On this day one hundred years ago, the 5th December 1914, 44 British Army officers and men lost their lives. 9605 Pte David Henry Newey of the 1st Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment was one of those men.
Soldiers Died in the Great War notes that he was born in Aston, Birmingham and that he enlisted at Birmingham. Judging by his regimental number, that must have been September 1903, a time when standard enlistment terms into the British Army were three years with the colours and nine on the reserve. In all probability then, David had probably been transferred to the reserve in 1906 or (probably) 1907 and would have no doubt been a little out of shape, seven or eight years having elapsed, by the time he donned khaki again. In 1908 he had married Nellie Bloor and the couple appear on the 1911 census with their son, Herbert Henry Newey, aged one. David's trade is noted, intriguingly, as "Gold and silver". I could find no other children noted on subsequent GRO returns.
No service record survives for this man but his medal index card notes that he arrived overseas in France on the 27th August 1914. He died of wounds in England at the age of 32 and is buried in Birmingham's Witton Cemetery. Nellie remarried, Henry Mason, in 1921 and it is the name Nellie Mason that appears on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's headstone schedule where it indicates that the words "THY WILL BE DONE" were paid for by her to be added to David's headstone. Her address is given as 2 Back, 28 Park Lane, Aston.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, WE WILL REMEMBER THEM.
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