The Other Female Name on the Crook War Memorial
Among the names of WW2 casualties added to the War Memorial in 1959, there is one female name, that of Evelyn Davies, listed under the heading of NAAFI. Up the hill in Crook Cemetery, in the row of WW2 graves maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, there is a headstone with the wording Evelyn Davis, 6th September 1943; unlike the others, the top of this stone has a notch at each corner.
The Northern Echo 09/09/1943 contained the following Death notice:
DAVIES 6 Sept at Base Hospital Beverley. Evelyn aged 18, dearly loved daughter of Philip and Frances Davies of 20 West Rd, Crook. Interment Crook Cemetery, leaving residence at 2.30pm for service in St Catherine’s Church. Friends accept this intimation.
From other publicly available information it seems that Evelyn was born in 1925 and may have been the 5th of 9 children of her father Philip and mother Frances (née Richmond) who married in 1915. By 1943, it seems she had left home to work in some capacity for the NAAFI at a Camp near Beverley (probably an Army Camp). While there, it appears that she contracted an ear infection which developed into septicemia, and she died in the Emergency Hospital in Beverley.
As elsewhere, at the beginning of WW2 a specific area was set aside in Crook Cemetery so that the expected war casualties could be buried together. However we don’t know how Evelyn came to be buried in this area – whether this was as a result of a request from the NAAFI or the family, or simply the decision of the cemetery authorities. Given that Evelyn had left home (perhaps with some family apprehension) to work at an Armed Forces camp for an organisation closely associated with the Armed Forces, there may have been a feeling that her untimely death made her effectively a war casualty – even if she wasn’t actually a member of the armed forces and didn’t die of enemy action.
At the end of the war, when CWGC took over responsibility for war graves, they found that the special areas set aside in cemeteries sometimes contained the graves of those like Evelyn who were not war casualties according to CWGC’s definition, and were not technically their responsibility. However in the interest of respect and of uniformity within these special areas, CWGC usually took over and maintained such graves, marking them with the slightly different ‘non-war’ headstone which has the notch in each top corner. CWGC records show that after a site-visit they made to Crook in the 1950s they noted that Evelyn’s grave was still marked with a wooden cross, and suggested that this should be replaced by a ‘non-war’ headstone; however for some reason this didn’t actually happen until the 1970s. CWGC records also show that Evelyn’s surname was originally recorded as DAVIES, but for some unrecorded reason, this was early on altered to DAVIS – the spelling which is on the headstone.
In the meantime, someone had ensured that Evelyn’s name was remembered on the War Memorial when the WW2 names were added in 1959; it isn’t known if anyone later raised the misspelling on the headstone.
Evelyn seems to have had several siblings and there may well be members of her family who still live in Crook and who know more of her story; there may even be some older people in Crook who remember Evelyn.
