Name
Frederick Harvey
Conflict
First World War
Date of Death / Age
03/12/1918
34
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Gunner
18869
Royal Garrison Artillery
1st Siege Battery
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
Not Yet Researched
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
CHARLEROI COMMUNAL CEMETERY
N. 13.
Belgium
Headstone Inscription
Not Researched
UK & Other Memorials
Standon War Memorial, St Mary’s Church Memorial, Standon, Puckeridge Memorial Plaque, Standon Village Hall, Standon
Biography
Frederick Harvey was Gunner No. 18869, with the 1st Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery. He died 3rd December 1918 in his early thirties, of influenza.
He is buried at Charleroi Communal Cemetery, Hainault, Belgium.
His grave ref is: N. 13.
The Siege Batteries were deployed behind the front line, tasked with destroying enemy artillery, supply routes, railways, stores etc. The batteries were equipped with heavy Howitzer guns firing large calibre 6, 8 or 9.2 inch shells in a high trajectory.
Baptised Frederick James Harvey 14 February 1886 at St Mary’s Standon, his father was George Harvey, a farm labourer, and mother, Lydia (nee Pryor), had been a domestic servant before marriage. Both were born in Standon and in fact may have been childhood sweethearts as they had lived next to each other in Stortford Road.
The 1901 census shows the family living in High Street, Standon, near Mill End, George still a farm labourer, and Frederick, then15 years old was a corn miller.
By the 1911 census the Harvey family have had 13 children, 10 of whom had survived up to that point. Frederick, 25, was no longer living at home, but had already joined the army, and was in Punjab, India with the 68th Company, Royal Garrison Artillery. Two of his older brothers also joined the Army, John Harvey was already a soldier at the time of the 1911 census, although at home on census night, and later, Walter joined up too, receiving ‘slight’ wounds on four occasions, but at least returning home at the end of the war.
The Herts & Essex Observer dated 21st December 1918 reported his death:
“Death of Gunner Frederick Harvey
Gunner Frederick Harvey, son of Mr & Mrs George Harvey of Standon was in the old reserve of the RGA (Royal Garrison Artillery) and re-joined his battery at the commencement of the war. He went through the war uninjured and was looking forward to home leave when unfortunately he was seized with influenza, and pneumonia supervening, he died after a brief illness on December 3rd at a clearing station in France. He was 31 years of age.
The chaplain who attended him at his death states that he asked him to write a letter to his mother enclosing his last kindly gift, which has been received. Like his two brothers he had proved himself a fine soldier.”
Frederick Harvey’s passing from the influenza pandemic which swept the world in 1918/1919 seems a cruel irony, having survived the war and the horrors he must have seen around him. An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilised for the war died of influenza, as people in the 15-40 year age group seemed more susceptible than other ages.
A medical journal in its final edition of 1918 said: “The 1918 has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked the end, at least for a time, of man’s destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all – infectious disease.”
We will never know what the gift was that he sent home to his mother.
Acknowledgments
Di Vanderson, Jonty Wild
