BOMBARDIER THOMAS FRANCIS LONG
ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
7TH MAY 1917 AGE 24
BURIED: RENINGHELST NEW MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
Among all the conventional descriptions of the dead - gallant hero, loved by all - you occasionally get a glimpse of a real person: Bombardier Thomas Francis Long had a golden voice. From his family circumstances I don't imagine it was a trained voice. Thomas Long's mother was a washerwoman and his father was dead. In the 1911 census he was working as a clerk and living in Kennington so he had neither the money nor the time for formal lessons but he still had "a golden voice" and his mother recorded the fact for posterity on his headstone inscription.
The 187th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery was raised in Fulham in 1915 and arrived in France in May 1916. Bombardier Long died of wounds a year later at a field ambulance station near Reninghelst in Belgium and was buried close by.