At the outbreak of the Great War, on 4 August 1914, Barwick in Elmet and Scholes were typical rural villages on the edge of a big city. Scholes had been a village mainly built on agriculture and much of the land where the heart of the village stands now, along Station Road and Main Street was farmland with the odd house or terrace of houses here and there. The names common in the village at the time of the Great War and before the major expansion of the village in the 1920s and 1930s, were names that had been in the village for hundreds of years, and the same can be said of Barwick. In Scholes at the end of the 19th Century, the village was widely but thinly spread. The Station, linking Scholes to Wetherby to the north and Leeds to the east via a southerly route through Cross Gates, had tied cottages for its signalman and platelayer (later the tenancy was taken by the station porter). Much of the lower portion of the village was given over to farming and there were two farms opposite each other on Main Street a little way along from Scholes Hall and Mr Shippen’s Beer shop, Scholes Lodge Farm, and Green Lodge Farm. People as far away as Whinmoor, Seacroft, the Manstons, and Barnbow classed themselves as Scholes people and when war came, they too joined the boys from the village proper. Few of the men listed on the Scholes war memorial for the Great War of 1914 - 1919 are mentioned as living in Scholes at the time of the 1911 census, which shows how people were still coming to live in Scholes, either from elsewhere in the country, to escape from the unhealthy miasma of industrial Leeds or to take up tenancies on the land. Then as now, people were prepared to move great distances in the search for work.

Barwick was (and still is) a village of ancient origin proud of its Maypole, topped with a silver fox weathervane at just over 86ft above the road surface it is the tallest in England. As in Scholes, the population of Barwick, in the old Kingdom of Penda's Elmet, was a stable one. Again, names in 1914 merely marked the current generation of ancient families who had worked the same fields, milled the same grain, forged the same ironwork, or cut the same coal. Often there could be half a dozen households where different branches of the same wider family lived, half streets were made up of cousins all bearing the same surnames. The influx of people into Scholes was not as pronounced in Barwick, possibly due to it not having the railway station. Many more of the men remembered on Barwick's war memorial are listed on the 1911 census.