Was watching something on TV and it reminded me of a question that I had heard once on Brain of Britain and prompted a touch of googling and stumbled across this which I found interesting about the Thankful or Blessed Villages (which are settlements in England and Wales from which all their members of the armed forces survived
World War I because wikipedia says so):
From the
Telegraph:
No surprise, then, that the most elaborate testament to the safe return of a village’s male population, at Catwick, in East Yorkshire, has never been on public display. Knowledge of its existence owes much to the research of Norman Thorpe, who, with his colleagues, has put together a website cataloguing the experiences of the Thankful Villages.
“When the men of the village joined up in 1914-18, the village blacksmith, John Hugill, nailed a coin for each man to the doorpost below a lucky horseshoe just inside his forge,” says Thorpe. “Thirty men joined, so there were 30 coins, and they all returned. One of the men did lose an arm, though, so John Hugill took one of the coins off, cut a piece out of it, and nailed it back again.”
Even more surprisingly, the same thing happened in the Second World War, with 30 men going off to fight and 30 men returning. This makes Catwick one of the dozen or so Doubly Thankful villages, never to lose a man in either war.
Far from being displayed in pride of place in the village, though, the luck-bringing relic is kept in a safe place by the blacksmith’s grandson, a local engineer who also goes by the name of John Hugill.
“It’s a family heirloom, we keep it safe at home, and it only sees the light of day occasionally,” says Mr Hugill Jnr. “The thing is, people don’t readily talk about these things. I remember finding out one day, to my great surprise, that the old village postmaster had been at the D-Day landings. He never ever spoke about it, as far as I knew.