Henry James Sawyer

Henry Sawyer's grave in the Bolsena War Cemetery, Italy. Image from Find a Grave.

Henry Sawyer was born on 1 August 1921 at 69 Blackfriars Road, St Ebbe’s, Oxford. His parents were Percy and Beatrice (née Burdock). Percy was born in East Avenue off the Cowley Road; his father (a labourer) died when he was six. As a young man Percy moved to Sutton Courtenay near Abingdon and worked as a general dealer’s assistant. He lodged in the house of his employer, Richard Roberts. Later Percy moved back to Oxford to live at 69 Blackfriars Road, St Ebbe’s. During the First World War he served as a driver with the Royal Field Artillery. He was wounded and given a disability payment by the army.

After the war Percy worked as a bus conductor and in 1920 he married Beatrice Burdock at Holy Trinity Church, St Ebbe’s. He was 27 and she was nineteen. Beatrice was originally from Westcote near Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, the second of the eight children of a road labourer. She and Percy lived at 69 Blackfriars Road, St Ebbe’s, where their first child Henry was born on 1 August 1921. By this time Percy was employed as a labourer at the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Didcot. Living with them was a seven-year-old boy, Francis Shirley, born in St Clement’s, who was described in the 1921 census as their adopted son; whether or not he was a blood relation is unclear. Four more sons and a daughter were born over the next thirteen years: Cyril (1923); Thomas (1925); Anthony (1929); John (1931); and Ann (1934).

Percy died in 1936 aged 44. By this time the family had moved to 12 Fox Crescent in Cold Harbour, at the far southern end of the Abingdon Road. His funeral was at St Matthew’s Church and he was buried in Osney Cemetery.

The 1939 register, taken on 29 September, four weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, recorded Beatrice living at 9 Canning Crescent in Cold Harbour, with her five younger children Cyril (aged sixteen, working as a builder's errand boy); Thomas (fourteen); Anthony (ten); John (eight); and Ann (five). Lodging with them was an eighteen-year-old barmaid, Betty Hawkins.

Henry, who was eighteen, was absent from the 1939 register, which suggests that he had already enlisted as a Private in the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry. Later in the war he transferred to the 2nd Battalion, Rifle Brigade (Prince Consort’s Own), and became a Rifleman, service no. 5383328. The 2nd Battalion served in the Middle East and North Africa, including El Alamein, Egypt, in 1942. It moved to Italy in April 1944, following the Allies’ invasion of the Italian mainland in September 1943. Allied troops moved northwards through Italy, and Rome was taken on 3 June 1944. German forces made a stand at Bolsena, 80 miles north-west of Rome. To the east of Lake Bolsena there was a tank battle in June 1944 between the 6th South African Armoured Division and the Hermann Goering Panzer Division. Henry was killed in action on 11 June 1944, probably during this battle. He was 22.

Henry was initially buried near the battlefield but his remains were re-interred at the Bolsena War Cemetery in July 1945. The site for the cemetery had been chosen in November 1944, and burials were brought in from the battlefields between Bolsena and Orvieto. Almost a third of those buried at Bolsena were South Africans. Henry’s gravestone bears the inscription “No one knows / How much we miss him / None but aching hearts / Can tell”. He is also commemorated on the Oxford City Second World War Roll of Honour in the church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket, Oxford.

It's not clear whether Henry’s younger brothers Cyril and Thomas served in the war (though they were old enough), but his older adopted brother Francis Sawyer-Shirley did. Francis worked at Morris Motors in Cowley, and had joined the 4th Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry in 1930, when he was sixteen. As a member of the Territorial Army he would have been called up as soon as the Second World War broke out in September 1939. He went with his battalion to France and was captured at Dunkirk on 30 May 1940. He spent the rest of the war – until 1 May 1945 – as a prisoner of war (POW). Part of this time was at Lamsdorf Prisoner of War camp (Stalag VIII B; later Stalag 344) in Upper Silesia (then in Germany, but now in Poland), from which he made an unsuccessful attempt to escape in 1940. Between August 1943 and January 1945 Francis was held at a labour camp in Poland, working in a coal mine, where he sabotaged railway wagons by filling the grease boxes with sand. In April 1945 he was made to work at the main railway station at Regensburg, Bavaria, whilst under heavy bombing by Allied planes. He survived however, and returned home.

In the winter of 1946 Henry and Francis's mother Beatrice married George Chambers. She died in Oxford in 1972, aged 71.

Research by Heather Reid; with thanks to Pete Roper for additional information.

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