Pozières Memorial

Memorial

The memorial commemorates the missing of the British Fifth Army, and to a lesser extent the Fourth Army, which was re-formed after the Fifth Army's near disintegration. Originally the missing of the Third Army were to be listed here, and those of the Fifth Army at Saint-Quentin, but French objections to the amount of land for British memorials led to the Third Army names being added to the Arras Memorial and the Fifth Army memorial being placed at Pozières, even though the site lies on the opposite side of the River Somme from where those named died.

William Harrison Cowlishaw designed the memorial, with sculpture by Laurence A. Turner. It consists of a colonnade of wall panels forming three sides of the cemetery perimeter, incorporating a Cross of Sacrifice, while the fourth side is an open arcade with a central entrance archway bearing the inscription. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien unveiled the memorial on 4 August 1930.

Cemetery

The memorial encloses a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery containing 2,758 Commonwealth servicemen buried or commemorated. Plot II, an original 1916–18 plot, holds 272 burials; the remaining graves were moved here after the Armistice, mostly of soldiers killed during the Battle of Pozières and the latter stages of the 1916 Battle of the Somme, with a few from August 1918. About half the graves are unidentified; among those identified, most are Australian. 57 Germans were buried here in 1918, but most of their remains were moved after the war, leaving just a single German grave.

Notable commemorations

The most senior officer commemorated on the memorial is Brigadier-General G. N. B. Forster of the 14th (Light) Division, killed on 4 April 1918. One Victoria Cross recipient, Sergeant Claud Castleton of the Australian Machine Gun Corps, is buried in the cemetery. Three Victoria Cross recipients are commemorated on the memorial: Private Herbert Columbine (Machine Gun Corps, killed 22 March 1918), Second Lieutenant Edmund De Wind (Royal Irish Rifles, killed 21 March 1918), and Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfrith Elstob (Manchester Regiment, killed 21 March 1918). Also commemorated are Sergeant Percy W Pickles DCM of the 4th Queens Own Hussars (killed 31 March 1918) and Lance Corporal Francis George Preece DCM of the 13th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment, who died of shrapnel wounds on 22 March 1918.