This article was first published by the Pirton Magazine in June 2006, and is provided courtesy of the magazine, the editor Derek Jarrett. Further acknowledgments appear at the end of the article.

Private Frank Abbiss

Walking round the village and many signs of modern day affluence, it is hard to realise how poor so many of the villagers were when the men on our WW1 memorial were children. It was hard for families to survive and few parents were interested in their children forsaking the opportunity to earn a few pence by going to any of the charity or church schools. As an Inspector of Education wrote (1869) “Straw plaiting is the local hindrance…boys and girls begin work at four years and continue to old age.”

When the 1870 Education Bill came into effect making school attendance compulsory, illness – scarlet fever and measles were rife - and truancy continued to bedevil many Pirton children’s schooling. But when the Pirton Board School opened on 15th January 1877, a new world dawned for the village children. On that first day, 112 children were admitted to the ‘Mixed Department’ and 62 to the Infant Department. Those buildings, with additions and changes, continue to serve well the village children.

A family name that featured prominently on the village school roll was Abbiss, for there were several related households bearing that name. In the eighth year of the new school’s life, two boys bearing the name of Frank Abbiss were admitted. Their fathers both bore the name of George, but the two Franks were only very distantly related.

‘Ten Steps’ as it was popularly known, consisted of a row of four cottages, built in the mid 18th century; small and poor, they were demolished in 1980 to make way for a new development. In one lived newly-married George and Annie, both Pirton born folk, one labouring in the fields, the other at home straw-plaiting – the oft-repeated pattern in the village. On 13th November 1880, Annie gave birth to their first child, Frank. Elizabeth, Mary (always known as Polly) and Harry soon followed.

A thought that Frank might have joined up with the Bedfordshire Regiment well before the War, seems unlikely; for he would almost certainly have reached a higher rank than Private by the War’s end. More likely that after a time of labouring he joined the Regiment in 1915. By this time Frank was 35 in an army of generally younger men. With the terrible casualty list and changes that occurred through the awfulness of the war, the regiments to which humble privates belonged were often changed. At some point he became Private 201339 Frank Abbiss of the Norfolk Regiment.

Frank’s war moved on, He found himself fighting in the Middle East becoming the only Pirton victim to be buried in Egypt. The tragedy of his death is underlined by it being on the first Christmas Day after the Great War. He may have died from wounds, although more likely of disease, possibly Spanish flu which was to account for well over 20 million deaths.

Whatever his condition at the end of the war, he was almost certainly placed in a hospital in Alexandria. On the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, Alexandria had been the wartime centre of communications for the middle and near east. So Frank, who started life as one of the many poor boys in Pirton, died a lonely death in a ‘foreign field’ on Christmas Day 1918 and was buried in Hadra Cemetery, one of 1,700 War dead buried there.

Hadra is a district on the eastern side of Alexandria and near the University and the cemetery is on the road to Sharia Manara. His headstone shares with the village war Memorial in Crabtree Lane, the name of Frank Abbiss. The words carried on his headstone in Egypt, “Gone but not forgotten”.

*** For help with this article we thank: Clare Baines, Grace Maidment, Denise Marshall, Lynda Smith www.roll-of-honour.com, Jonty Wild www.pirton.org.uk, Tony French, Nigel Lutt (Bedford Archivist), Helen Hofton, The Hitchin Museum and ‘A Foot on Three Daisies’ 1987.

Points of contact are:
Pirton Website Jonty Wild via jontywild@pirton.org.uk

We would like to ask for your help, if you have any information, photographs or artefacts:

Please get in touch jontywild@pirton.org.uk

Also if anyone would like copy of any Pirton WW1 war grave or memorial please contact Jonty Wild, digital copies for personal use will be provided free of charge to relatives, photographs can be provided for a small charge.

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