The war memorial of Private John Lawrence Brew, 11th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, who died on 7 August 1918, aged 19, is located on the Pozières Memorial, in the Pozières War Cemetery, on the Somme in France (Panel 19 to 21). He was the son of John Joseph and Maria Louise Brew of 116 Venmore Street, Liverpool, England.
The Pozieres Memorial remembers the period of crisis in March and April 1918 when the Allied Fifth Army was driven back by overwhelming numbers across the former Somme battlefields, and the months that followed before the Advance to Victory, which began on 8 August 1918. The Memorial commemorates over 14,000 casualties of the United Kingdom and 300 of the South African Forces who have no known grave and who died on the Somme from 21 March to 7 August 1918. The Corps and Regiments most largely represented are The Rifle Brigade with over 600 names, The Durham Light Infantry with approximately 600 names, the Machine Gun Corps with over 500, The Manchester Regiment with approximately 500 and The Royal Horse and Royal Field Artillery with over 400 names. The memorial encloses Pozieres British Cemetery, Plot II of which contains original burials of 1916-1918, carried out by fighting units and field ambulances. The remaining plots were made after the Armistice when graves were brought in from the battlefields immediately surrounding the cemetery, the majority of them of soldiers who died in the Autumn of 1916 during the latter stages of the Battle of the Somme, but a few represent the fighting in August 1918. There are now 2,755 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or remembered in this cemetery. 1,375 of the burials are unidentified and there are also special memorials to 23 casualties known or believed to be buried among them.
The Pozières War Memorial and Cemetery is located on the left hand side (north side) of the Amiens-Albert-Bapaume road (D929), on the southern outskirts of Pozières, approximately 6km north-east of Albert.
The first image, below, shows John Lawrence Brew's name on the memorial. He appears in the first column of names on the left, near the bottom of the second section. The second image shows Pozieres War Cemetery with the Memorial Wall in the background.
Click on an image to see an enlarged version.
© These photographs were taken by Steve Brew on 26 September 1998.