Four short paragraphs that told the tragic tale behind Great Langton war memorial

ONE of the area’s most isolated war memorials was unveiled 100 years ago. It is on a quiet lane outside the village of Great Langton, near Northallerton, and has its back to the Swale as it looks across the fields towards St Wilfrid’s Church.

It is 9.5ft high and has the names of seven men from the rural parish who had died during the First World War. It looks only to have been a small ceremony, meriting only four paragraphs, but there must have been plenty of emotion.

Among those present, said the D&S, “was Mrs Fife of Langton Hall, with her child and her parents, Mr and Mrs EH Courage”. The service, the paper said, was conducted by the local rector, the Reverend JM Walton.

And the first two names on the memorial are those of Lt-Col AJ Fife and Lt OT Walton.

Alexander Fife was the son of Major William Cookson-Fife who had bought nearby Langton Hall in 1891. Lt-Col Fife had been killed in northern France in 1917 at the age of 36, leaving his wife, Mary, to bring up their child.

Oswald Walton was the son of the rector. He had been born at Croft-on-Tees and was 24 when he died at 10.40am on April 12, 1917, in a mid-air collision over Baralle in northern France.

Oswald was in his FE2d biplane when it collided during aerial combat with an Albatros flown by Adolf Schulte, who was one of the first German aces with eight aerial victories.

An FE2d biplane (which stands for Farman's Experimental 2) like the one Oswald Walton, the son of the rector of Langton, was flying when he crashed into the German ace, Adolg Schulte, over northern France, killing them both

Some sources say that bringing down and killing the North Yorkshire rector’s son – plus his observer, a 19-year-old from Glasgow – was Schulte’s ninth aerial success, but as he died in the process, it was a Pyrrhic victory.