Paving stone tribute to VC hero on display

It was awarded to a soldier who won the top award for valour in a desperate rearguard action in the opening days of the conflict.

Major Charles Allix Lavington Yate, of Madeley, Telford, fought to the last against overwhelming odds at the Battle of Le Cateau on August 26, 1914, and was initially reported killed, although he had in fact been taken prisoner.

While the intention of the national scheme is to lay the paving stones on the exact centenary of the action for which the Victoria Crosses were awarded, in the case of Major Yate's commemorative stone there will be a delay.

"It arrived on Monday in a wooden crate and we have now put it in a display cabinet in our reception at Jubilee House," said Madeley Town Council regeneration officer Andy Rose.

"We thought it would be nice for people to be able to come in and have a look at it rather than leave it in storage until it is eventually laid in Russell Square next to the war memorial. We are currently trying to get some external funding to refurbish the whole area around the war memorial."

The proposed scheme will include landscaping, new paving, and re-orientating the war memorial to make it more visible from key points. The slab is etched with Yate's name and unit, and the date of the Victoria Cross award.

Major "Cal" Yate, was the son of a former Madeley vicar, and the circumstances of his capture and death have long been shrouded in uncertainty, although modern research has given a clearer picture.

The official citation for his posthumous VC said that he had been "severely wounded" after calling for a desperate last charge from his men and implied that he had died in captivity of his wounds.

But according to the recollections of the battalion commander, Lt Col RC Bond, also captured at Le Cateau, "Maj Yate shouted to his men to charge, but was instantly afterwards struggling in the hands of Germans who had approached the trench from behind. There was no surrender."

Yate appears to have been captured unharmed, but was determined to escape. Research in his file in the National Archives done a few years ago by Shelagh Lewis of the Madeley Living History Project uncovered the remarkable story of Yate's death.

Having escaped from his prisoner-of-war camp, Major Yate was rumbled and set on by hostile German peasants on their way to work at a local factory. To avoid recapture, he slit his throat with a cut-throat razor. She did not give credence to the possibility that the German statements about his death were a cover-up for murder by a mob.

Supporting evidence that Major Yate had not intended to allow himself to be captured alive came from a statement by a fellow officer that before making his escape attempt he had exchanged his safety razor for a cut-throat one.

"All the reports are in agreement. A factory owner saw him being knocked about and roughed up and gives a fairly graphic description. But if the mob was going to kill him they would have hit him with a bill hook rather than killed him with a cut-throat razor. The story as I read it has the ring of truth – that he cut his own throat," she said at the time.

Among other fascinating elements to the brew are that Yate was actually born in Germany, was a fluent German speaker.

He is today buried in Germany in the Berlin South Western Cemetery. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission gives his date of death as September 20, 1914.