Major Octavius Darby-Griffith died after being shot through the heart during the Third Battle of the Aisne in northern France on 27 May 1918. He was listed among those lost in action, with no known grave, and his name was engraved on the war memorial to the missing in Soissons on the banks of the River Aisne.
His name will be removed from the memorial, as next week a gravestone to an unknown officer in a military cemetery outside Rheims will be replaced with one bearing his name.
David Tattersfield, vice-chairman of the Western Front Association who researched Major Darby-Griffith’s story after coming across the grave three years ago, will be attending the rededication service at Ville-aux-Bois-les-Pontavert.
‘I am delighted that, after 100 years, Major Darby-Griffith will have the honour of his name living for evermore after being one of the thousands of lost names for so long,’ he said.
Major Darby-Griffith was born on 2 September 1871 in Monmouth, South Wales. He enlisted in the British Army as a ‘boy soldier’ aged 15, going on to serve for 22 years, the majority of which was spent in Jersey when the Island was militarised with barracks at St Peter and Fort Regent.
In December 1893 he married a local girl, Alice Roberts, at St James’s Church. In 1910, when he left the army after 23 years of ‘exemplary’ service, he was attached to the permanent staff of the 2nd Royal Militia, Island of Jersey. He took over the Forester’s Arms at Beaumont and the 1911 Census records show him living at the pub with his wife and their three daughters.
When war broke out in 1914, even though he was 43, he enlisted and rose though the ranks from Honorary Lieutenant to acting Major in the 9th Battalion, Loyal North Lancashire Regiment by April 1918. He saw action across the Western Front – including at the Battle of the Somme and in the Ypres Salient – and was wounded three times.
Mr Tattersfield, who lives in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, began his quest to identify the unknown grave in 2015.
‘Wandering around the cemetery, I noticed a headstone stating “unknown Major, Royal North Lancashire Regiment”. Realising there would be few battalions of the regiment operating in the area, and that few men with the rank of Major would have been killed, it seemed that it should be possible to identify this officer.
‘It was easy to verify that there was really only one candidate who could be buried in this grave, due to the fact that only one battalion of the Royal North Lancs was in the area, and only one officer of this rank was killed – being Octavius Darby-Griffith.’
Nonetheless, it took months of research at the National Archives at Kew in London, and time spent looking at military records, to convince the Ministry of Defence and Commonwealth War Graves Commission that the grave belonged to Major Darby-Griffith before they agreed to change the gravestone.
However, his search for information on the soldier and his family continues. Anyone who can help can contact Mr Tattersfield by emailing development@westernfrontassociation.com.
