In a small side road on the edge of fields in Northern France is a small shelter with a British clock face on the roof bearing the name of a company in Derby. On close inspection within lies the grave of Lieutenant Anthony George Attwood Morris. The youngest son of a family from Rugby, Morris had been educated at Winchester and had been commissioned in the regular army before the war, serving in the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment.

The clock face on the Morris Memorial.

He went to war to join the 1st Battalion King’s Own in September 1914 and served on the Aisne before moving to take part in the fighting in Northern France. He was appointed the officer in charge of the Machine Gun section of 1st King’s Own and was killed with members of his section in the fighting at Méteren. One account said he had set up his gun behind a,

“…scanty hedge where he and his team were later found in a tidy row of eight, all dead and their gun out of action.”

Buried on the spot, his family purchased the land on which he was buried and created the memorial in the 1920s. The family continued to visit into the 1960s and the Western Front Association helped renovate it in the 1990s. A century ago today Morris fell on the fields of France and remains buried where he fell, one of a small number of original grave sites still surviving on the Great War battlefields.

The Morris grave.