Tears at the memorial to the Somme missing (From Gazette & Herald)

Tears at the memorial to the Somme missing

Late last year, the Gazette & Herald asked for readers to send in their stories of relatives who fell during the First World War. We were particularly interested in those referred to as 'unknown soldiers', men who have no marked resting place. Here, we present some of those stories...

I NEVER knew my uncle Jim. He died 12 years before I was born. He served in the army in the First World War, and was reported missing, presumed killed, on July 1, 1916. That was all that my father, Harry Smith, Jim's youngest brother, had been told of his death.

My father had also volunteered to serve in the First World War, by adding a year to his age to permit enlistment. After a short training period, he was kitted out and prepared for draft to France. Shortly before his battalion was about to leave, he was called before his commanding officer and asked: "Smith. What is your age?"

To which he replied: "18, sir."

The question was repeated: "Smith. What is your age?", followed by the same reply: "18, sir."

"You are not, I have your birth certificate here."

He was under age, and his sister Lily (who acted as mother to the family, after his real mother had died early in life) had written to my father's CO to tell him of his correct age and to try to stop him going to France.

My father was taken off the draft. He told me that he sat beside the road and watched his pals march away, happy and singing, to France, disappointed not to be with them. He remained in the army, but was transferred to a Welsh regiment, and ultimately posted to Salonica, where, although still on active service, conditions were quite different from the Western Front.

My father told me this story many times in his long life, more frequently in his latter years when he was living with us. I think he had a touch of guilt because he had avoided serving in the trenches, whereas his brother Jim had served there and died. He usually completed this story by saying that lying in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey could possibly be the body of my Uncle Jim.

We thought it impossible to find a grave, or any record of a private soldier, with the common name of James Smith, and there the matter rested until my father died, after a good life, aged 95. In going through his personal effects after his death, we came across some letters to my aunt Lily, written in France during the First World War. One was from Jim, part of it saying: "I am here in the trenches. Bullets and shells are flying overhead. Don't let our Harry come here."

Was this the letter that encouraged my aunt to send my father's birth certificate to the CO, and possibly save his life... and thereby mine too?

Among the other papers, we found that Jim had served in the Lancashire Fusiliers, with an army number of 126378. My brother (another James Smith) enquired from the War Graves Commission to see if it had any record of his death. It soon replied that he had no known grave, but that an inscription of his name would be found on the Commonwealth memorial at Thiepval in the Somme valley in France.

Private James Smith (Uncle Jim) was just one of the 60,000 British soldiers killed on the first day's fighting at the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. And one of 800,000 soldiers killed before the end of that battle on November 18, 1916, when at the onset of winter, the German forces fell back to their new prepared defences, the Hindenburg Line.

In a cold January, my husband and I, whilst on a journey to Spain in search of winter sun, made a detour to Thiepval. We found Uncle Jim's name on the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It was on Pier and Face 3C. He was one of 72,000 officers and men killed in action, but having no known grave. We also found a memorial book in which, among the thousands of other names, we found the following: 'Smith, Pte James, 126378, 1st Bn Lancashire Fusiliers. July 1, 1916, son of William and Fanny Smith, of 75 Thynne Street, Bolton.'

After almost 90 years since that tragic battle, we were the first members of James Smith's family to see this memorial on which our relative's name is inscribed. It was an emotional experience. Photographs taken of me show a red nose from a winter cold, and emotional tears in my eyes. What a pity that my father was not able to see it - he thought that his brother Jim had been forgotten, just one of nearly a million men killed that year on the Somme.

But he was remembered.

Painter, fisherman - a thoughtful lad

HE was my uncle though I never knew him. Enlisted into a Yorkshire Regiment, he would have found himself in the sodden trenches of the Belgium-French border during the winter of 1917.

My mother often spoke of him. As a child of 10, she could vividly recall the day the telegram arrived. "Regret. Killed in action. Feb 8, 1917." He was 20 years old. There was no grave.

He had been a thoughtful lad, quieter than the young brother who finally inherited his campaign medals. He liked to go fishing with his father and had painted some quite delicate watercolours, two of which my mother had kept.

After reading diaries and letters of some of the war poets, I decided to send to the War Graves Commission for details of his memorial in France.

Some time later, one of my grandsons was to visit the battlefields of the First World War with his school.

I asked him to look for the name of his great, great uncle if the Thiepval Memorial was on the itinerary. It was and he found it. His friend took a photo of him standing beside the name.

I was so pleased to see it. I will have it framed to put beside the small watercolour which still hangs on my bedroom wall, in memory of Corporal R L Beaumont.

C B Copley

My uncle Gordon has become a fiction almost

THE "Lost Soldier" in my family was my uncle Gordon, the youngest of my grandparents' five sons.

The eldest stayed on the farm, as did the fourth son, whose health precluded any military service, but the second, third and fifth joined up.

My father, Frank (son number three) and Gordon enlisted together, in the 21st Battalion of the King Royal Rifle Corps (the Yeoman Rifles) after harvest in 1915.

They were together throughout basic training, first at Duncombe Park, Helmsley, then at Aldershot, and embarked for France from Southampton on May 5, 1916.

They were together, side by side, polishing their equipment for a rifle inspection, on Thursday morning, June 1, as the battalion moved towards the River Somme, when a stray shell from Jerry landed in nearby Ploegsteert Wood (Plugstreet to the Tommies).

Gordon was killed instantly, Frank was badly wounded, and it was many months before he returned to the continent after hospitalisation and convalescence in Oxfordshire, and leave at home, Scackleton.

Gordon's grave, which I have visited, is in a small burial ground surrounded by trees, and known as Rifle House Cemetery, approachable only by a half-mile walk.

But worth the walk, on the rough track: the solitude and the peace is so complete, so reassuring, like nowhere else I have known.

So, though lost in one sense, in another way, you feel he is truly at rest and in his 'long home' - it was all so long ago, and there is no one alive now who knew him, he has become a fiction, almost.

The losses of that era did not end there, however, for my family, for within two months of the Armistice, the flu pandemic claimed grandfather's brother, grandmother's sister and Clem, the fourth son.

In later years, I think 'the lost soldier' death merged with the others, so that in some ways they became one, a kind of amorphous loss and grief, which is now well-faded - almost a fiction, as I suggested earlier, but worth keeping alive, given the enormous sacrifice of the generation which died nearly a century ago that we might have our today.

Michael Hickes, Sleights

Updated: 16:13 Wednesday, January 11, 2006