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Christina Drummond

Private William Garrod 1st Batallion, [12th foot], The Suffolk Regiment


Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1915, Private William Garrod (1st Batallion, [12th foot], The Suffolk Regiment, was killed in action in the Battle of Ypres. His brother Arthur had enlisted at Ipswich on the 10th of August, 1914, and William followed shortly thereafter. In January of 1915 he transferred from the Royal Army Medical Corps so that he could travel to France with his brother. Arthur was killed on 24th April near Zonnebeke at the Second Battle of Ypres. He has no known grave but is believed to have been buried on the Zonnebeke Road near Ypres. The Bramford Church Magazine for January, 1917, contains the following reference: “Hoping against hope, Mr and Mrs William Garrod and their family have at last resigned themselves to the sad conclusion that their elder son Willie, reported missing for so long (in May 1915), must have been killed on May 8th about the same time as their son Arthur in the neighbourhood of Ypres. Willie Garrod, before the war was a pointsman and shunter on the Great Eastern Railway. He realised from the first that all the youth of Bramford would have to go, and enlisted in Kitchener’s Army in the Royal Army Medical Corps. As soon as his brother Arthur went he felt that he too must join up in a fighting battalion and eventually went out with the 1st Suffolk’s and fell about the same time as his brother, it is supposed in a trench attack.” Private Garrod has no known grave, and is remembered on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial. William (standing in the photo) was 23 years old and his brother Arthur was 18 years old.

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