Armed Forces Day

My first reconnaissance took place on Friday when I began my search for Corporal Herbert Frederick Marfleet.

Herbert Frederick Marfleet the son of Benjamin James Marfleet a sergeant in the 2nd Dragoon Guards, was born in the Punjab in 1891. By 1901 the family had returned to England and Benjamin was working as a Railway Shop Clerk in the GWR Works. On leaving school Herbert followed his father into the railway factory as an apprentice coach finisher.

In 1915 Herbert joined the Royal Army Service Corps serving first in Egypt. In 1918 he briefly returned home to Swindon to marry Elsie Morse in a double wedding with her sister Agnes and Canadian serviceman Hooper Gates.

Immediately after the wedding Herbert returned to his regiment in Salonika where he contracted malaria. He was discharged from the army and returned to Swindon in the spring of 1919 but died just a few weeks later. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has now begun the process of acknowledging the grave of Herbert and they needed a photograph of the plot before sending a surveyor out to Radnor Street Cemetery.

Despite being armed with a map of the burial plots kindly supplied by the staff at Kingsdown Crematorium, finding a grave is not an easy task. In many cases the terracotta burial markers are smashed but even where they survive intact you cannot take it for granted that the marker is in the correct place.

I had no idea whether Herbert’s grave would have a headstone, but looking at the area where his grave was it seemed unlikely as there were but a few in situ. I paced up and down the area indicated by the map and took a few photographs before returning home and back to the drawing board.

With my colleague and fellow campaigner Mark Sutton in France recording Swindon soldiers buried there, I turned to his book ‘Tell Them Of Us,’ a record of Swindon men who served in the Great War. I was able to find a plot number for F.C. Whatley , an air mechanic who was serving in No 1 School of Navigation and Bomb Dropping, Royal Air Force when he was killed on October 12, 1918. Frederick, the son of Mr and Mrs W.G. Whatley of 29 Broad Street, was just 19 when he died.

Having got my bearings I was confident it would be reasonably easy to find Corporal Marfleet, and with the help of Phil who lives in a house backing on to the cemetery, we began our pacing again. According to the cemetery map Herbert’s grave was three spaces in from the hedge. One headstone stood close to where I believed Herbert lay with just a couple of unmarked graves between that and the substantial hedgerow. All the evidence pointed to this area, but I remained unsure. Then suddenly I caught sight of a familiar piece of masonry, a corner stone with a cross on the top, almost buried beneath saplings and turf.

I dropped to my knees and began clawing at the earth, soon hitting the plinth. Phil left me scrabbling about and by the time he had returned with a spade and secateurs I had revealed the name Matilda Hammett, the name of Herbert’s aunt with whom he was buried, and all the confirmation I needed.

Phil finished off the job I had begun and within a few minutes the whole grave was exposed, part of the inscription left by Herbert’s widow – ‘dear Bert the beloved husband’ just legible. Phil and I took a few quiet moments to survey our find and then shook hands. On the day that Britain celebrated Armed Forces Day we had found a fallen soldier in Radnor Street Cemetery, 92 years after his death.

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