Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1916, Private Cyril Edric Barfoot, B Company, 1st/4th Battalion, the Suffolk Regiment, was killed during the Battle of Bazentin Ridge and the attack on High Wood on the Somme.

One of four children of a tailor’s cutter, he was a member of the Officers’ Training Corps. At the outbreak of the Great War he enlisted and served as a private with the Suffolk Regiment,

Private Barfoot’s battalion arrived in France in November of 1914. At dawn on the day of his death, his battalion joined the hostilities in the Battle of Bazentin Ridge, in support of the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment in an attack on Switch trench. The battalion lost over two hundred men, seventeen of whom were from Ipswich, Private Barfoot’s home-town. He was listed as missing, known to have been wounded, and was presumed killed. In 1931 his remains were discovered – his father and brother identified the watch he was wearing, and he was then buried in the Serre Road Cemetery No. 2 at Hebuterne in France.

Cyril, from Ipswich, was 19 years old.