My village, Stoke Bruerne in south Northamptonshire, is just getting back to normal after a great influx of visitors for its annual weekend festival called ‘Village at War’. Stoke Bruerne is a small place that sits astride the Grand Union Canal about halfway along its route from London to Birmingham. Its fame, such as it is, rests on its seven locks and the fact that it houses a Canal Museum; and the ‘Village at War’ event was started six years ago by the Friends of the Canal Museum to raise money for that excellent institution. I don’t yet know how well it has done this year, but last year it was attended by more than 12,000 people and raised £20,000.
According to the Village at War’s website, this is Britain’s ‘only wartime vintage themed canal festival’, which is about as rarefied a category as one could imagine. And Stoke Bruerne also seems a strange place in which to hold such an event because its role in the second world war was, to say the least, insignificant. The canal, it is true, was unusually busy during the war years, carrying coal and other freight between the Midlands and London to relieve the burden on the railways. But the village itself suffered no damage and no war deaths.
The war memorial beside the church, which serves both Stoke Bruerne and its neighbouring village, Shutlanger, lists 18 servicemen from both villages who lost their lives in the first world war, but only two from Shutlanger (and none from Stoke Bruerne) who died in the second world war. Between them these villages raised a platoon for the Northamptonshire Home Guard, and Stoke Bruerne alone mustered two motor cars, one motorbike, 12 bicycles and 13 wheelbarrows for use against the enemy in the event of a German invasion.
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