The Wickets Inn Roll of Honour

A Roll of Honour recording local servicemen who received gifts from a comfort fund established at the Wickets Inn, Holyhead Road that was in operation between 1915 and 1918. It was the first mass post-war commemoration to be unveiled in Wellington.

 

Background

The Wickets Inn Roll of Honour was unveiled on the 16th April 1919, when  ‘a large community of mostly demobilised soldiers’ gathered at Mr Carter’s in Holyhead Road to witness the event (as the Wellington Journal reported the following Saturday, in an article entitled War Memorial). The scroll, designed by C Home of Wellington, recorded the names of 225 servicemen who each received gifts of cigarettes or a money order from a comfort fund established in 1915. Over the course of the following three years, £50 was raised and a total of 273 packages were sent out. 

The Wickets Roll of Honour was Wellington's first object of mass commemoration

It was not the first time the Wickets Inn comfort fund had reached the pages of the local paper and, indeed, the Wickets was not the only pub in town to have established such an enterprise — the Three Crowns at the top of New Street raised £68.2s.6d (around £3500 today) for soldiers and sailors during the same period the Wickets scheme was in operation. In May 1918, the Journal provided its readers with more details about Mr Carter himself, a retired artilleryman who ‘retains all his old affection for the forces and is justly proud of their recent achievements’. The money was raised via the use of a collecting box, while a small committee managed the distribution of funds. Mr Carter explained that, before August 1915, cigarettes had been sent to two regiments ‘but when so many local lads were called to the colours it was decided to confine the gifts to them’.

Current Status

In July 2019, the roll of honour still hangs in the same pub in which it was unveiled 100 years earlier