| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Acting Corporal Frederick Long, aged 20, of the 8th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment (8th Brigade, 3rd Division) was killed in the Battle of Arras in 1917, specifically in the First Battle of the Scarpe (9th to 14th April 1917) fought to the east of the town. He was killed in action but there is a discrepancy as to the date of his death. His platoon officer, 2nd Lt Joseph Craig, in a letter to Frederick’s father published in the Beverley Guardian of 28 Apr 1917 said that, “he was killed in action on the 11th instant, when the battalion were making an attack on the third German line, which they eventually took”.( He went on to say that he was, “a good soldier”.) “Soldiers died in WW1” gives the date as the 13th whilst the Commonwealth War Graves Commission says it was the 9th. The action described in Craig’s letter along the Wancourt-Feuchy line actually took place on the 9th. He had arrived in France in the spring of 1916 and is buried at the Tilloy British Cemetery, Tilloy-les Mofflaines. He was posthumously awarded the War and Victory medals.
Frederick was born in Beverley the 24 Mar 1896 and had been a farm labourer, latterly in the employ of Mr Dixon of Lockington, near Beverley. His father, Robert Long, from Tickton, was a brewery labourer; his mother Hannah Eliza was from Middleton on the Wolds. It was a large family of ten children, the last two children twins, Harold and Fanny, died shortly after birth in 1908. The family home was 5 Dyer Lane, previously it had been in Spencer Sreet. Frederick was unmarried.
Frederick’s other brothers, John and Robert Edward also served in the war. John living in Scunthorpe, served in the Lincolnshire Regiment for a short time in 1914 before being discharged as “unfit”. Edward a plater’s helper at the Beverley shipyard served in the Royal Field Artillery and was wounded three times, latterly suffering “gun-shot wounds to the head” in Jan 1917.
Frederick is remembered on the Hengate War Memorial and on the East Riding Memorial in Beverley Minster
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |