Thomas Garland

War Service

At the outbreak of war Thomas would have been about 17 years old. He enlisted at Normanton but regrettably, I have been unable to establish when he joined the Royal Horse Artillery / Royal Field Artillery.
It is possible that Thomas was one of the young men caught up in the rush, at the time, to join Kitchener’s Army – to see the world, to escape from the daily toil. We will never know.
However, it is possible that Thomas answered the call to join the army earlier. A brief history of the brigade (from “The Long, Long Trail”) states the following:
“The brigade was evacuated from Gallipoli via Murdos when the British force pulled out and arrived at Alexandria on 3 January 1916. The last Turkish attacks at Helles were on 7 January 1916. On 8-9 January 1916 the Division was evacuated from Helles and by 31 January was concentrated at Port Said. The Division held forward posts in the Suez Canal defences. On 12 February 1916 operations began to move to Mesopotamia to strengthen the force being assembled for the relief of the besieged garrison at Kut al Amara. The brigade was transferred to the 13th (Western) Division for operations in Mesopotamia and landed at Basra on 17 March 1916. By 27 March, the Division had assembled near Sheikh Sa’ad and came under orders of the Tigris Corps. It then took part in the attempts to relieve Kut. These efforts failed.”
The surrounding land of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers that flow through Mesopotamia is mostly desert and very flat with virtually no water except that from the rivers. There were few roads suitable to transport an army and all the equipment. Boats on the rivers were the favoured mode of transport. Records confirm Thomas accidentally drowned on 22 May 1916. Where Thomas drowned remains unknown but he is one of the 40,626 casualties remembered with honour on the Basra Memorial in Iraq, in an area of what was a major battleground during the first Gulf War.
Communications were considerably slower 100 years ago so there was the possibility that Thomas, whilst serving in Mesopotamia, may not have received the news of his father’s death in France three months earlier. We can hardly begin to imagine the pain and sorrow his mother must have suffered on receiving the news of the death of Thomas, not only losing her son, but also still grieving following the death of her husband Samuel.

Family Life

Thomas was born in Altofts on 15th November 1896, the son of Samuel and Jane Garland. Thomas’s early life is documented in the account appertaining to his father Samuel Garland.

Basra Memorial