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| Frederick Duce & Mary Brady c1914 (photograph courtesy of Richard Alecock) |
Frederick Duce was born in 1885, the sixth child of fifteen born to Charles Duce, a coconut mat weaver and his wife Emily Jane Boggis a horsehair drawer. By 1904 Fred was working as a groom and serving briefly as a volunteer with 3rd [Militia] Battalion, Suffolk Regiment. Restless with civilian life, and occasional soldiering in the county militia, he left the family home in Westgate Street, Long Melford and enlisted in Sudbury as private No.8505 of 1st Battalion, The Cameronians otherwise known as the Scottish Rifles. He joined his regiment north of the border, at their headquarters in Hamilton, where he spent three years with the Colours before being transferred to the Army Reserve in 1907. It was while he was stationed here that he met and married Mary Brady in Glasgow in 1906.
Military Career
On August 5, 1914, the day after war was declared, he was mobilised and returned to his old regiment, being posted to France ten days later with the British Expeditionary Force, as part of 19th Infantry Brigade. Over the course of the next two years he saw action at the Battles of Mons, Le Cateau and the Marne in 1914, Loos in 1915 and the Somme in 1916. He returned to England in mid-November 1916 before being posted for a second time to France at the end of May 1917. Promoted to Sergeant two months later, he was with his unit at the Battles of the Menin Road Ridge and Polygon Wood at the end of September, and took part in the Battles of the Lys and the Hindenberg Line during the spring and summer of 1918. He returned to England in October 1918 and was discharged early the following year.
One small corner of the Somme
Fred Duce’s unit saw little action in the first days of the Somme Offensive of 1916 being held in reserve until 15 July when they were moved forward to Bezentin le Petit, six miles north-east of the town of Albert. Two days later the Cameronians together with other elements of 33rd Division, took part in an assault on the German held ‘Switch Trench’, the attack stalling due to concentrated enemy fire from concealed machine gun nests in High Wood, on the Division’s right flank. To neutralise this threat the Battalion was launched against the Wood in a pre-dawn attack. Known locally as Bois des Fourcaux, it was at this stage of the campaign still very much as it had been before the War, a closely packed area of woodland with a floor of tangled undergrowth. The advance was met with stiff resistance followed by an intense enemy artillery barrage, leaving fifty-seven of Fred’s comrades dead and over three hundred wounded or missing. The Cameronians were so badly mauled by this action that they were temporarily taken out of the line, for rest and reinforcement. High Wood was not firmly in Allied hands until the Battle of Flers-Courcelette on September 15.
After three months respite Fred next saw action when his unit moved to Lesboeufs, four miles east of the earlier action. At dawn on October 29 a large-scale assault was made on ‘Boritska Trench’ which was brought to a shuddering halt by a hail of machine gun fire, inflicting over 100 casualties on Fred’s unit alone. Two days later another attempt was made, Boriska being briefly occupied before the attack was again beaten back. Boriska Trench was finally taken on November 5.
The Somme Offensive, which had begun on July 1, did not end until November 18 when weather conditions brought any further movement to a halt. The five month campaign had taken a heavy toll on all combatants, with total casualties on both sides close to 1,500,000 men; of these nearly 1 in 5 were recorded as either killed or missing.
Research by David Gevaux, MA
Melford and the Great War Project
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