Page 244 - Bugle Autumn 2014

LETTERSTO THEEDITOR
From: Councillor E Berry Mayor of Winchester
To:
Lieutenant Colonel JW Poole-Warren Regimental Secretary, The Rifles.
2 September 2014
As I promised you, in my words and my experience of the event, I hope that you may be able to do something with this. It is so important. We are sending you the photographs as well, just to let you know that we went through
the whole cemetery. By the way thank you for your hospitality and friendship.
The background of
this is that forty years
ago I was taken by my
father-in-law, Mr Fred
Berry, to the church
in Kings Worthy. He wanted me to see his father’s name on the village Cross that is in the church yard of St Mary’s in Kings Worthy. His father’s name on the cross
as one of the fallen of Kings Worthy in the Great War was Sargent Frederick Berry.
I was touched by this and it introduced me to this particular church, but that is another story. But on
Remembrance Sunday,
for a certain amount
of years, his name
was called out. Well, it
seemed he was calling
to me.
City. It came in the year of the centenary
of the Great War. As you know, hundreds and thousands of men passed through Winchester based at Morn Hill and went to war from Southampton and Portsmouth.
Hundreds and thousands never returned. So I thought as Mayor of Winchester I could not only just
go and lay an official wreath of poppies given to me by the Army on one grave, which was Srg Frederick Berry, but
to honour all that fell from this wonderful City.
That is basically what I did. The first cemetery that we went to, where this gentleman’s grave was, had three and a half thousand men buried there. It would seem that when Sgt Berry fell in February 1916 his comrades fell with him. They were
On the death of
my husband, John
Berry, I inherited all the
memorabilia from his father, Sgt Frederick Berry – the letters from the trenches with the heartfelt anguish from a young man to his wife Rosanna and to a son that he never saw. He never met him. Reading these letters and receiving the medals and the death plaque, I again became very touched. It was in my mind that one day I would like to honour this man. From letters sent to his widow, his men loved him. He was a great leader.
Well, then comes this peculiar event of my becoming Mayor of this wonderful
Reading these letters and receiving the medals and the death plaque, I again became very touched
The other thing that was most touching as well was that hundreds only had ‘a soldier known only unto God’
in a line and their ages ranged from 18 to 27. The other thing that was most touching as well was that hundreds only had ‘a soldier known only unto God’. This was very poignant and made me feel very humble. My family that
were with me made a pilgrimage through the whole of that cemetery and thanked them all for their sacrifice. We passed five cemeteries and were told that one had quite a number of Indian soldiers that had fallen, so we went to that cemetery and looked for them and bless them, there they were, quite a number of them, all drivers and all Indians. They all fell in 1914 at the beginning of the War, how sad is that? So we said thank you to them as well and they were very young. Kind regards,
Cllr Eileen Berry (Mayor)
242 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR