#9191 Private Frank Ernest Bindoff
22ND MANCHESTER REGIMENT
TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD TWINS FRANK AND HERBERT Bindoff enlisted at the end of 1915. Until the War Office could provide the resources to train them, both walked the streets of their native Brighton wearing armlets to fend off criticism and indicate that they had already joined the army. Both six footers, both clerks in their home town, the brothers joined the Royal Sussex Regiment when they were finally mobilised at the beginning of March. They embarked to join the 2nd Battalion of their regiment at the end of June 1916, but on arriving at a base in France found that a different fate was awaiting them.
The 22nd Manchesters had been mauled on 1st July, first over at 7:30am as part of the division that successfully captured the village of Mametz by the day’s end. They had contributed to the limited success of the opening day of the Battle of the Somme at a cost of almost 500 casualties. When the twins arrived on the Western Front, they were some of the first reinforcements to be sent out to depleted units on the Somme. On 8th July, along with seventy-five others of their Sussex battalion, they were reallocated to the 22nd Manchesters and two days later joined them with hundreds of other men gleaned from another Manchester battalion, the Middlesex Regiment, The Royal West Kents, Royal Fusiliers, and even two men of the Border Regiment sent to make its numbers up after their fight at Mametz.
Privates Frank (left) and Herbert (right) Bindoff. (Authors’ collection)
On 25th August, General Rawlinson had met with his corps commanders in the morning and read them a letter from GHQ that emphasised the importance of securing key objectives ‘without delay’ in order to prepare for the new large-scale offensive due in mid-September. As a result, on the 3rd his army would try to secure all the desired start line positions for this attack in the opening days of the month. One of these was the village of Ginchy. To the north-east of Guillemont and set on a high plain, it formed a forward position in the German defences.
Thus far Frank and Herbert Bindoff’s experience of fighting the Great War was some twenty-four hours of hell inside High Wood. In divisional reserve as the Battle of Bazentin Ridge commenced on 14th July, the following day the 22nd Manchesters blundered about inside the wood, during the ill-conceived attack as Lorimer Headley died advancing to the side of it. Less than a week after receiving all their reinforcements, the Manchesters suffered almost another 250 casualties.
Then the division went, deservedly, to rest. For the rest of July and the whole of August, the Bindoff twins acclimatised to their northern battalion together. They trained and watched as the Manchesters absorbed yet more reinforcements. On 31st August they left Fricourt to return to the trenches. The battalion passed back through the area around Mametz to hold the line ready whilst other troops prepared to make the attack on Ginchy on 3rd September.
The twins entered the front lines on the 1st and immediately came under heavy German shellfire as they improved their surrounding by digging latrines and repairing blown in and wet trenches. Throughout the night Frank and Herbert were bludgeoned by lachrymatory shells and poisonous gas as they tried to work. The enemy, it seemed, was aware of an impending attack and was determined to prevent it from coming to pass. In a four-day stint before they were relieved, leaving other troops to capture Ginchy while they furnished carrying parties in support, the 22nd Manchesters had lost another 100 men. Included among them were the Bindoff twins, killed by the same shell during the hellish artillery bombardment laid down by the enemy.
On Coventry Street in Brighton, on the opposite side of the railway lines from Preston Park, the twins’ widowed mother was beside herself. Not only had her two sons been killed on the same day, but by the same shell. The two boys were deemed missing, but there was seemingly no hope, for almost immediately they were classed as having been killed in action, or having died of the wounds shortly after the shell landed. Kate Bindoff could not understand why Frank should have a grave and yet Herbert be lost to her, destined to have his name carved on to the Thiepval Memorial. Herbert’s mortal wounds were described to his mother by the fellow soldier that buried him, but if when the isolated graves in the area were tidied and the fallen brought together Herbert was among them, his body was never identified. It is likely that he still lies somewhere on the battlefield. His twin brother was originally buried in Ginchy, but as the battlefields were cleared Frank was eventually laid to rest at Delville Wood Cemetery, plot XVII.C.3.