George Frederick Brown
Died 3rd May 1917 at Neuville, Vitasse, France. Age 32
‘A sensitive man and a bit of a loner’, his niece said. George, a family name dating back to 1716, was a clerk in the Railway Accounts Office in Euston. Possible because his brother, William, had been invalided out of service with ‘shell shock’, he joined the army at St. Albans on the 16th November 1915 before conscriptions began in March the following year. His father, Frederick, owned the Blue Anchor pub which still exists in Fishpool Street, St. Albans. Initially in the Bedfordshire Regiment, after four months leave in September 1916, he was transferred to the Northamptonshire Regiment and promoted to acting Lance Corporal.
On the evening of the 3rd May 1917, a bombardment started at 5.30 p.m. The battalion was ready and in position. They advanced as soon after the barrage as possible but suffered several casualties from the machine gun fire which swept the area and was as bad as it was as the attack that had been made that morning. After covering 900 hundred yards the Company suffered fifty percent casualties by the time they had reached within 50 yards of the enemy wire. The bombardment had not even touched it and machine gun fire was coming from the right and in front.
The Company was then ordered to withdraw to enable wounded men, and others, who had been lying out since morning, to get back. The number of casualties totalled 120. The lack of success was recorded as due to intense enemy machine gun fire. George Brown’s body was never found.
My family and I visited the battle field in February 1997. We found it to be almost untouched and not a known tourist site. There was church, a mairie and even a sunken road which we followed. Many shell cases and hand grenades, both British pineapple and German stick, still lay in the area. The farmers are constantly ploughing them up. Some had been put into piles and sprayed with a luminous orange paint so the bomb disposal teams could locate them. I collected two large shell cases to display in our garden. Before we left we hung our Christmas reef from a tree overlooking the battle field.
Paul Brown