Brass memorial plaque and roll of honour to the soldiers of Fovant parish of WWI.
Brass plaque with a cross and crossed flags. The flags are the Union Flag and White Ensign.
Inscription -
IN PROUD AND LOVING MEMORY OF THOSE/ WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR ENGLAND IN THE/ GREAT WAR 1914 - 1918/ (Names)
NON SIBI SED PATRIAE /ALSO IN THANKSGIVING FOR THE SAFE RETURN OF/ (Names)
"Eighty-two men from Fovant are recorded as having served in the 1914-18 War, of whom 23 served in the Royal Navy (including the Royal Marines) and 59 in the Army. The proportion of those who served in the Navy seems quite high for an inland village with no naval tradition. Perhaps it shows the high regard of the Royal Navy in the first part of the twentieth century.
The 17 men recorded on the War Memorial represented 21% of those who served, 5 in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines and 12 in the Army. The proportions of the dead in each service were within a percentage point of those who served. It is sobering to think that over a fifth of the men who left Fovant to serve in the war never came back.
Most of the men who died were aged between 20 and 30, although three were under 20 and one over 40. Three men died before 1916, including George Bracher , Fovant’s first casualty, who was killed, with the Coldstream Guards, in the first battle of Ypres in November 1914. The number of deaths then rose to five a year before falling to four in the last year of the war. That final figure highlights a particular tragedy for Fovant, and indeed for Wiltshire, in that Reginald Dorrington and William Penny died on the same day when the 1st Battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment was overwhelmed at Bapaume by the Ludendorff offensive of March 1918. Only three officers and 54 other ranks of the battalion survived the fighting.
The 1st Battalion was hastily reconstituted from the 3rd Battalion, which was a training and holding unit, and fell back to the Ypres area, right in the path of a second German offensive in April 1918. Amongst those then killed was Christopher Usher , who had already been wounded twice and probably had been withdrawn from the line to rest. He was the son of the Reverend Robert Usher, Rector of Fovant from 1919 to 1942, who was to lose another son in a flying accident in 1924 and yet another in the Second World War . Although Christopher Usher’s name does not appear on the War Memorial there is a memorial to him in the parish church.
Of those who were killed in the Army, practically all were serving in the Infantry and most of those in the Wiltshire Regiment. The 1st Battalion arrived in France nine days after the beginning of the war and served on the Western Front thereafter. George Shergold died with them before the second battle of Ypres in 1915. The 2nd Battalion also served on the Western Front from October 1914. Vivian Clay was killed in 1916 when the battalion was fighting on the Somme.
The 5th Battalion took part in the Gallipoli campaign, where Frank Simper died of exposure in 1915, and then went on to Mesopotamia, where Ronald Ewence died of wounds in 1917.
Of those soldiers not belonging to the Wiltshire Regiment the only one from Fovant to be killed who was not in the Infantry, Albert Macey , was a member of the Corps of Royal Engineers. Possibly he died of wounds as there was a large hospital centre at St Omer, where he was buried in 1918. James Mullins was serving with the London Regiment (Queen’s Westminster Rifles) when he died in 1917 at the Battle of Arras and Walter Perrett was killed during the third battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele in 1917. He was serving with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. It is not known whether they joined these regiments originally or whether they were drafted from elsewhere to replace casualties.
Of the naval casualties, three were lost at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, all on different ships. George Lever and Frederick Sanger were serving in the Royal Marine Light Infantry, in HMS Tipperary and HMS Black Prince respectively. George was Fovant’s oldest casualty, he was 43, whilst the youngest, John Shorland another Rector’s son, was only 17 when he was lost with HMS Invincible. Two of the other sailors were also lost at sea, Bertie Goodfellow in HMS Hampshire sunk by mines NW of Scapa Flow whilst taking Lord Kitchener to Russia in 1916, and Cyril Lever in the North Sea on convoy duty in HMS Mary Rose in 1917. The other sailor, Henry Hardiman was also killed in 1917, at Passchendaele whilst serving as an Able Seaman with the Royal Naval Division. In the memorial in Fovant church he is listed under "Army".
One of the tragedies of modern warfare is that so often the dead have no known grave. This was particularly true of the men of Fovant. Nine of them, over half, are commemorated as names on memorials to the missing. Those buried lie in cemeteries cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, mainly in France or Belgium, but others as far afield as Turkey and Iraq. George Lever rests in one of only seven named graves of sailors from the Battle of Jutland in a small cemetery in Norway.
One man, Sidney Carpenter , has not yet been traced. Eight Sidney (or S) Carpenters are recorded by the Commission but none of them can be traced to Fovant, or to the Wiltshire Regiment. Six of the eight were infantrymen, one Royal Garrison Artillery and one Army Service Corps. Reginald Carpenter, Sidney’s brother, returned safely from the war and, it is believed, lived and worked as a Dairyman at Green Drove."
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