FIRST WORLD WAR 100: We will remember Private Ben Pike

IT was 100 years ago today on August 24, 1914, that Yeovil suffered its first casualty of the First World War.

Private Abendago Richard Pike, known as Ben, was a reservist at the outbreak of the war and was called up straight away with the 1st Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment, having signed up in Sherborne, and was deployed to the Western Front.

He and his comrades soon found themselves fighting in the front lines in the Battle of Mons.

The Battle of Mons was the first major action of the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War.

At Mons, the British Army attempted to hold the line of the Mons-Conde Canel against the advancing German 1st Army.

PHOTO - ABOVE: The Royal British Legion has planted 20,000 commemorative poppies in Mons to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Mons.

PHOTO – RIGHT: British infantry at the Mons-Conde Canal.

Although the British fought well and inflicted disproportionate casualties on the numerically superior Germans, they were eventually forced to retreat due to both to the great strength of the Germans and the sudden retreat of the French Fifth Army, which exposed the British right flank.

Ben lived at Great Western Terrace in Yeovil and left a widow and three young children, the eldest being only six.

His wife had been warned that he was missing in action, but a week later she heard the news that he had died of wounds sustained at Wurns, near Mons, France.

Ben was aged 28 when he died. His name is commemorated at the La Ferte-Sous-Jouarre Memorial in France and also the War Memorial in the Borough of Yeovil.

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