Not Forgotten - George Arthur Lumby

On this day ninety seven years ago my Great Uncle George died, not peacefully in his sleep as an old man with his family around him. No, he died a sudden and violent death at the age of twenty five in the mud and blood of France. There is not even a grave for his wife and family to visit and pay their respects. He is one of the many thousands of men whose remains simply disappeared into the earth, blown apart by two further years of shelling and mechanised warfare on an industrial scale. Until ten years ago I was totally unaware that I even had a Great Uncle George as nobody in my mothers family had ever spoken about him; he died several years before she was born.

The Lumby family. George is standing in the middle. My Grandmother Helena is on his left.


I have been interested in military history since I was a boy but never bothered about WW1. Like most people I thought that it was just four years of stalemate with two opposing armies shelling the life out of each other. This all changed in 2002 when I visited the Western Front with some work colleagues, for a laugh and a weekend of drinking beer. We went to several cemeteries, where we saw row upon row of identical graves, just like soldiers lined up on parade. I don't know how it happened, but reading their epitaphs, many just saying 'A soldier of the Great War, Known unto God' simply blew me away. After coming home I set about finding out as much as I could about these men who died such tragic deaths far from home and their loved ones.

War Graves at Serre Road Cemetery on the Somme


The scale of the casualties was so great that I thought virtually every family in Britain and the Commonwealth probably have an ancestor who died during this terrible conflict. This inspired me to look into my own family's history. I decided to look down my mothers line because her mother had the unusual maiden name of Lumby, easier to find a match than Smith or Jones etc. I wrote to my elderly Aunt Gladys for information about her mothers family which she very kindly sent to me along with a family photograph taken just before the war.

My Aunt Gladys sitting on her Mothers knee. My Grandfather was also in the West Yorks Regt.


While waiting for this information to arrive from my aunt I did some research on the surname via the Commonwealth War Graves Commission web site. Here I discovered  a George Arthur Lumby of the West Yorkshire Regiment who died on 17/08/1916 and is remembered on the Thiepval Memorial to the missing on the Somme. I am a very sceptical person, that's what 25 years of being a Police Officer does for you, but some how I knew that I was related to this man. Was this his spirit calling down through the years, or was it something from my subconscious mind that I had heard when I was very young, who knows! A few days later I received a letter from my aunt with the necessary information, confirming what I already instinctively knew to be true.

Thiepval Memorial to the missing on the Somme


Armed with this information I visited the National Archive at Kew to find out all about George and how he lived and died. Unfortunately sixty percent of  individual soldiers service records, including that of George, were destroyed during WW2 when the Public Record Office was bombed in the blitz. This led to several months of investigation using Regimental and Brigade war diaries and other sources until I eventually discovered the tragic circumstances surrounding his death (I will post about this at a later date).

George's name inscribed on the Thiepval Memorial to the missing


I have been to the Somme several times since then and on each occasion I made a point of visiting the Thiepval Memorial where I left a small cross and poppy in remembrance of George and his comrades who died attacking 'Lonely Trench' on the night of the 17th August 1916. He was married to Elizabeth Ann Kyle but I don't know if they had any children and As far as I am aware I am the first and only person to make this pilgrimage. 'So he is not forgotten'.

A Cross for George from his Great Nephew