A Visit to the Cemetery

Three words I shy away from are “pleasant”, “nice” and “intriguing”; so I reluctantly admit that I found this memorial intriguing.

Both the structure and the inscription attracted my interest. “To the memory of Peter Sidney Arthur Justins, painter, singer, actor, player, who died March 4th 1925 aged 26 years”; a Renaissance man whose potential was nipped in the bud.

The Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing in Belgium is on a larger scale. It commemorates 11,367 missing Commonwealth soldiers; not so well known as the Menin Gate but an equally fine and enduring tribute to their sacrifice. One of the names recorded is Lieutenant Charles Simeon Beaven who is also remembered in Margravine Cemetery.

He “fought at Suvla Bay, Anafarta and Egypt” in the 7th Tank Battalion. I’m no military historian but I cannot find out anything about the 7th Tank Battalion and all this happened in 1915 when tanks were an experiment – it wasn’t until 1916 that the War Office bought 100 tanks to be deployed on the Western Front. The campaigns at Suvla Bay and Anafarta were unfamiliar until I found they are what we call Gallipoli. Having survived that it seems hard that he was sent to France where he died aged only twenty-three and leaving a widow, Violet. After Gallipoli he was commissioned into the 7th Battalion, Tank Corps and posted  to France. His epitaph, “he gave his life to save others”, is as apt today as it was a century ago, in a cemetery beside Charing Cross Hospital.