HERE we remember two more Redditch soldiers who died this week 100 years ago in the First World War.
Henry Arthur Smith had already survived being wounded once, in 1915, when fate finally caught up with him on November 18, 1916.
He was born in 1896, the eldest of Arthur and Harriett Smith’s eight children.
They lived at 80 Beoley Road, then moved to The Common, Rowney Green before returning to Redditch at 189 St Georges Road.
By the time he was 15 Henry was working at the Enfield Cycle Works before joining William Hall & Co in Studley.
When war came he joined the 7th Battalion of the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, which, says its war diary, ‘suffered appalling casualties on the Somme’.
Like Pte Egbert Dolphin last week, Henry’s unit ‘went over the top’ at 6.10am on the morning of November 18 to attack the German-held Desire Trench in the Battle of the Ancre, on the last day of the Somme campaign, running into a hail of steel in appalling weather.
He is remembered on the St Stephen’s War Memorial.
Harry George Mason enlisted as a volunteer in the 2/7th Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment, which had already seen action during the Somme offensive before being rested.
They found themselves being hurriedly moved forward to replace the 10th Worcs who had been severally battered in the final assault of November 18.
On November 19 the regimental diary reports they came under shellfire wounding two soldiers, and it is likely that Pte Mason was one of them, passing away the next day, November 20.
To give an idea of the conditions, on the night of the 20th the 2/7th sent patrols into No Man’s Land to try and establish where the enemy was.
There, to their astonishment, they found the shattered remnants of two platoons ‘lost’ by the 10th Worcs, wounded men who’d been left 18 hours exposed to the elements.
Harry Mason was born in 1878 in Astwood Bank, the eldest of nine children born to William and Emma Mason.
His father was a coachman and Harry worked as a needle scourer to help support the famiy which by 1911 was living at Doe Bank Lodge.
He was 38 when he died and is remembered on the Thiepval Memorial in France and on the Astwood Bank War Memorial.
