SERJEANT THOMAS OLIVER CREW
MACHINE GUN CORPS
9TH MARCH 1918 AGE 27
BURIED: LIJSSENTHOEK MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
A wink from Hesper, falling
Fast in the wintry sky,
Comes through the even blue,
Dear, like a word from you.
Is it good-bye?
Across the miles between us
I send you sigh for sigh.
Good-night, sweet friend, good-night:
Till life and all take flight,
Never good-bye.
It's far more usual to see this lovely poem by WE Henley misquoted than it is to see it correctly quoted in headstone inscriptions. Henley wrote, "till life and all take flight, never good-bye", whereas most inscriptions deny that death is the end and write, "though life and all take flight never good-bye". There is, of course, much more consolation in the latter.
Serjeant Crew's mother, Eliza Crew chose the inscription. Thomas Oliver Crew was his parent's eldest child. The family lived in Poplar, east London, where the father, John Crew, was a marine engineer. In 1911, Crew was a clerk working for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He enlisted in June 1915 and served for a year with Queen Victoria's Rifles, a territorial battalion before transferring to the Machine Gun Corps. He went to France in July 1916 attached to the Royal Fusiliers.
Crew's is one of the few service files to exist and it records that on 9 March 1918 he was admitted to a Canadian Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek with gun shot wounds penetrating his abdomen and both legs. He died the same day.