Image: The end of Sandwell Road, 2025.

After the declaration of war in August 1914, the West Bromwich Territorials returned from their training in Rhyl, marched down to the Drill Hall at Carters Green and got their harness and guns in good order. The leather has been in storage and was stiff and difficult to handle. Reservists were called up. Horses are being commandeered in the town. Crowds gather, the gates open, and the men march off to the railway station. Over the next few weeks, new recruits are sent to Winchester, Lichfield and other army centres.

In the early weeks of the war, the number of volunteers signing up far exceeded government expectations. The number of recruits in the town up to 7 September is recorded as 906, 69 of whom were rejected on health grounds. Swearing his allegiance to the King on the Bible, Joseph Lane signs up on Saturday 5 September, age 21. Joseph passes the medical exam - category ‘A’ indicates a volunteer is “able to march, see to shoot, hear well and stand active service conditions.” He will go on to serve with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and die at Ypres in 1917, grave not known.

Joseph was an iron dresser in a local foundry. He lived with his brothers and young sister at 220 Sandwell Road, off the High Street. Their father was a coal hewer, after the war a coal merchant. They go out their door and past the corporation stables. They can hear the hosses in the yard being readied. They’ll be off to war soon as well. They all go with him down the street, leaving Mother’s tears behind. Turn on the lower end of the high street, it’s crowded and the trams are slowed up to a snail pace, ringing their bells in frustration or jubilation, they can’t tell. Past the pork butchers, stationers, iron founders, bootmakers, confectioners, newsagents, drapers, hair dressers, fruiterers, bakers, chemist, tobacconists, printers, watch makers, tailors. Mrs Firkin’s pork pie shop at the Green is doing a fine trade today. No time to stop for a pint at the Oddfellows Arms. Joseph signs up and off he goes to the army.

His younger brother, Frank, an errand boy with the clothier industry, will enlist with the South Staffordshires in 1916 and be sent to the huge training camps at Cannock Chase. The youngest brother in the family, Moses Henry Lane, a parcels errand boy, will also join up, serving with King’s Own Scottish Borderers and listed as missing in France in 1918.

Frank is transferred to the Worcesters and finds himself sailing from Marseilles to the Salonika front. Before the final campaign on the Salonika front in September 1918, due to the considerable number of troops dying in hospitals with pneumonia and malaria, composite battalions are made up. Frank is transferred to the Gloucesters, who will then be sent to Batumi at the end of December 1918, as part of the new Army of the Black Sea. Some of them will travel on to Tiflis, others to Ararat. Rations are poor and sick rates remain high. There is a shortage of milk. No frozen meat is available and the Battalion diary records: ‘The men will not eat the locally purchased meat.’ Private Frank Lane is admitted to the Stationary Hospital at Batumi and dies on 16 January 1919, aged 22.