220510 Rfmn. Frederick Thomas Miller British Army 21st Btn. Kings Royal Rifle Corps from:Poplar, London (d.14th Aug 1917) Fred Miller died in France, about one mile from the border with Belgium, in August 1917, during the Third Battle of Ypres (known as Passchendaele). This was another attempt to break through the German line of trenches and bring the war to an end. It did not succeed. The war continued for another 15 months.
Fred Miller was the oldest child of Henry and Elizabeth Miller, who lived in Poplar, in the East end of London. Henry was born in Poplar and worked as a painter, mainly in the shipbuilding yards in the dock area, but also in the building industry. His own father had been in the same trade, originally at Gravesend, in Kent, moving to Poplar in the early 1860s. Elizabeth was also born in the East end, but had been a domestic servant in the city centre. They married in 1896 and Fred was born on 28 June 1898.
When the war started in August 1914, Fred was 16. He would have been at work for two years. He now had four younger brothers - Thomas, Charles, Sidney and Henry, and a younger sister, Grace. Just before he joined the Army, he was working at a clothing shop in East India Dock Road. We do not know whether he volunteered for service or just waited for his turn to be ‘called up’ under the compulsory military service scheme introduced in 1916 but we know he was taken into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps as Rifleman 27542 of the 21st Battalion. He would have joined with no illusions – his mother’s brother, a very frequent visitor to the house, was a regular soldier and had been killed in the first few weeks of the war.
His Army record was probably destroyed along with thousands of others during the Second World War when a bomb hit the Army Records Centre but he would have done his basic training in England in 1916, and he certainly came home on leave before he went out to France. One of his brothers remembered him leaving, saying to them, ‘Look after Mother’. We know he died of wounds in No 11 Casualty Clearing Station near Godeswaersvelde (a French village one mile inside the Belgian border, near Hazebrouck) on 14 August 1917. He was 19 years old.
The family were told that he had been shot by a German sniper. The exact circumstances are not known but they understood that he was a Signaller, so he may have been out of the trench, working on telegraph lines. His battalion had fought in the second phase of the battle (Pilckem Ridge, which finished on 2 August) and was probably in preparation for the third phase of the battle in September. The Battalion War Diary records that 3 Officers and 26 Other Ranks were killed in August but gives no real clue as to how Fred received his deadly wounds. The Battalion was taken out of the front line on 6 August and returned on 10 August, spending the next three days ‘consolidating the line’ with various working parties. On the morning of the 14th, ‘a raid was attempted against enemy dug outs’ but the raiding party returned with only ‘slight casualties’. Fred may have been among them, or he may have been hit during one of the ‘working parties’ in the previous few days. He must have arrived in the Casualty Clearing Station within a few days of his death because the wounded who survived the first few days were sent to hospitals much further behind the lines.
Thousands died, on both sides, in the September attack and if Fred had not been killed a few weeks earlier, he might well have been killed then.
The Cemetery where he is buried is one of the many smaller military cemeteries in that part of northern France – some 900 graves. It must have been very close to the Casualty Clearing Station. In 1917 the grave was marked with a wooden cross, and family were sent a photograph of it with very brief details written on the back. A little later, headstones were placed there with details of the dead and a short verse chosen by the family. The verse on his stone reads
‘How I miss the sunshine of your smile
Mother’.
Back home, it was the custom for the bereaved family to put a little display in the window of their house – a picture of the soldier, some flowers, and a slogan, ‘For King and Country’. The Miller family did this too but, no royalists, made their slogan, ‘For Home and Country’. -
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