AN UNREMARKED SACRIFICE

Description

Jimmy Aspley (the author’s wife’s great-uncle!!) was the eldest son of a Rifleman father who died in Birmingham City Asylum aged 33. Mother and family impoverished; three Aspley brothers spent much time in a children’s home in Coleshill, Warks. Family ‘home’ was in the warren of back-to-backs of Birmingham. Jimmy enlisted in July 1913, trained, posted to ‘D’ Company, 3/Worcestershire. Book follows the battalion’s role, from mobilisation until the end of December 1914. Based on battalion war diary, regimental history and three eye-witness accounts. The author has walked the ground where Jimmy Aspley became a victim of the German Artillery’s ‘daily hate’, dying (without a marked grave) as a 19 year-old Old Contemptible. Was Jimmy’s an ‘Unremarked Sacrifice’? The commemorations uncovered by the author suggest thiswas hardly so.