The Last Harvest
ON A CRISP November morning in 2021, three elderly men gathered beside a newly erected street sign in the Lincolnshire village of Hacconby.
They stood proudly, smiling for the photographer as the street sign denoting Wyer Close was formally unveiled ahead of Remembrance Sunday.
To many people passing by today, it is simply another village cul-de-sac.
A place where children learn to ride bicycles in comparative safety, where neighbours exchange greetings over garden gates, and delivery drivers glance at their sat navs before turning into this quiet corner of the fens.
Few realise that the name commemorates one of the most heartrending misfortunes ever to befall a single family in this peaceful village:
The tragic loss of the Wyer brothers.
Long before the Great War transformed Europe, the Wyers lived the sort of life that had changed little for generations.
Born in nearby Kirkby Underwood in 1848, William Wyer was a farm labourer. His wife, Sarah Elizabeth, was a Hacconby girl, and together they raised a large family in the village.
Their home would have been full of bustle, hard work and the daily rhythms of rural life. There were fields to tend, horses to care for, hedges to lay, harvests to gather and livestock to feed. William’s sons learned quickly that life was earned through work.
Robert arrived first in 1885. Edmund followed two years later. William, the youngest of the three brothers, was born in 1894. Between them came sisters and younger brothers, until the family numbered ten children.
Like countless agricultural families across the fenlands, theirs was a household where everyone contributed. There was little luxury, but there was security in family, church and home.
From the comparatively comfortable standpoint of today, it is difficult to imagine that this ordinary family would come to suffer losses almost beyond comprehension.
The Wyer brothers were three volunteers among many in the area who answered their country’s call to arms. And tragically, these three young farm workers never came home.
But how did the young men from rural Lincolnshire, men with so much to live for, become caught up in a war that began over a thousand miles away?
To answer that, we must return to another summer. A long, warm summer.
And the harvest of 1914.
THE MORNING OF Sunday, 28 June, 1914 dawned warm and bright across much of Europe.
In the rolling fenland countryside around Hacconby, it began as countless summer mornings had before it.
The first birds had long since broken the silence and, as the eastern sky brightened over the broad, open fields, young men were already stirring. Horses needed feeding before the morning’s church service. And a continuation of good weather meant that the afternoon would be spent in the fields.
Hay waited to be turned, barley was beginning to ripen and another long day lay ahead beneath the summer sun.
Among those whose ‘day of rest’ would be limited to the morning were three brothers: Robert, Edmund and William Wyer.
As they considered the day ahead they could scarcely have known that this ordinary Sunday morning would become one of the most significant days in modern history.
For, more than a thousand miles away, another young man was preparing for his day.
The man’s name was Gavrilo Princip.
Nineteen years old, slight in build and suffering from tuberculosis, Princip belonged to a Serbian nationalist movement determined to free Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule.
Hidden beneath his clothing was a Belgian-made FN Model 1910 automatic pistol. In his pocket were cyanide capsules, intended to prevent capture should his mission succeed.
Within a few hours he would step onto the streets of Sarajevo, with murder in his mind.
As the Wyer brothers prepared to attend church, Princip checked his pistol one final time. Neither knew anything of the other. But by the end of the day, all of their lives would have irreversibly changed.
THE ASSASSINATION OF Archduke Franz Ferdinand has become one of the twentieth century’s extraordinary stories.
Earlier attempts on his life that day had failed. A bomb thrown at his motorcade missed its target and exploded beneath another car. Despite the threat to his life, the Archduke stubbornly insisted on continuing his day’s schedule before deciding to visit those injured by the bomb’s blast.
Then came the remarkable twist of chance that changed history.
Whilst on the way to Sarajevo’s hospital, the driver’s wrong turn brought the royal car almost to a halt outside the delicatessen where Gavrilo Princip happened to be standing.
Princip stepped forward. He fired twice. And within minutes, the Archduke and his wife Sophie were dead.
News of the murders swept rapidly across Europe. The ruling classes were outraged, and the story was front page news across all of Britain’s broadsheets.
But the Balkans had known unrest before. Many times. To the people of Hacconby this was simply another foreign crisis, tragic perhaps, but remote from their own lives. And besides, they had other priorities. There was work to be done.
Because the harvest could not wait.
THE FOLLOWING WEEKS passed much as they always had.
The corn ripened as the days grew hotter. Each working day spent in the fields grew longer.
Yet while wagons creaked home beneath heavy loads of hay and barley, Europe was becoming entangled in a web that few fully understood.
In Vienna, ministers debated how to punish Serbia. In St Petersburg, Russia watched anxiously, determined not to abandon her Slavic ally. In Berlin, Germany assured Austria-Hungary of her support.
While in Paris and London, governments hoped diplomacy might yet prevail.
The newspapers spoke of ultimatums. Of alliances. Of mobilisation.
They were words that had little import for the labourers in the fields around Hacconby. After all, there was that harvest to bring in.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the language changed as diplomacy became overshadowed by threats. Now there were deadlines.
On 23 July, Austria-Hungary delivered its ultimatum to Serbia, who later accepted almost everything demanded of her—but not enough. And so, on 28 July, exactly one month after the murders in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declared war on the Serbs — Russia’s ally.
The first domino had fallen.
STILL, BRITAIN REMAINED at peace, and in rural Lincolnshire work on the harvest approached its peak.
Robert, Edmund and William continued to rise with the dawn, working until fading light finally brought another exhausting day to an end. Yet, far beyond the fenland horizon another kind of harvest had begun.
Across the Russian Empire, regular soldiers and conscripts began making their way towards railway stations.
Mobilisation had commenced. It is a phrase that slips easily past the modern reader. However, in the charged atmosphere of the summer of 1914, it carried a far darker meaning.
Mobilisation meant reservists receiving their call-up papers. Horses being requisitioned from farms and villages. Railway stations filling with men carrying kitbags while locomotives stood ready to move entire armies according to timetables prepared years before.
Crucially, it meant that politicians were slowly surrendering control of events to generals.
Russia believed she had no choice. Germany believed the same. And each move compelled the other to set in train out-dated and inflexible plans for war.
And so, in this way, the dominoes continued to tumble.
SUNDAY, 2 AUGUST 1914 dawned warm and still.
The people of Hacconby gathered at St Andrew’s Church for morning worship, as they had done countless times before.
The familiar rhythm of the service will no doubt have offered comfort, yet there must surely have been an unmistakable sense that something significant had changed.
During the previous week the newspapers had carried increasingly alarming headlines, and it is not hard to imagine the hushed conversations that took place between neighbours, their words punctuated by the sound of church bells.
Men may have spoken in lowered voices at the church gate, scanning the latest reports while wives exchanged anxious glances. Even then, most will have continued to believe that common sense would prevail; surely Europe’s statesmen would find a way to pull back from the brink.
Standing among the congregation that morning were the three Wyer brothers.
Like everyone else, they could not possibly have known that within forty-eight hours Britain would be at war. Nor would they have realised that this ordinary Sunday would be one of the last they would ever spend together before the world they knew was swept away.
Monday morning, and another busy day in the shires of England. As work continued in the fields around Hacconby, Germany declared war on Russia. Then on France.
Tuesday: Germany’s obsolete Schlieffen Plan, prepared years before, swung into motion. Facing threats from east and west and unable to fight a war on two fronts, the German’s only plan was to engage France first of all, knock them out within six weeks, and then turn their forces around to face Russia.
For such an ambitious aim to be realised, speed was of the essence, and to achieve this it was vital for German forces to bypass France’s heavily-defended border by cutting through neutral Belgium. And this they did, ever-hopeful that speed alone could win the coming war.
For Britain, Germany’s violation of the Law of Nations in its move against ally, Belgium changed everything.
On the evening of 4 August 1914, Britain’s own ultimatum to Germany expired. And at eleven o’clock that night, the country found itself at war with Germany.
Despite these cataclysmic events played out on the world’s stage, the following morning dawned over Hacconby much as the previous one had. The birds still sang. The horses still needed feeding. But nothing was the same.
Three brothers who had gone to bed as agricultural labourers awoke as citizens of a nation at war; a nation that would soon be calling for fit and able young men to carry its political ambitions onto the bloody battlefield. Men like Tom Hutchins, Edward Ellis and Robert Wand. Men like the Wyer boys.
And neither they nor anyone around them could ever have known that within only a few years, their names would be carved into the memorial of the village they called home. A village they would soon be preparing to leave.
The Wyer Brothers’ story continues in Part Two.
Author’s Notes:
On 2 April 1911, when the census was taken, only Edmund remained at the family home in Hacconby. Robert was then living with an uncle in Oldham, where he was recorded as a labourer. William, meanwhile, was lodging in the south Lincolnshire village of Greatford, where he was working as a horseman on a farm.
We cannot know for certain where the three young men were three years later, at the outbreak of war. For the purposes of this narrative, and to reflect the close-knit family networks of the area, I have therefore chosen to place them together at Hacconby, working on the harvest. This is a reconstruction, but it is by no means an implausible one.
The village itself has been known by various spellings throughout its history. Today the name is generally rendered as Haconby, but Hacconby was a contemporary spelling found in many records from the period in which this narrative is set. I have therefore chosen to use the latter form throughout.
While I have exercised a degree of creative licence in portraying the Wyers’ lives and activities in the months leading up to the war, the subsequent account of their enlistment, training and movements with the Army is based upon surviving service records, military records and battalion war diaries.
No known images of the Wyer brothers exist. I have therefore used family archive photographs of other, related males from which to create conceivable likenesses.
RAVEN MOON 