About
In the years before 1914, Sir Mark Sykes, sixth baronet of Sledmere, did something that no other British landowner attempted. Convinced that a European war was coming and that the Army would find itself desperately short of men who could handle horses and heavy waggons, he set about recruiting a reserve force from the farm workers of the Yorkshire Wolds — men who had spent their working lives managing teams of horses over bad ground in bad weather, and who possessed exactly the skill the Army Service Corps would need and could not quickly teach.
By 1913 he had enrolled around a thousand of them into what became the Wagoners' Special Reserve. They were paid a retaining fee, attended brief annual training, and otherwise carried on ploughing. In August 1914 they were mobilised, and within weeks a body of Wolds waggoners who in many cases had never travelled beyond the East Riding were driving supply waggons of food, fodder and ammunition on the roads of France and Flanders, among the first British troops to reach the continent.
The Wagoners' Museum at Sledmere tells this story through photographs, service papers, personal memorabilia and a substantial collection of medals. It is a small museum with an unusually concentrated subject, and its strength is the closeness of the material to the ground it stands on: many of the men came from the villages within a few miles of the door, and the records name them individually.
Sykes himself is a complicated figure to encounter here. The man who raised the Wagoners is the same Sykes who, as a diplomat, negotiated the 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement that carved up the Ottoman Middle East between Britain and France and whose consequences are still being lived with. The museum is chiefly concerned with the Wolds men rather than with his diplomacy, but the two sit within one biography.
Outside stands the Wagoners' Memorial that Sykes commissioned and helped design, a small carved rotunda whose frieze narrates the Reserve's mobilisation and service in a deliberately vernacular, almost medieval style. It is unlike any other First World War memorial in Britain. It is a small museum, and one of the more quietly extraordinary things in East Yorkshire.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- The museum opens only when Sledmere House and Gardens are open, from late March to late September — check the current season's dates before travelling.
- Entry to the museum is free even though the house and gardens are ticketed; you are not obliged to buy a house ticket to see it.
- Out of season, or on days the house is closed, contact the Curator by email to arrange a visit — this is a genuine offer rather than a formality.
- Walk the village afterwards. The Wagoners' Memorial, the Eleanor Cross war memorial and St Mary's Church are all within a few minutes and complete the story.
- Give the memorial frieze proper time — it narrates the whole history of the Reserve in carved sequence and rewards working round it slowly.
- If you have East Riding family history, come prepared with names; the medal and service records are organised around individuals from local villages.
- The museum is small and can be seen in under an hour, so it pairs naturally with a house and gardens visit or with a Wolds drive.
- There is no phone number published for the museum specifically — email the Curator or contact Sledmere House for anything that needs confirming.
Highlights
The Medal Collection
The museum's medal collection is its single most substantial holding and the heart of the visit.
Ranged together, the campaign medals, service awards and associated papers of Wagoners who served in France and Flanders turn an abstract force of a thousand men into a list of named individuals from named villages. Because the Reserve recruited within a tight geographical area, the surnames repeat across the collection in a way that reveals whole families and hamlets committed to the same unit.
For visitors with East Riding ancestry the display is frequently a genealogical experience as much as a historical one.
The Wagoners' Memorial
Standing outside in the village, the memorial Sir Mark Sykes commissioned is unlike anything else raised in Britain after the First World War. A small carved stone rotunda, designed with Sykes's close involvement and executed by the Italian carver Carlo Magnoni, its frieze narrates the Reserve's story in a continuous band of figures: the men at the plough, the mobilisation, the crossing to France, and the fighting.
The style is deliberately naive and medievalising rather than classical, and the effect is closer to a Romanesque church tympanum than to a cenotaph.
It repays close and slow looking.
Recruitment and the Roll of the Reserve
The enrolment records and recruiting material explain the mechanics of an idea that sounds eccentric and was in fact acutely practical. Sykes and his agents worked the Wolds farms, signing up horsemen and waggoners on a retainer with an obligation to serve if called, and grading them by skill. The papers show how the Reserve was structured, what the men were paid, and how a private landowner assembled a body of a thousand trained specialists without any formal War Office machinery.
It is a remarkable document of pre-war anticipation, compiled by someone who turned out to be right.
Photographs of the Wolds Men
The photographic holdings are the part of the collection that most directly conveys who these men were. Group portraits taken at annual training, informal shots on the farms, and images from service in France present a body of agricultural workers in their twenties and thirties, weathered and unmilitary-looking, standing beside the horses that were the reason they were there.
Many had never been further than Driffield or Malton before 1914.
Set against the later images from the Western Front, the pictures make the distance travelled — geographical, social and otherwise — uncomfortably plain. The graded lists read like a census of Wolds horsemanship.
Collections
The collection is tightly focused on the Wagoners' Special Reserve, the force of roughly a thousand Yorkshire Wolds farm workers raised by Sir Mark Sykes before 1914 and mobilised at the outbreak of the First World War. It comprises a substantial holding of campaign and service medals, enrolment and service papers, letters and personal memorabilia, and a strong photographic archive covering annual training, mobilisation and service in France and Flanders.
Supporting material addresses horse transport, harness and the working of the Army's supply line, together with the wider history of the Sykes family and the Sledmere estate.
The collection is unusually local in origin: most of the men came from villages within a few miles of the museum, and the records name them individually, which makes the holdings a genealogical resource for East Riding families as well as a military one.
The Wagoners' Special Reserve
The museum's main display, covering the raising of the Reserve from Wolds farm workers, its mobilisation in 1914, and its service driving supply waggons on the Western Front, told through medals, papers, photographs and personal memorabilia.
Sledmere and the Sykes Family
Supporting material on Sir Mark Sykes, the Sledmere estate and the commemorative landscape of the village, including the Wagoners' Memorial and the Eleanor Cross war memorial.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.