3rd Battalion (attached to 1st Battalion) Gloucestershire Regiment
Laurence* Clerke Brown was born on 1 September 1892 at Winson, Gloucestershire. He was one of three children born to Blanche and George Clerke Brown; his brother Richard was also killed in the war.
Laurence was educated at Durnford School, Langton Matravers, Dorset. He joined the Gloucestershire Regiment and was posted to the 3rd Battalion, which was attached to the 1st Battalion.
He was killed on 11 October 1915 near Loos and the extract from the Regimental Diary reads:
At about 11pm that night the 1st Gloucesters were relieved by the South Wales Borderers and moved back to the support trenches east of the Loos-Le Bassee road. But they were not beyond the enemy fire, for on the 9th many howitzer shells fell all along the line of the road. At night the Battalion sent up working parties to construct four advance saps running south from the fire-trench immediately South of Chalk Pit Wood. The 10th and 11th were similarly spent. Lieutenant L C Brown was killed on the latter date.
Lieutenant Laurence Clerke Brown is commemorated on the Loos Memorial and appears on the Wayside Cross (War Memorial) in Sheepscombe.
[* His birth certificate appears spelt Lawrence but all Sheepscombe records use Laurence.]
Reproduced from The Wayside Cross by kind
permission of the Sheepscombe History Society.