Five sons killed. Then a town’s pleas to save the last were heard

Five sons killed. Then a town’s pleas to save the last were heard: The wartime tragedy faced by one family moved the queen to help bring their youngest boy home from the front. His granddaughter remembers

As Amanda Harrison looks up at the war memorial in her home town of Barnard Castle, County Durham, she points to the names of five great uncles who died in the first world war, one after another. The brothers – Robert (22), George Henry (26), Frederick (21), John William (37) and Alfred (30) – all lost their lives on the battlefields of northern France and Belgium in a period of just 22 months between September 1916 and July 1918. Four are commemorated in cemeteries near where they fell, while Frederick is remembered on the Menin Gate in Ypres, along with 55,000 other soldiers whose bodies were never found.

To this day, Harrison cannot comprehend how the boys’ mother, Margaret Smith (her great grandmother), endured so much pain and grief. Throughout the war, Margaret and her husband, John, kept a photograph of their boys on the mantelpiece. But in grim succession, the telegrams arrived with terrible news that another would never return.

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