ROBERT GEORGE BEAUMONT
42033, Private
22nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment
Who died aged 29 on 4 October 1917

Robert’s parents are given on his Commonwealth War Graves Commission record as Robert & Jane Beaumont of Sunnyside in Bergh Apton.  Local knowledge tells us that the house they lived in (and is believed to have been built by the family) was Pennyhill.

On his enlistment in September 1916 Robert himself was living at Prospect Place in Thurton with his wife Ellen (nee Stonebridge) whom he married in January 1915 and his first-born, daughter Ada Ellen.  By the time his widow received his medals in 1921 she had moved, with Ada and Robert (a son born on 27 September 1917) to 2, Kimberley St in Norwich.

Robert was killed at the age of 29 on Thursday 4 October 1917.  That was the first day of the Battle of Broodseinde in which the Manchester Regiment lost 279 ORs (other ranks) wounded, missing or killed.

Many of these casualties were incurred near a small café called In Der Ster Cabaret (Café of the Stars) on the N303 road south from Zonnebeke to Beselare.  That was where German machine guns firing from Joiner’s Rest (a slight hillock east of the road)  caught Robert’s battalion in enfilade fire.

He was amongst the missing whose bodies were never recovered and he is remembered on the Tyne Cot Memorial at Zonnebeke in Belgium. 

Tyne Cot was one of the cemeteries and memorials where a party from Bergh Apton Local History Group paid its respects when it visited the Ypres battlefields in September 2007

 
Beaumont 1:  Robert Beaumont.


Beaumont 2:  A map in the archive of the Passchendaele Memorial Museum in Zonnebeke with the position of Joiner’s Rest and the In Der Ster Cabaret marked.  The Manchesters were advancing in the direction of the arrow.

Beaumont 3:  Tyne Cot Memorial near Passchendaele, and the apse where Robert Beaumont’s name is recorded. >

Beaumont 4: Robert’s widow in 1918 with daughter Ada (aged 18 months) and baby son Robert who was born just a week before his father was killed. >

Beaumont 5:  Robert Beaumont’s daughter Ada in her early twenties.  She married Leslie Coe and died in Norwich in 2002 at the age of 86 years. >