The year the Anzacs came: the little-known story one English village still tells its children

Tucked away in the southern end of the Cotswolds, this English village may seem, at first glance, like a quiet postcard of rural life unchanged by the passage of time.

Yet beyond its historic stone cottages and charm lies a history that binds it across oceans and generations to Australia. In a quiet corner of the church cemetery rest almost two dozen young members of the Australian Flying Corps, whose lives were cut short not in battle – but in the skies above Gloucestershire, where they trained to fly.

These white headstones, set against the rolling hills and neatly trimmed yew hedges, do not mark the fallen of Gallipoli or the Somme. Instead, they tell a no less tragic story of the cost of preparation – for a war that would already be over by the time some perished.

In early 1918, eight months before the Armistice, Australia, seeking to establish its own air arm, sent hundreds of men from the 7th and 8th Training Squadrons of the AFC to Leighterton. Here, on the grounds of Bowldown Farm, a grass aerodrome sprouted, its portable timber and canvas hangars sheltering fragile flying machines from English rain and wind. For villagers – who had never seen an aircraft before – the loop-the-loops and barrel rolls performed by sunburnt young men from the Antipodes must have seemed like wizardry.

But flight, in those early years, was as deadly as it was daring. Of the 23 Australians buried at Leighterton, 18 were killed in training – five of them in mid-air collisions. Others succumbed to pneumonia and Spanish flu, and one to a car accident. Their average age barely crept above 22.

Among them was Sergeant Thomas Llewellyn Keen, who had survived Gallipoli and the deserts of Palestine, where he was awarded a Military Cross. He had exposed himself to exceptionally heavy rifle and machine-gun fire to run messages between squadrons of the Light Horse.

Keen was killed in a training crash in March 1919, mere weeks before he was due to return home. Lieutenant Geoffrey Dunster Allen, just 21 and from Haberfield in Sydney, died when his Sopwith Camel nosedived during a manoeuvre. His family erected a unique gravestone, adorned with a carved propeller and the biblical phrase: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

This cemetery is not just a resting place, but a storybook of interrupted lives.

Lieutenant Patrick George Walsh, a rugby player and bank clerk from Toowoomba, was one of several who had already seen service on the Western Front before dying in an English field. His family received by post a painstaking account of his final hours, right down to the vicar’s words and the mourners who stood beside his grave.

It’s not just their deaths that echo here, but the lives they built briefly in Gloucestershire. Alan Vaughan, a local playwright and historian who grew up near the old Minchinhampton aerodrome, has spent decades documenting the Australians’ time here.

“Some of them married local girls,” he says. “One fellow, a Sergeant Nick Reyne, started a bus company. The kangaroo emblem on the buses is still remembered in the district. They didn’t just pass through – they became part of the village.”

Vaughan notes that their presence here marked the beginning of modernity in this pocket of England. In a region still reliant on horse-drawn carts, the thrum of engines and the sight of aircraft overhead were transformative. Boys and girls watched with awe the men they regarded as latter-day pop idols.

Village fetes were enlivened by “the flying kangaroos” – a band of talented airmen who staged music-hall style revues, singing and joking their way through the strain of training life. The Australians played cricket against villagers and rugby the “Aussie way”. In Stroud, one romantic pilot was known to swoop low over town to drop love letters to a terrified young woman below. Another was said to have flown under a railway bridge in an attempt to impress her.

But high spirits occasionally came at a cost. Stroud’s magistrates, in one memorable case, sentenced three Australians to return “forthwith to the front” for stealing a pair of boots. More notoriously, in April 1919, two Australian mechanics and a civilian stood trial for stealing a pig from an RAF captain’s farm. The courtroom scene included five witnesses, three policemen and the pig’s body.

Despite these misadventures, the Australians were deeply woven into the social fabric of the area. Church records, newspapers and village gossip preserve their time here not just as military trainees, but as young men full of vitality.

Robert Bryant-Pearson, warden at the village church, St Andrews, says the community remains proud of that connection.

“I can assure you the village community holds dear the fact that the brave lads buried here died serving the British Commonwealth in a country far away from their native homes,” he says.

“These young guys who lost their lives far away from home … far away from their relatives. So local people step up to remember them … We honour that every year.”

He said the local Royal British Legion branches deserved credit because, with so many British forces buried “in far-flung places”, they’d chosen to pay respect to the fallen here “in the hope others are doing the same elsewhere”.

That honour takes shape most poignantly each April, on the Sunday closest to Anzac Day. A parade winds through Leighterton’s narrow lanes, led by a brass band. Children from the primary school, who are taught about the bravery of the Anzacs in their classrooms, lay wreaths, and the Australian and New Zealand high commissions send representatives to pay their respects. A service, led by the St Andrew’s vicar, has been annually held since 1931, except for the years 1940-45.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with the help of village volunteers, keeps the cemetery immaculate. The Portland stone shines white in the Cotswolds sun.

I trace my fingers along the names etched into the stones, each telling of a young man who never returned. Lieutenant Jack Henry Weingarth of Marrickville, who died instructing a student near Yate. Second Lieutenant Oscar Dudley Shepherd of Goulburn, a beloved cricket captain and tennis player, whose SE5a disintegrated mid-flight. Roy Lytton Cummings, a Gallipoli veteran turned instructor, who died with his pupil in a horrific mid-air collision that killed three. Charles Clarence Frederick, an American-born mechanic from Leongatha, Victoria – via Peking – whose Sopwith Camel came down near Rodmarton.

The training was brief, intense and perilous. After just a dozen 15-minute flights with an instructor, cadets were sent solo. The Camel, with its reputation for spinning out under novice hands, claimed many lives. “Some pilots died doing dangerous stunts,” Bryant-Pearson says. “Others were simply caught by bad luck or mechanical failure.”

The training aerodrome is long gone and fields returned to quiet farmland. The hangars, barracks and mess halls dismantled, sold off or left to rot. But the legacy endures – in gravestones, in memorials, and in memory.

A stone monument, unveiled in 1994 by the then Prince of Wales, stands near the cemetery. The now King Charles III is a neighbour, his Highgrove home not far away. A plaque installed in 2009 by P&O Cruises, whose ships once carried the men back to Sydney, also marks the site. And beneath it all, the story of the First Training Wing lives on.

Not all who died were buried at Leighterton. Some, with family nearby, were laid to rest in Tetbury, Cirencester or Lasborough, where the officers’ mess was once located at Lasborough House. One former Digger, Edward Baron Broomhall, who stayed in Gloucestershire as a car salesman, asked to be buried among his mates after he died of cancer in 1930.

The epitaphs on their graves speak of pride and grief. One family wrote simply: “An Anzac – He Did His Duty.” Another left a line asking the reader to remember that this young man had died “not in vain”.

The grave of Cadet Ernest Howard Jefferys, who died in that mid-air collision that also claimed the lives of Cummings and his student, Lieutenant Charles William Scott, is perhaps the most poignant.

To mark his grave, his parents, Peter and Rose, chose:“To live in hearts of those we love is not to die. Our Son, an Anzac.”

A century and more since these young men flew above the hedgerows and villages, their story continues to be told where they trained, lived, laughed, loved and then left.

It is etched into stone, into memory, and into the heart of a village that adopted these young men as its own.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.