Edmund was not a local; he had originally come from Cornwall, presumably in search of work.  He brought with him the traditional songs, not all of them polite to the ears of Victorian gentlefolk, which he had grown up with; and no doubt sang them to some of his Lydford friends, who had their own repertoire from Devon.  Sometimes the squire-vicar of the neighbouring parish of Lewtrenchard, the tireless Sabine Baring-Gould, would form an audience.  Baring-Gould built his own country house-cum-rectory, fathered 14 children, wrote Onward Christian Soldiers and other hymns, and produced over 100 books – one of them being Songs of the West in which, long before Cecil Sharp, he collected the folk songs he heard in Devon.  The world in which Frank Fry spent his boyhood was homespun.

There was little money in rural Devon in those years.  To judge from old photographs, village people were none too particular about the state of their roofs, many of which had holes in; they couldn’t afford to be.  But eventually there came a point when the roof needed renewing.  Thatch was picturesque but, from the village point of view, outmoded.  Tiles were cheaper and needed less looking after.  You could get stone ones from the parish of Coryton, next door to Lydford, although they would flake in a storm.  And mass-produced concrete tiles had come onto the market.  So these were difficult times for thatchers, as for other people in Lydford.  Frank Senior made a little extra by looking after another type of thatch: he cut hair for 6d a time. 

Some time before March 1917, young Frank went down to Plymouth and enlisted with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, who put him in a reserve training battalion.  He was then posted to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.  I’m not sure that he got overseas.  He is recorded as having died from pneumonia on March 24, 1918 – probably the victim of what was to prove an even deadlier killer than the shells, bullets, bombs and mines of the Great War itself: Spanish Flu. 

He is Fry, F.W. on the war memorial; his grave lies in Lydford churchyard, near the yews that he planted.  I have yet to see the stone.  Perhaps it will add to the story.

One of R.J.Petherick’s brothers is captured in a studio portrait aged twenty-one, in a stiff collar, long jacket and jaunty cap, a posed image in the guise of a man about town, swinging a cane.  The same young man looks quite different – and more at ease -- with his sheep, sleeves rolled up and smoking a cigarette, a broad smile on his face.  There is a photograph of the Lydford football club, players in white shorts down to their knees, flanked by other men of the village, respectably dressed in their collars and ties, if not looking too comfortable in them.  Dick isn’t sure whether R.J. is in the picture.  R.J. played in it with Archie Huggins (see earlier post).  Instead, we see him as a boy, in a family group with his proud father; he wears a suit of heavy cloth, with a watch chain hanging prominently in front of his waistcoat.  In another shot, he is shown, with the others, in the vegetable garden: R.J. is the one holding the horse’s rein.  He is the oldest of the three Petherick boys.  There’s also his sister, Frances, in a white apron. 

Like Huggins, he had been a member of the Royal North Devon Hussars (a yeomanry regiment equivalent to the modern Territorial Army) but was posted into the 5^th Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiemnt.  A group photograph of Dorsetshire soldiers has been made into a postcard.  ‘Dear Frances,’ reads the message, dated August 28, 1916, saying that he can be seen in the back row at the right.  ‘...It’s a bit of a mixed up lot you can see.’  He means that companies had been amalgamated to make good the losses they had suffered.  ‘Have had a fairly decent time so far, billets are better than canvas.  Shall have to leave next Sat.’  He expects the exam he is sitting on Thursday to be a ‘washout’.  Dick died on November 24, 1916, aged twenty-one.  He is one of the 72,194 British and South African soldiers whose names are emblazoned on the great Thiepval Arch, the memorial to the Missing: men whose bodies were blown to pieces in the shelling of the battlefield and never recovered for burial. 

What was the action in which he died?  I plan to find out.  Whatever the fight, it would have been hardly imaginable to the village he left.  The Great War not only took a son and brother from the Petherick family but may have imposed other sacrifices on those who stayed behind.  Frances never married, suffering the pain of a generation whose sweethearts never came home.