the support they were entitled to. Was he lucky? Perhaps. He had been supported throughout his life by imperfect systems of official care, and had done his best to prosper despite their failings. His death certificate describes William as a former musician as well as an ex-private of the Middlesex Regiment, and although that information didn’t make it onto his headstone it was something he achieved through his own efforts rather than luck.

At Westminster Abbey the Unknown Warrior lies in a casket of royal oak, under a slab of black marble, someone who could be mourned by all who did not have a known grave to visit. He was chosen from four undentified men taken from the battlefields of France and Flanders. Perhaps he was a workhouse boy, and a kind of luck has placed him amongst kings.

Text © Albertina McNeill 2025 with the exception of quotations. Do not reproduce without written permission on each occasion. All rights reserved. Do not add text or images to Pinterest or similar sites as this will be regarded as a violation of copyright.

For Ben Chesterton

Thank you to:
Ben Chesterton
Alan Bradford, Vicar of St. John the Baptist Church, Hillingdon
Please donate to maintain this wonderful church.

Sources:
Private W Hodges – CWGC

The Workhouse
Lost Hospitals of London
“Industrial Schools in England, 1857-1933, ‘Moral Hospitals’ or ‘Oppressive Institutions’?”, Gillian Carol Gear (A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of London Institute of Education, 1999).
“The Workhouse – A Social History” Norman Longmate, Pimlico, 1974
“Macmillan’s Magazine” 1861
“Lost Voices of the Edwardians”, Max Arthur, Harper Press, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006.
Middlesex County Times, Wednesday, November 19, 1919
“Oliver Twist”, Charles Dickens, 1838
Wikipedia
Ancestry
General Register Office
4th Battalion The Middlesex Regiment