WWII: Lest we forget - a tale of two brothers and their war

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Every November 11, Jayne Brewster Beard places a poppy in the grass around the war memorial in Derby Market Place in memory of a great uncle she never met, but whose name she has always known. Here, Jayne, of Spondon, tells the poignant tale of two brothers who went to war – and the one who never came back.

WHEN you are 25 years old, you believe that you can live forever. One Saturday morning, in September 1915, Rifleman George Frederick Beard, aged 25, walked, or more probably ran, into a form of immortality on the hotly contested battleground of the Ypres Salient.

He came from a lively and large family in Repton. Some remained in the village to work on the land but he and his younger brother, Leonard, gravitated towards Derby and joined the Midland Railway.

They probably had expectations of long untroubled careers, possibly even reaching the Olympian heights of lives as engine drivers, until events in a distant corner of Europe overtook them.

Nineteen-year-old Leonard departed for the conflict first, in early spring, with the Sherwood Foresters. Fred embarked for France in June. Despite the clamour of local regiments for recruits, he found himself, for reasons still unclear, in the Royal Irish Rifles.

The odds on the brothers meeting at the front were, therefore, slim but, somehow, they did. The encounter disturbed them. There was a superstition that brothers should not meet, for one would not survive the war.

In truth, it was less a superstition than a matter of bleak statistics.

Leonard went on to see action on the Somme and at Ypres – and sights that beggar the imagination. He saw trenches full of gassed Canadian soldiers standing upright where they had died, eerie fire rolling across no-man’s land and comrades deliberately rubbing rust into open wounds to encourage gangrene, amputation and a swift passage home.

Even on leave, gratefully out of uniform for a couple of weeks, there was little respite for him. He was given a white feather, a symbol of cowardice, by a passing stranger.

However, he also found time to fall in love with a striking auburn-haired young woman – my grandmother.

Fred’s destiny took him to a diversionary action on the first day of what would eventually become known as the Battle of Loos.

The contribution of the Royal Irish Rifles was heroic. Despite pulverising machine gun fire, they managed to take and hold a German trench for a whole night, before being forced to withdraw. Their commanding officer was effusive in praise for the Irish fighting spirit and, had he but known it, one boy from rural Derbyshire.

Fred never heard the speech. He had been lost, forever, somewhere in the blizzard of bullets, during the initial assault on the trench.

No photograph of George Frederick Beard survives. He has no known grave. We do, however, have his name, carved in stone on the Menin Gate, Derby Midland Railway monument, and Repton Village war memorial.

Later in the same battle, a young lieutenant , John Kipling, would perish, his body also lost in the unimaginable carnage.

His heartbroken father, Rudyard, who had encouraged him to volunteer, would, in time, suggest the phrase “Their name liveth for evermore” for use on memorials everywhere.

Although his name is nowhere immortalised in marble, Leonard, my grandfather, returned to his family, became an engine driver, lived to be 90 years old, and survives, still, in his descendants and our memories.

Of my shadowy, lost Uncle Fred nothing remains, apart from a neatly chiselled name. Does it “live for evermore?” Who knows?

I think of him, though, every year, for a silent moment, in November.

If, as some believe, no-one is truly dead while their name survives, there is maybe that small consolation. Lest we forget.

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