A NASTY ACCIDENT ON EASTON STREET

Frederick Waite was born in Easton Royal in 1902 and went to the village school until the day after his thirteenth birthday when he left to work at Manor Farm. He lived with his parents, Edward and Kate, at No 21 next to the school.

On the evening of 8th June 1932, Frederick was driving a horse and cart down the village street towards the farm. In front of him appeared a loose horse which bolted, causing the horse pulling the cart to take off in hot pursuit. Frederick was thrown into the road, shaken but without sustaining serious injury. Meanwhile, the horse and cart had careered down the road and crashed into the wall of the church near the farm.

It was not until later when the damaged cart was being removed, that the grizzly fact was revealed that trapped between the cart and the wall was the body of a man. And by a fateful coincidence that man was John Winchcombe, Frederick’s brother-in-law who had also been employed at the farm as a carter.

John had moved with his parents to live at No 7 and in 1913 at the age of twenty-four married Emily Waite who was sixteen at the time. During the war he fought in the Hampshire Regiment and is remembered on the wooden war memorial in the church to those who served and returned. On the 1918 Electoral Register he is noted as an ‘absent military voter’ living at No 18 which no longer exists but stood in what is now the back garden of the Old Beer House.  John was buried in Easton cemetery where his grave is marked with an inscribed border.

A year later, his widow Emily married Leslie Cook, a resident of Collingbourne Ducis whose grandfather was head carter at Manor Farm. Leslie had joined the Wiltshire Regiment when he was 15 years old after committing the youthful deception of increasing his age to eighteen on the application. This matter was in due course discovered but without detriment to his progress.

Leslie spent 25 years in the army travelling all over the world. Before the second world war, Emily accompanied him on his travels but when the war started, she joined the Red Cross and was sent to work in Hawick, Scotland.

Leslie reached the rank of Captain and Quartermaster of a battalion which saw action in Sicily and France. The operations in Sicily presented him with many difficulties in keeping the battalion supplied with food, water, ammunition and other necessities, but they were little compared with what had to be overcome during the fighting in the mountains of Italy. His battalion then took part in the assault crossing of the Garigliano and finally fighting on the Anzio beach-head.

During an interview with the Marlborough Times published in October 1944, Captain Cook told of his exploits: ‘Everyone at Anzio could be said to be on the frontline because the area was compact, with little depth and the rear lines near the coast were frequently shelled and bombed. During one period we had an air-raid every morning at 7.00 a.m. and we could almost set our watches by their precise timing.’

When the Wiltshire Battalion held positions known as the ‘Fortress’, supplies had to be taken by any available manpower during the hours of darkness, following a guiding tape throughout a journey that could take at least two hours. ‘Whenever the enemy heard the sound of movement, they lit flares or gave a burst of machine gun fire and the porters fell flat very quickly, I can assure you’ added Captain Cook.

After the war, Leslie and Emily moved to a newly built bungalow called Windyridge in Easton Royal and spent the rest of their lives in what Leslie described as ‘a very lovely village to live in’.

After his accident Frederick Waite continued working as a carter, still living at home with his parents. But fate had not yet finished with him.  In 1944 he married Kathleen, a domestic servant working at the farm of his employer’s son, James Stanley Haines, in Milton Lilbourne. Soon after their marriage, Kathleen died in Marlborough giving birth to their son, Richard John William Waite, who did not long survive her.

Frederick died in the Savernake Hospital in 1965 aged 63 years.

Captain Leslie Cook