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Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages; Welsh: Pentrefi Diolchgar)[1][2] are settlements in England and Wales from which all their members of the armed forces survived World War I. The term Thankful Village was popularised by the writer Arthur Mee in the 1930s; in Enchanted Land (1936), the introductory volume to The King's England series of guides, he wrote that a Thankful Village was one which had lost no men in the war because all those who left to serve came home again. His initial list identified 32 villages. There are tens of thousands of villages and towns in the United Kingdom.
In an October 2013 update,[3] researchers identified 53 civil parishes in England and Wales from which all serving personnel returned. There are no Thankful Villages identified in Scotland or Ireland yet (all of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom).[4]
Fourteen of the English and Welsh villages are considered "doubly thankful", in that they also lost no service personnel during World War II.[4] These are marked in italics in the list below (note: while the list includes 17 of these, not all have been verified).
- ^ "Taith i gofio 'pentrefi diolchgar' (Tour in remembrance of "thankful villages")". BBC News (in Welsh). Retrieved 8 November 2018.
- ^ St Cyrus – an example of the use of "Blessed Villages" in section 'St Cyrus War Memorial' of the St Cyrus Newsletter, October/ November 2007, at mearns.org/stcyrus Accessed 11 November 2017
- ^ Norman Thorpe, Rod Morris and Tom Morgan. "The Thankful Villages". Hellfire corner. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
- ^ a b Kelly, Jon (11 November 2011). "Thankful villages: The places where everyone came back from the wars". BBC News Magazine. BBC News. Retrieved 12 November 2011.