WHEN the Great War broke out, WG ‘Don’ Shorrock and his young wife didn’t hesitate.

The family immediately offered their grand house in Darwen as a much-needed hospital.

They had moved from another family home, Oakleigh in Bolton Road – just across the main road from the Bowling Green Mill which he ran – the year before war broke out and gone to live in a large cottage on the wild moorland above Entwistle.

The family’s elegant Moss Bridge House, they decided, would make an ideal hospital – and it certainly did.

In October, within a few weeks of the war starting, a group of 13 wounded Belgian soldiers were moved in and there was a steady stream of casualties throughout the conflict.

Looking back now it seems to have been a very generous gesture. But that’s what was almost expected of Darwen’s mill-owning elite. Others did the same.

William Gordon was a member of the mill-owning Shorrock family and he carried on working.

He and his wife, New Zealand-born Ethel, also helped out at the hospital.

They, like everyone else, were determined to ‘do their bit’.

Ethel had a fourth child during the war but she also found time to work alongside the medical staff and volunteers.

And she also found time to keep a diary. She kept it all through the war – and when the Second World War started 20 years later she picked up her pen and carried on.

Ethel Shorrock’s diaries have made up into a book which has been written by her adoring granddaughter Jill Faux.

It tells an amazing story, particularly of life on the home front from 1914-18.

It’s a mix of rumour and speculation, of patriotism and tenderness, sprinkled with incredible detail – the price of eggs, tendering for 10,000 shrouds, snippets of news from around the globe, a show at the Library Theatre, and the difficulty of obtaining dried fruit – a luxury not a necessity, she says firmly.

WG seemed to spend the early months of the war chasing round in his car with local bobbies at dead of night looking for enemy planes.

When he had a bit of spare time he looked after his hens at New Meadow between Bull Hill and Entwistle.

Neither Moss Bridge House or Bowling Green Mill have survived, but Oakleigh, still looks out over Bolton Road.

Jill Faux has done an excellent job editing the diaries of her grandmother.

Newsy items and gossip from the war front are mixed with stories of shopping trips to London and visits to relatives.

It’s an interesting book with a different slant to so many of the Great War books now on sale.

Bite-sized chapters make for easy reading and it’s just a pity that the gutters down the spine are desperately tight.

n Granny’s War, the War Time diaries of a Lancashire cotton mill owner’s wife, is edited by Jill Faux and published by 2QT at £15.99.