Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1918, Lance Corporal Alfred Lawrence Ford, 8th (King’s Royal Irish) Hussars, died as a prisoner-of-war in Germany.
The eldest of four children of a clerk, after leaving school he was employed as a railway clerk.
He would become one of one hundred and five from his regiment to be killed in the Great War after its arrival on the Western Front in December of 1914.
At the time of writing it is not clear where nor when he was taken prisoner, but it would have been at some point after his marriage to his wife Emily in May of 1917.
Lance Corporal Ford died in the Crossen-an-der-Oder prisoner-of-war-camp.
He was buried in the prisoners’ cemetery but his final resting place could not be identified after the end of the war.
In 1925 it was arranged by the then-Imperial War Graves Commission that there be a memorial stone erected in his honour.
It stands in what is now the Berlin South-Western Cemetery at Brandenberg, and after his name and explanation for the stone, are the words “Their glory shall not be blotted out”.
Alfred, born in Derby, was 26 years old.
