Lives of the First World War

Private ALFRED HUNT G/11689, 11th Bn., Royal Sussex Regiment. He was born in Hardingham on 2 June 1897, the son of Alfred and Ellen Hunt, and was baptised there on 22 August 1897. In the 1901 Census the family was living at High Common, Hardingham, and Alfred was the middle one of three boys. Alfred is recorded as attending Hardingham C of E School from 15th April 1901, leaving on 19th August 1910 to become, we read, a butcher’s boy. He would have had to leave the following year anyway – the school leaving age at that time was 14. He went into the business run by his uncle Edmund Ashby at 54 Queen’s Road, Leicester. That seems to have been a fairly well-established business – there is a record of it in trade directories from 1901. According to the Hardingham War Memorial Register, which refers to Alfred and Ellen as being “of 70, Montague Rd., Clarendon Park, Leicester”, the family would appear to have moved to Leicester in 1916. Alfred Hunt was called up in May 1916 and joined the Royal Sussex Regiment. It is, perhaps, worth noting why a lad from Norfolk, by then living in Leicester, found himself in a Suffolk regiment. When the officer in command of the 11th Battalion, Colonel Grisewood, had seen the battle plans for the Somme, to his eternal credit he declared “I am not sacrificing my men as cannon fodder”. He had promptly been relieved of his command, and under their new commanding officer, the men of his battalion, with the rest of the Sussex Regiment, were duly massacred. To this day, people call it “The Day that Sussex Died”. That is why the regiment had to be built up with men from other parts of the country, such as young Alfred Hunt, who was 20 when he died. He was one of the 6,527 men of the British forces who were killed on 31 July 1917, the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. His body was never found and he is commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial.

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