Banstead
Cricket is a sport for girls and
boys at Banstead Prep School
- proud sponsors of Banstead
Cricket Club.
Co-educational prep school and
nursery for girls and boys aged 2-11.
SUTTON LANE | BANSTEAD | [email protected] | 01737 363600
new army of volunteers to French dignitaries. The
soldiers waited in the freezing snow for hours but
the inspection itself lasted just a few minutes, long
enough to impress the French and short enough
that they wouldn’t notice that few of the men
actually had rifles.
Drafts were periodically sent to join the 1/15th
Battalion at Watford and Fred was with them when
they let for France. They disembarked at Le Havre
on 18th March 1915 and were disappointed to
see no sign of the war and no welcoming crowds
of pretty French girls. The front line was not what
was expected, as one of the officers later wrote:
“War had, till then, been regarded as a glorious
thing, a thing of bugles and flashing bayonets, of
courage in hand-to-hand encounters, and above
all, of excitement. But this first experience showed
it to be a thing of drab monotony, of dull routine,
of the avoidance of being killed, of an invisible
enemy.”
They first saw action at Festubert, in May,
on the fringes of the battle in marshy trenches,
holding the line, scouting and patrolling, fetching
and carrying supplies and burying bodies, some
in such bad condition that they necessitated
wearing gas masks, and all the while losing men
to enemy shellfire. The dead were stacked up to
form barricades and the men crawled over bodies
in the dark. They were relieved to leave the “land
of mud, blood and stench” at the end of “the merry
month of May” and move to quieter climes.
Fred became a batman to one of the officers
and would have been responsible for his officer’s
clothing, kit and weapons, preparing and serving
his meals and acting as a bodyguard.
In August, the Germans unleashed a new
weapon, a mortar-fired aerial torpedo with a range
long enough to reach battalion headquarters and
powerful enough to cause considerable damage.
On the morning of 2nd September 1915, the
Germans fired aerial torpedoes and heavy artillery
in reply to British shellfire. Fred Davis was killed.
He was 21. He is buried in Maroc cemetery and
his headstone inscription, chosen by his father,
reads: “He Did His Duty”.
If you have any information or photographs of
Banstead, Redhill or Merstham’s fallen cricket
players then we would love to meet you at a game
or hear from you at banstead100@btconnect.
com.
www.sportip.biz
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