I have just returned from a three-day trip to the Somme. I wanted to mark the 100th anniversary of the South Down battalions' decimation as part of a diversionary attack on the so-called Boar's Head at Richebourg L'Avoue on the 30th June 1916, and so I attended the commemoration ceremony at St Vaast Post Military Cemetery which contains a number of South Downs dead from that day.
It's not hard to find touching inscriptions on headstones on the Western Front but I was particularly struck by this one on the headstone of Ernest Coppard. It reads, "Safe from the fume and fret / You whom I never forget".
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission notes that Ernest was the son of Albert and Sarah Coppard, and the husband of Alice Emily Coppard of 26 Seville Street, Elm Grove, Brighton. The words on the headstone were chosen by Alice and cost her 11 shillings and 11 pence to have chiselled into the Portland stone. Ernest was 29 years old, a Brighton-born man who enlisted at Hove in February 1915. He and Alice had been married for under a year when he was killed in action. General Register Office marriage records show that he married Alice Gearing in Brighton in the third quarter of 1915 and so he would have spent precious little time with her before sailing for France in early 1916.
Alice Coppard never re-married. She appears on the 1939 Register, still living at 26 Seville Street and working as a book-sewer in a public library. Her widowed mother, Florence Gearing, was also living with her. She died in Brighton in 1972 at the age of 85. At the time of her death she had been a widow for 55 years. There were no children from her all-too-brief marriage to Ernest.
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