Received this photo from Mike Heslop as well as the following information......In the centre of the photo is my wife's (Barbara Smith) Grandfather. He told everyone, if asked, his full name was John, George, Henry, Dowsy, Archibald, Joseph, Whitsun Smith. He was known to everyone as Auld Whit, you see all the other names belong to his friends in the photo. They all enlisted in the First World War and he was the only survivor. The others were all Wheatley Hill pit men and were all killed. He said if he took their names they would live on in him and so they did until he passed away aged 83. He believed it was wrong to leave a friend behind so in his own way he didn’t.

    I know that along with Whitsun they were all Wheatley Hill Pitmen who decided to heed the call of King and Country and went off to fight in WW1. I Cannot put a name to a face but they are his friends so John, George etc., are all there. Incidentally Whit didn't escape the savagery unscathed. In an attack on a railway embankment he was caught in machine gun fire which hit him in his left arm destroying 2" of bone and spinning him around. The rest of the burst destroyed his buttocks. He was invalided back to England to a wounded receiving station, a disused jam factory, in West Hartlepool. Now come the almost unbelievable part of the story. The Doctors at the receiving station wanted to remove his left arm. If they did that he would not be able to continue as a pit man. There was no welfare state then. He refused to let them. Anesthetics were in short supply the vast majority of them were shipped out to France and the Front. Every three days they opened his wound and using bone forceps pulled the bones together bit by bit until they were close enough to knit. Can you imagine going through that. His arm was saved, although it was 2" shorter than his right. He went back to the pit and worked there until he retired aged 65yrs. He was a small man who used to smoke a pipe loaded with the strongest pipe tobacco he could find mixed with dried shredded Comfrey leaves which he picked and dried himself. The smell of that pipe was enough to repel anyone or thing that got within it's surprising range. Did he change? Not really I was once just in time to stop him operating on his own ingrowing thumb nail with his pocket knife and a candle ( for sterilizing the blade). I had to threaten that I would tell Minnie, his wife, before he would let me take him to A&E. I can still hear him "Huh the time this is bloody taking I could have had it done by now and be sitten in the Club." A remarkable man. The old saying 'They don't make them like that anymore.' Certainly applied to him..