#26263 Private George Lee
16TH SHERWOOD FORESTERS (NOTTS & DERBY REGIMENT)
ALMOST DUE WEST OF MERRILL Price and his Cheshire Battalion was a 30-year-old Nottingham local named George Lee. Prior to the war, George worked at a local lace factory where he was a bobbin and carriage hand. Enlisting in his home town in May 1915, he left three children at home: Winnie, 6, George, 4, and 3-year-old Doris. His wife, Mary, was also heavily pregnant with a fourth, Hilda. George arrived in France in 1916. Just two weeks after reaching the Western Front, baby Hilda died at the age of six months suffering from convulsions and enteritis, but there would be no chance of him returning home because the 16th Sherwood Foresters had already begun their journey towards the Somme.
British troops had managed to get part way into Schwaben Redoubt, north of Thiepval. On 4th October George Lee’s battalion took over the sector of the line that included it during daylight, the men coming in for heavy shelling and losing twenty-eight of their number. The Germans were of no mind to simply let Gough’s men hold on to their gains at this strong point. Three days later, they attacked using flammenwerfer in an attempt to push the British out of it, but George’s battalion, along with a neighbouring Sherwood Foresters outfit, drove them back, the enemy leaving a trail of casualties and prisoners as they retreated. The Notts and Derby men’s efforts were enough to draw letters of congratulation from generals: ‘units supported each other; liaison with artillery was very complete and satisfactory, and all units showed much spirit and dash.’ Likewise though, sharing the position with the enemy was not ideal for the British, and on the same day that Stuff Redoubt was attacked by the 10th Cheshires, Merrill Price among them, the Reserve Army also made a play for Schwaben in its entirety.
There was no preliminary bombardment. The Sherwood Foresters went forward at 4:30am on 9th October, attempting to surprise the enemy in the dark. The weather had begun its permanent decline towards the end of the year now, with conditions enough ‘to make mere existence a severe trial of body and spirit’. The mud in the trenches was so thick and cumbersome that the men moved over the open on their way to the crest of the redoubt and its north side. But the Germans were waiting. They opened up on George Lee’s battalion with machine guns and rifles before the men had got halfway across no-man’s-land. Three minutes into the attack they also began an artillery bombardment. The Notts and Derby men ran into wire as they approached their objective, if they could get through the storm of enemy fire. Only one flank managed to get into the enemy trenches, but were promptly pushed out again and driven back. There was to be no success to mirror that at Stuff Redoubt to the east. The Germans kept their hold on Schwaben Redoubt as the 16th Sherwood Foresters suffered almost 240 casualties. George Lee was among the dead. It was known he had been wounded, but he was never brought in by a stretcher party. In 1917 it was accepted that he had died of his wounds on 10th October. George had, in fact, been buried quickly on the battlefield and in 1919, as the area was cleared, he was finally laid to rest at Connaught Cemetery, plot X.H.6.