Lemington-on-Tyne war memorial

The Lemington-on-Tyne war memorial is possibly the only war memorial in England to name a Quaker who served with the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU)

The service of Walter Messer

The Quaker commemorated on this First World War memorial is Walter Messer (1894 - 1915). His name appears among the inscriptions remembering dead from the Lemington-on-Tyne area, Northumberland.

Walter was born in 1894 into a Quaker family living in the local area. He is believed to have been educated at the Quaker Ackworth School and later worked as an agricultural student before volunteering for the Friends War Victims Relief Service (FWRS) in May 1915.

Messer first served with the FWVRS in France until August 1915. In October, that year, he transferred to the French FAU unit.

Friends Ambulance Unit

The Quaker Peace testimony rejects war and violence as contrary to Quaker faith, so most Friends could not take up arms in wartime.

Instead, during The First World War, Quakers focused on humanitarian work and established organisations such as the FWVRS and the FAU. Almost 1,500 Conscientious Objectors were recruited, not all of them Quakers, and Messer was one of them.

The FWVRS had been established in 1870 following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and created the red and black Quaker Star as its symbol.

From the beginning of World War I until after the armistice, the FWVRS set up camps for refugees in Belgium and the Netherlands. It also opened a hospital, a school for blind children, an orphanage and several rebuilding projects across Europe.

The FAU was established specifically for World War I and first went to Dunkirk in 1914 under the auspices of the British Red Cross Society. It carried out relief work in Allied-occupied Belgium and supported wounded men from active French divisions in the Champagne and Argonne regions.

During World War II, the FAU established a training camp in Birmingham for ambulance drivers and orderlies. More than 1,300 people were trained, with new recruits beginning by helping those in need during the Blitz of London.

FAU members also served overseas in several European countries, as well as in Africa and the Middle East. There was also a deployment to China to relieve suffering caused by the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 - 1945).

The original trainees at the 1939 training camp issued a statement expressing their purpose:

“We purpose to train ourselves as an efficient Unit to undertake ambulance and relief work in areas under both civilian and military control, and so, by working as a pacifist and civilian body where the need is greatest, to demonstrate the efficacy of co-operating to build up a new world rather than fighting to destroy the old.”

The FAU was wound up in 1946 and replaced by the Friends Ambulance Unit Post-War Service, which continued until 1959.

Messer's death and remembrance

Only around a month after transferring to the FAU, on 28 November, Messer was killed during a German air raid. He is buried in Malo-les-Bains Communal Cemetery, Nord, grave I. A. 4A.

On the Lemington-on-Tyne war memorial, the letters FAU appear before Messer's name, recording the form of service through which this Friend entered the community's roll of the war dead.