The First World War

In Mathon Church is a memorial giving the Roll of Honour for the village, and showing 13 names. We can suppose that probably 2 or 3 times that number of young men answered Kitchener’s call for volunteers inspired by patriotism and what they considered their duty. Some of them were probably encouraged by friends, always a powerful incentive with young people, and we know that later the military authorities took advantage of this by forming friends’ battalions. Some of them may have falsified their ages adding a year or two in order to stay with their pals. Others will have felt the call of adventure, a chance to “see the world”, and to be sure of food and clothes, for there was much poverty in the countryside. Agricultural wages at that time averaged 13shillings (65p.) per week, assuming that a tied cottage was provided rent free., and it was not until the submarine campaign became so effective , and it was essential to produce more of our own food that wages rose substantially . It was also due to the shortage of young men left to work the farms that Land Girls were now working beside the men. Not that this was something new. Women had worked in the fields since time immemorial., sometimes with a baby in a sling.

As early as 1915 when the Parish Council discussed the possibility of holding a Recruiting Drive in the village, they concluded that so few men were left that there was no point in doing so.

It was in 1915, that the W.I. came into being. This was certainly more than an opportunity for countrywomen to sell dressed poultry, eggs and jam at the markets, and supplement their incomes, welcome though that was. It was much more closely allied to the suffrage movement which their town sisters were concerned with, and a general tendency in time of war to look at one’s way of life and contemplate improvement. Mathons W.I. was founded in 1923. and has been well-attended since
In 1920 Mathon Court, which had been owned by the Abbaye Notre Dame de Bon Secours at Blauvac in France was sold. The abbaye had owned the house since 1912, using it as a “refuge”.

Why they needed a refuge in faraway Mathon is one of the puzzles of local history, and complicating matters still further is the presence in Hereford Record Office of a sale sheet for Mathon Court by the executors of W.C Vale on June 11 1914. At all events the nuns were here and it was John Pound’s first task to clear the rather neglected roads and paths when they left.