There is not only a new Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC)
sign at the entrance to St Michael’s churchyard this week but also a new
gravestone within it. We have been
waiting for both to appear for quite some time.
The sign is part of a countrywide initiative to highlight where
small groups of CWGC graves exist. The
new gravestone is the result of one individual’s research to identify gaps in
CWGC coverage and his campaigns to fill in the gaps.
We know that James Hornshaw, who was living in Elsenham Road
at the time of his death, was buried in the churchyard but we do not know the
exact location of his grave so we picked a location for his new gravestone
close to another pair of CWGC stones; his is the left hand one of the three in
the group photograph.
He was a steward on a trawler who was guarding bridges and
pipelines in the Grimsby area at night with only reused railway platelayer huts
for shelter and his final illness may well have been caused or exasperated by a
severe wetting on one of those nights.
At one point the help of Grimsby’s then MP (the Tickler of
jam factory fame) was enlisted to gain some support for his wife when his death
was judged not to been due to military service; a gratuity of £50 was paid to
her.
He was born in Greenwich and she less than ten miles away at
Sutton at Hone in Kent. Their eldest sons were twins born in Grimsby, a younger
James who had been discharged from the army on the grounds of ill health in May
1915 and who died of tuberculosis a few months later (and who had already been
buried in the churchyard) and a Charles who was to be killed in 1918 (and who is
buried at Senlis in France where a major Casualty Clearing Station operated
briefly).
1 comment:
My own relative, Alfred Bygott, has a commemorative gravestone in St Michael’s, next to his mothers (my Great Great Grandmother) grave. But he lies in Mericourt cemetery in France. Died at the Somme, 2 July 1916.
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