Special exhibition in Higham Ferrers to pay tribute to local heroes honoured with new street names

Gary Salmon, deputy mayor of Higham Ferrers, alongside local First World War historian and author Geoff Moore, has spent six months researching and trying to find living relatives of the local heroes and heroine.

Gary said: “When you look at how many served and the age they died and the fact that some families ceased to exist, it is moving.”

The exhibition, that will run through the Remembrance weekend, will pay tribute to the 11 servicemen and suffragette Alice Maud Shipley, who died in 1951 aged 82.

On Saturday (November 9) from 9.30am until 1pm at Hope Methodist Church, there will be some local re-enacting from family Ria Jefferies, her son Thomas, seven, and her father, William Chalmers.

Ria will be dressed as a suffragette, complete with a ‘Vote for Women’ rosette, and her son and father will be in civilian clothes of the era. It will also include wartime artefacts, trench art and other remembrance displays.

Panels displaying stories and pictures of the heroes and heroine will be on guard around the church, which will then be moved to the town’s War Memorial in the Market Square for the Remembrance Service on Sunday (November 10).

After the service, visitors will be able to see the exhibition boards in the nearby Bede House during the post-Remembrance coffee morning, and on Monday, November 11 and Tuesday, November 12, the boards will be on show at St Mary’s Church, alongside Remembrance-themed artwork from local schools from 10am to 7pm.

Higham Ferrers Town Council assistant clerk, Emily Arrow, said: “It’s been a pleasure and an honour to help research and compile the stories of these brave heroes and a heroine.

"Every year, local people turn out in their hundreds on Remembrance Sunday to show their respect to the men who went to war from the town and I fully expect they will support this exhibition too.”

Higham Ferrers road names honour local heroes

A handful of Higham Ferrers streets have been given new names in honour of those 11 servicemen and Shipley, which organisers have said has been ‘a satisfying and a moving experience.’

The names will be for roads in the development being built by HarperCrewe that is currently going up between the back of the town’s Ferrers School and the nearby A6 bypass.

The main road in the new estate is Draper Road, which is being named after William Ernest Draper, who lived in Kimbolton Road.

Other streets will be named after the likes of Sidney Gadsby (Gadsby Place), Reginald Litchfield and his brother Thomas Litchfield (Litchfield Drive), William Wagstaff (Wagstaff Court) and Shipley Close, being named after suffragette Alice Maud Shipley

After being approached by North Northants Council (NNC), Higham Ferrers Town Council selected names from the War Memorial, whereby NNC made the final decision about which ones to use. Some had to be discounted if a name, or part of a name, was already a street name in the area.

As well as honouring the 12 by naming roads after them, HarperCrewe has also agreed to put up an information board about them at the entrance to the estate.

Gary Salmon added: “We have been able to trace several descendants and after the BBC ran the story on its website, we were contacted by a relative of two of our heroes – Reginald and Thomas Litchfield - who live in Canada, and who plans to visit her Higham Ferrers relatives next year.”

However, while several street names are in place, Gary Salmon and Geoff Moore are still unable to put names to some of the photographs they have amassed, and have never found a picture of suffragette Shipley, with Gary calling it ‘a mystery’, adding: “You begin to wonder if she ever had a photograph taken.”