Private John Swift

One of the 40 names believed to have been omitted from the War Memorial is that of Private John Swift who was serving with the 2nd/7th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment when he was killed at the Battle of Fromelles on 19th July 1916.

In 2009, excavations began at a mass grave in France where he is believed to have been buried. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission which has responsibility in these matters began trying to make a positive identification in order that he may be laid to rest with due military honours while the Bourne branch of the Royal British Legion expressed the wish that his name be added to the roll of honour on the War Memorial.

The best method of establishing an identification is by tracing immediate relatives and taking a DNA sample, a simple but effective procedure, but after almost 100 years it is difficult to trace members of the family especially when information about the dead soldier’s life is not always easy to find.

Census returns from 1901 and 1911 established that John Swift’s parents were Charles William Swift, a local grocer, and his wife Sarah, who lived originally in Gladstone Street, Bourne, and then in Meadowgate, Bourne, where he was born in 1911, one of five children, the others being Annie (born 1887), William (1888), Edith (1890), and Kathleen (1900), but John subsequently moved to London to live with his grandmother and it is not known when he enlisted. There the trail ended until that fateful day in 1916 when he fell during the first major battle on the Western Front in which the 5th Australian Division suffered 5,533 casualties, 1,780 of them killed, and the 61st British Division lost 1,547 men, either killed, wounded or taken prisoner, all within a 24-hour period.

Some 400 of the dead were buried by the Germans in mass graves at Pheasant Wood near the village of Fromelles, confirmed during a limited excavation in May 2008, and a full exhumation began this spring. Although lists of names are not available, it had been possible to draw up a pool of possible identities of the victims with formal identification being made by DNA testing which should be completed by 2010.

Private Swift’s grandfather was almost certainly William Peck Swift, a grocer and draper of Church Street [now Abbey Road], whose business was taken over by Charles William Swift whose younger brother, John Thomas Swift (1855-1939), became a leading citizen as magistrate, chairman of the old Bourne Urban District Council, county councillor and alderman, and is best remembered for his book about the town which was published in 1925, Bourne and People Associated with Bourne. His own son, Ashby Swift (1882-1941), who was therefore Private Swift’s first cousin, was one of our leading local photographers who also served with the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War.

His father, Charles Swift, died in 1934, aged 84, and was buried in the town cemetery on November 29th that year. Both J T Swift and Ashby Swift are also buried there but exhumation for DNA sampling is unlikely and so it will depend on finding relatives and so the search goes on. However, local military historian, Tony Stubbs, has urged caution regarding identification. "Expectations have in the past been raised too high", he said. "Several years ago, near Ypres in Belgium, ground was being cleared for an industrial site when a grave of over twenty men was discovered, the skeletons neatly laid out all with the remains of their boots on, all else having rotted away, yet despite exhaustive investigation, only one or two were actually identified."

John Swift is remembered on the Loos memorial to the missing at Dud Corner cemetery near Loos-en-Gohelle in France. Other Bourne soldiers included there are Sgt Harold Fortescue and Private Frank Larkinson of the 8th Lincolns, Private Fred North (7th Northamptons) and Private John Stevenson (5th Lincolns).

There is also another Swift not mentioned on the War Memorial in Bourne. He is 2nd Lieutenant William Swift of the Lincolnshire Regiment who was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme on 2nd July 1916 and is buried at Gordon Dump cemetery near the village of La Boisselle, France. He was the elder son of Mr and Mrs William Swift of North Road, Bourne, and is also recorded on the memorial scroll from the Baptist Church in West Street, now on display at the headquarters of the Bourne branch of the Royal British Legion in Burghley Street.

REVISED SEPTEMBER 2009

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