We will remember them, July 1918
Two more Alderley Edge men are commemorated this month.
Private Robert Bruckshaw, Machine Gun Corps, is buried in Berlin South Western Cemetery and his memorial states that he died on 23rd July. The local paper reported on 26th April that his wife had received a telegram which said he had been posted missing on 21st March.
Another surviving document, the Register of Soldiers’ Effects, gives the date of death as ‘21.3.18 or 27.7.18 death accepted Germany’.
It seems likely that he either died on 21st March or was taken prisoner of war and subsequently died.
In 1924-25, the graves of Commonwealth soldiers in 146 burial grounds in eastern Germany were brought into Berlin South Western Cemetery – largely those of prisoners of war or men whose bodies had been recovered and buried by the Germans.
Private Brookshaw’s connection with Alderley Edge was that he married Elizabeth Cartwright from South Terrace in 1915. He was born in Wybunbury and, like many men from the Crewe area, worked for the London and North Western Railway.
In the 1911 census he was listed as a railway porter living in Handforth.
Private Frank Fairhurst, Cheshire Regiment, died on 26th July in the Second London General Hospital, Chelsea.
He had suffered horrific wounds when a gas shell exploded close to him on 11th July somewhere on the western front.
Born in 1898, he attended the village school and left in 1912 to become a gardener. The funeral at St Philip’s on 31st July was reported at some length in the Advertiser.
He was the third of five children who had been orphaned by the deaths of their mother and father in 1907 and 1909.
Among the mourners was the Chairman of the Urban District Council, Mr A A Gillies, representing the Thomas Henry Fairhurst Fund ‘raised in 1909 to provide for and educate a large family who were suddenly left without father and mother’.
He was buried in the family grave in Alderley Edge cemetery with his mother and father.