Not Divided

“They were Lovely and Pleasant in their Lives and in their Death, they were Not Divided.”

These are the splendid words added to the Nash family grave in the quiet churchyard at 12th century St Peter’s in Martley, near Worcester.

On 2nd April 1915, 21-year-old James Nash, a Lt in the East Surreys was checking on his men in the trenches at Kemmel and had just told one of his men to keep down when the Germans sent up a star-light, and a sniper’s bullet found his heart.

James Nash

Two months later, his elder brother George (left), a Lt in the Worcesters, was with his Battalion at Hooge, about 8 miles north-east of where James lay, when another sniper’s bullet hit him in the head.

George clung to life.

They successfully operated at a large hospital at Boulogne to remove the bullet, while his Mum Edith forced her way across the wartime Channel (no small feat in 1915) to be with him.

She was at his side, 9 days later, when he died.

George Nash

Edith brought George back to Martley with her to be buried with his sister Dorothy, who’d died 4 years earlier aged 18, in the Martley village churchyard, and she would ensure George’s brother James, whom she’d had to leave buried at Kemmel Chateau, was also remembered on George’s gravestone.

Even then, tragedy was not quite done with the Nash family of Martley, for little sister Margaret, who’d been 16 when her brothers died, did not live to see the end of the War that killed them.

She died two weeks before the Armistice, possibly in the Spanish flu epidemic ripping through the nation that autumn.

Only the two youngest siblings survived to make lives for themselves.

Mum Edith, widowed in 1936, was living in Worcester with her unmarried daughter Barbara when WW2 came and bless them, elderly Edith was volunteering then as a VAD, one of the hard-working volunteer nurses, while Barbara was ARP and a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service, who helped, soothed and organised.

They were likely both on hand in October 1940, when Worcester was bombed by the Luftwaffe.

Perhaps in a way, every person they bandaged or consoled was George or James.

With WW2 safely won, Edith Nash was 82 when she at last went to find her lost children.