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12389 9th Battalion, Essex Regiment
Arthur Clark was born in Sudbury in 1890. At the age of one he was living with his widowed mother Annie, a stay maker and Grandfather Thomas Clark, a groom and gardener at 19 Church Street. The family later moved to 63 Cross Street. His mother was Annie L Briggs who later lived at 88 Cross Street.
Arthur enlisted in Chelmsford and served with the Essex Regiment. The 9th Battalion formed part of 35th Brigade, 12th (Eastern) Division and in May 1915 the battalion was at Blenheim Barracks in Aldershot before embarking on SS Queen and landing in Boulogne on the first day of June. The battalion began instruction in the trenches at Ploegsteert Wood near Armentieres on the French/Belgian border.
At the beginning of October 1915 the battalion was sent to France to relieve the shattered 21st and 24th Divisions after fierce fighting at the Battle of Loos (25 September – 15 October) and ordered to attack on 13 October between Gun Trench and the Quarries. The British suffered over 61,000 casualties.
It is not known what accident befell Arthur but he is recorded at having died from injuries after an accident aged 25 on 18 October 1915 and lies buried in Wimereux Communal Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France. A Cross of Remembrance was laid by the grave in April 2007.
Wimereux was an important hospital base and three other Sudbury men are also buried in this cemetery. They are buried not far from Lt. Colonel John McCrae who wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’ and died in 1918.
Arthur was awarded the 1914-15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal
On the original Roll of Honour and war memorial there is an Arthur Leman Clarn recorded. Arthur L Clark was mentioned in the Suffolk and Essex Free Press in 1916 when a Memorial Service was held at St. Gregory’s Church. No Arthur Leman Clarn can be traced and a relative has since been in contact and is happy that their relative who they had discovered was missing is now correctly remembered. In 1919 the people of Sudbury were invited to put forward names for the War Memorial in 1919 and the handwriting could easily have been misread. If family had moved away from the town when the War Memorial was unveiled in 1921 then the error would have gone unnoticed.
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