Tuesday, September 15, 2026

too awesome to pass on, I must share this



When 30 men from Catwick, in East Yorkshire, left to fight inWW1, the village blacksmith John Hugill nailed a coin for each of them, mostly farthings, to the doorpost of his forge on Main Street, just below a lucky horseshoe.

Remarkably, all 30 men returned home alive, though one, Joseph Grantham, came back having lost an arm. Hugill marked this by cutting a notch out of one of the coins to represent the missing limb, before nailing it back into place.

Two decades later, when another 30 villagers went off to fight in WW2, Hugill repeated the exact same ritual, and once again, every single man came home safely, making Catwick one of just a handful of "doubly thankful" villages in the whole of England and Wales.

The horseshoe and coins have since been mounted onto a wooden plaque, passed down through the family and now kept by the blacksmith's grandson, also named John Hugill, who still lives next door to the old forge and calls it "a fantastic piece of history."

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