Samuel John Crocker

"The necessity for the removal of the body is much regretted"Some time after the end of the war, during which many bodies by necessity were buried where they fell in hurried or makeshift graves, or in some cases not buried at all but lost, came the clean-up. It was felt, first by the Army and later by the Imperial War Graves Commission, that the best way to remember the dead properly was in defined cemeteries. These later became the responsibility of resident IWGC staff who tended the grass and flowers and maintained the simple, beautiful headstones and monuments commemorating the dead. Before the IWGC took over responsibility for memorials, the War Office wrote to the father of Samuel John Crocker, a young man who had previously worked as a packer and who joined the regular army at 19 in June 1913, only to die in the first few months of the war. Crocker had evidently been buried in a small, possibly makeshift, cemetery. "This is to inform you that in accordance with the agreement with [illegible] ...religion Government to remove all the scattered graves [illegible] ... small cemeteries which are situated in places un[illegible] ... retention, it has been found necessary to exhume the bodies in certain areas and re-inter them. The body of your son the above named soldier, has therefore been removed to the cemetery below.

Vailly British Cemetery, ENE of Soissons

The necessity for the removal of the body is much regretted but was unavoidable for the reasons given above. The work of re-burials has been carefully and reverently carried out; special arrangements having been made for the appropriate services to be held."

The youngest of six children born 9 years after his next eldest sibling, Samuel looks very much like an "afterthought" for his parents, Philip Crocker, a furniture porter born in Whitehapel, and Sarah Crocker, born in Reading, Berkshire.

Crocker's early Army career looks, at least on paper, uneventful. He sprained his ankle jumping a ditch, an injury dismissed as "trivial" by his commanding officer but taken seriously by the examining medic. "I recommend remission of full hospital stoppage," wrote the latter ar Bardon station in March 1914. One can assume that Crocker's pay was stopped while he was resting up.

Crocker died at the Battle of the Aisne, at which trench warfare as a battle tactic was first developed.