IN THIS edition we remember another Redditch soldier who was killed 100 years ago this week whilst fighting for King and Country in the First World War.
Arthur Charles Broom was just 21 when he was killed in action while serving in France with the 3rd Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment on October 15, 1916.
Born at Tardebigge in 1894, he was one of the seven children of John and Eliza Broom. The family lived at Butlers Wood with his dad working as a gamekeeper. The family later moved to Arthur Street which runs between Studley Road and Holloway Drive.
Young Arthur married May Harris, the two of them moving to Hill Top in Webheath before he enlisted in the local regiment, the Worcestershires, when war came.
Like thousands of other British units the 3rd Battalion had been heavily involved in the Battle of the Somme and by October 1916 it found itself involved in the battle to take the Ancre Heights, near Thiepval.
The regimental history of the Worcestershires graphically describes the situation facing the soldiers in the run up to death of Private Broom.
On October 2 they were ordered back into the line “across a wilderness of shell holes” to take over trenches ruined by gunfire.
“The crest line was a target for every German gun in the country around. Heavy gunfire started with the dawn and lasted all day….casualties could not be avoided, and casualties came in rapid succession,” reads the history.
The 3rd Worcestershires held the line for ten days “drenched with rain and continuously bombarded” before they were moved back down the line into support trenches, having suffered more than 100 casualties.
However there was scant relief behind the front line, the battalion suffering 14 more casualties from artillery fire – one of them Pte Broom.
Arthur Broom is remembered on the Thiepval Monument on France and on the St Philip’s war memorial in Webheath.
With thanks to Remembering Redditch’s Fallen Heroes and the official history of the Worcestershire Regiment.
