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 G/29445 24th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
Ernest Cross was born in 1890 in Sudbury, one of nine children of William and Sarah Cross. His father was employed as a silk weaver, his mother as a tailoress and the family lived at 12 Garden Row. By 1911 his widowed mother had moved to 47 Mill Lane.
Before he enlisted Ernest was a bricklayer’s labourer for Mr. G. Gooday, a local builder. He married Nellie (Harriet) Clarke in Sudbury in the late spring or early summer of 1916 before heading for France.
The battalion was known as the 2nd Sportsman Battalion and formed part of 5th Brigade, 2nd Division. The battalion saw action in the final phase of the Battle of the Somme at the Battle of the Ancre (13 – 18 November 1916).
Ernest was killed in action aged 26 on 13 November 1916. Captain Carroll Wilcocks, his Company Commander wrote to Ernest’s wife: ‘Throughout the whole day’s fighting your husband fought as fearlessly as any man could fight and he died bravely and like a soldier’. Sergeant Benson wrote: ‘Ernest was well in front of the advance and was doing splendid work when the first wave took a German trench. As the lads were going up this particular trench a German officer came up from a dugout and shot your husband’. ‘He was a good soldier, ever willing and ever cheerful, even in adverse circumstances’.
There is no known grave and Ernest is remembered on the Thieve Memorial, Somme, France. He was awarded the British War Medal and Victory Medal.
A Cross of Remembrance was laid at the Thiepval Memorial in April 2006 and April 2009.
His older brother George was captured and was a prisoner of war. He died five weeks after the Armistice and is also remembered on the Sudbury War Memorial.
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