Family Lessons 156: Maurice Won

On my town’s war memorial was one M. Winn listed on the Second World War section. Knowing that a branch of my family with that name moved here from Lancaster in the early twentieth century, I wondered if he was ‘one of mine’. He was.

Corporal Maurice Winn was born in Barnoldswick in 1919 and was killed in France in June, 1944, where he lays buried at the Hottot-les-Bagues cemetery between Bayeux and Caen in Normandy. Fighting with the Sixth Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, he had landed on the famous Normandy beaches, from where troops proceeded inland to try and capture Caen. The 6th Battalion was so badly depleted during Operation Martlet and sustained such heavy casualties that it was returned to Britain and disbanded, the survivors joining the 7th Battalion.

Marmaduke and Annie Winn, my 2x great uncle and aunt, and Maurice's wife Dorothy (nee Annis) whom he had married at Bracewell Church only two years before, must have been devastated. At only 25, he should have been raising a family and building a home. Yet for service to king and country, he fell, laying buried with thousands of others in foreign soil. For giving his life, the Nazi gangsters who controlled the continent were forced to retreat until they were finally expunged; our generations benefit from Cousin Maurice’s violent death. I may never thank him, though I hope he prayed to the Prince of Peace amid that terrible conflict, preparing his heart for the likelihood of eternity, in which case, I shall meet him one day.

As members of the broader, Christian community, we also give thanks for those martyrs who, in times past, made our current Faith more comfortable and commodious: William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and ordinary folk, too, like Agnes Grebill, John Maundrel and Richard Spurge. They died in pain and were left in the dirt, but now they reign with Christ- glorious, dignified and honoured.

We give thanks.