FROM CHARLIE AND NANCE BRINDLEY
Please find attached (below) details of the Brigg Passendaele 100 event being held this coming Bank Holiday Monday (August 28) with stalls setting up between 10:00am and 11:00am and the event to start on, or around, 12:00 mid-day on Station Road and in the Britannia public house, where the indoor entertainment will take place, including songs of the era and stories from the trenches.
It may not be a large event but it remembers one of the bloodiest battles of the Great War in some of the worst conditions faced by British, Commonwealth and American armed forces.
We will remember all the fallen and all the families back home left to pick up the pieces of lives shattered forever.
We are also trying to raise the awareness of the Brigg Branch of the Royal British Legion, to reach out to potential new members and support any local ex serviceman / servicewoman and families who are in need in any way shape or form, from home / hospital visits through to helping veterans with personal and financial needs however they are presented.
Charlie...just a small correction: the USA entered WW1 in April 1917, but their troops were not deployed to the Western Front until April, 1918.
ReplyDeleteThe only woman officially killed in action at Paschendeale (various spellings) was army nurse, Sister Nellie Spindler.
ReplyDeleteShe lived about 20 minutes after shrapnel 'went through her body, near her heart'. Her father and her paternal relations came from Willingham near Gainsborough.
6 months later, local army nurse, Sister Ellen Andrews, based at a forward casualty station as a theatre nurse, was also killed in action on the 21st March, 1918..she had volunteered to serve on the Western Front since 1914. She was killed by a bomb dropped by a German aeroplane on the first day of the German Spring Offensive, while attending the wounded on a first aid train at Lille, in the area of Paschendeale.
Both nursing sisters are buried in a Commonwealth War grave.
Sister Ellen Andrews' name is conspicuously absent from Brigg's war memorial (containing names of the fallen of Brigg and district.