Victoria Cross winner's role in First World War conscription appeals

He retired from the army in 1901 and married Muriel Walker, of Maunby Hall, where he lived for the last four decades of his life.

His derring-do meant that he became something of a local celebrity – he unveiled Romanby war memorial in the early 1920s, and he was chairman of the Northallerton Agricultural Show Committee.

Joanne Aston has discovered that he was also the last tribunal for deciding whether a man’s appeal against conscription into the army during the First World War was valid.

A man could be exempt on grounds of ill health, conscientious objection or that he worked in an essential occupation.

Read more: Northallerton's early court house and police HQ

At a time when soldiers were falling like ninepins, every recruit was vital, and to claim an exemption, a conscript had to apply to a local tribunal. If he was granted an exemption, the military could appeal to a last tribunal who, in the Thirsk area, was Major Hill-Walker.

The papers connected to the North Riding hearings have, unusually, survived and Joanne, after seeing an article in the D&S Times, became part of a project at the county record office to transcribe them.

Some of the hearings were fascinating: the Scarborough manager of an ice house presented a petition signed by the captain of every fishing boat saying how their crucial industry would be destroyed without his ice. He was conscripted.

Joanne, who gives talks to local groups on the stories that were uncovered, discovered another case heard by Major Hill-Walker in which a man running a building and decorating business, employing several people, pleaded that his business would collapse without him.

Read more: Alan Hill-Walker, Northallerton's only Victoria Cross winner

Maj Hill-Walker, whose job was to get as many men as possible into the army, was not sympathetic, either to the builder or to his principal employer who happened to have been born a German but had lived in North Yorkshire for 40 years.

"This man is the private workman for a millionaire Hun,” said the major, “who, it is generally expected, will shortly be interned at last.

“It is not to the advantage of the state that an alien should be allowed to keep this man from fighting for the allies. This Saxon, Austrian gentleman, acting no doubt under orders from Berlin, is employing a dozen men under this man – a new squad kept from the Army.”

The major’s attitude was despite the “millionaire Hun” having adopted British citizenship. Indeed, both of his sons were in the British army – one had already been killed fighting for the British king and country.

This shows how high and entrenched anti-German feelings were running.

“Official anti-German sentiments were driven from the top down to officials such as Hill-Walker, who felt comfortable using phrases such as ‘the Hun’ – a phrase regularly used in Parliament – in an official document,” says Joanne, who lives in Thirsk. “At the time of this appeal in 1916, the Home Secretary was Herbert Samuel, the MP for Cleveland, who declared that ‘although a man changed his nation, he did not always thereby change his nature’. These times were very hard.”

The “millionaire Hun” died in 1917. The appellant joined the army and survived the war.