A Beswick man who had been invalidated home told the story of how he had come face to face with the enemy on the Western Front.
Private Peter Monks described how out of 500 men he had travelled out with, few had not been either killed injured or taken prisoner and how he had been in the trenches for a month.
You are lucky if you can find a trench with only a foot of mud in it he said, adding that trenches were being taken and retaken up to four times.
He had seen men standing on the bodies of the dead for a dry footing and described how he had fell into a German trench,eight foot deep which he likened to the Bradford coal pit.He fell on a German soldier, his bayonet entering his spine and his rifle exploding.
He was wounded when a grenade exploding under him as he attempted to stamp it into the mud unsuccessfully before being dragged away by four Gurkas.
Manchester sent another one hundred recruits to join the public schools and Universities battalion of the Royal fusiliers.
They assembled at Houldsworth Hall on Deansgate marching to the Town Hall for inspection by the Lord Mayor before setting off from London Road station bound for Epsom.
The inquest was held on a boy from Newton Heath who died of diphtheria over the new year.
His mother told the coroner that she did not think there was much wrong with him and did not call the doctor.
She was told that she had done a very bad thing and his life would have been saved if the doctor had arrived.
It was obvious that the lad had been ill for some time, a relative at the houe had said that a week earlier his throat was so sore than he could not swallow his food. A verdict of death by natural causes was however returned.
It was announced that a Manchester man was one of the victims of the Ilford train crash on New Year’s Day.Mr Alexander White was head of the fancy linens department at a Manchester firm and had been on business in the London area.
The funeral took place of the Rochdale businessmen Dir James Duckworth who died over New Year.
It had, said the Evening News, called forth a remarkable expression of feeling on the part of the town that Sir James had lived practically the whole of his busy life.
Seven hundred pounds of damage was done to the Ram Mill at Hollinwood after fire broke out in the cotton chamber with fifty bales of cotton and a pair of spinning mills destroyed.
