Darwin SPILSBURY

45901, Private. b. 1886, Shelf d. Thu. 4th October 1917 (aged 31).

Having been conscripted in March 1916 into the Northumberland Fusiliers, Darwin left his home at 8, Holts Lane and his wife Sarah behind him, and embarked on his several months training programme. He docked in France in September 1916 and was sent to serve with the 12th Northumberland Fusiliers, who were greatly under strength due to losses sustained during the Somme campaign which was coming to a close at this point.

It was not just this unit which was undermanned though, as virtually every battalion that had taken part was now below par, and the British Army found itself 55,000 men short (through being killed) with perhaps three times that number recovering from wounds sustained in the field, and consequently unavailable for active service for several more months.

Darwin would have lived through the ‘quiet’ but cold winter of 1916 before taking part in the Arras campaign in the spring of 1917. This was another major loss of lives for the Allies, with many units never regaining a full complement of men before the start of the Third Battle of Ypres in the autumn of 1917. After the first few weeks of this battle, it became clear that it was unsustainable to have so many units which were under strength, and the army took the necessary step of merging and disbanding battalions. Darwin’s battalion was down to under half its complement of 1,000 men and so it was merged with its sister battalion the 13th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers.

In a similar way, many of the Pals battalions such as the Leeds Pals and the Tyneside Scottish were also merged. In most cases at the conclusion of the Passchendaele campaign these units were separated and re-staffed as separate units, but some never saw service as independent units again.

At the time of his death Darwin would have had to have been living through the murky hell of Passchendaele – a terrifically wet spring and summer of 1917 turned the entire Western Front into a quagmire. Climatological scholars today have actually suggested the reasoning for this – the wet weather was actually a knock-on effect from the sheer volume of shells exploding over such a small area which caused the weather to change. Darwin was posted missing in action on the 4th October.

Darwin is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium.

Darwin Spillsbury is also commemorated on Queensbury War Memorial. You can read about Darwin and more about his war experience here at Queensbury Remembers.