SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR CHARLES BROOK
MANCHESTER REGIMENT
4TH JUNE 1915 AGE 30
BURIED: REDOUBT CEMETERY, HELLES, GALLIPOLI, TURKEY
Although this sounds like a quotation, it doesn't appear to be. Captain Brook's wife, Sydney, who by the time she chose this inscription had remarried and was now Mrs Simpson, appears to have composed it herself. In so far as it can be said to have a source is it this?
"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand."
St John 10:27-8
So, "all that Thy eternal life can give" appears to be safety, the guarantee of being in God's keeping for ever, this is what Mrs Simpson hoped she was securing for her dead husband.
Second Lieutenant Arthur Brook was a Director of Jonas Brook & Brothers, cotton thread manufacturers from Meltham in Yorkshire. A former pupil of Rugby School, he was killed in Gallipoli on the opening day of the Third Battle of Krithia, 4 June 1915, along with seven other Old Rugbeians: Captain Thomas Cunliffe, Sub-Lieutenant William Denis-Browne, Captain Robert Edgar, Captain Joseph Holt, Captain Edgar Kessler, Second Lieutenant Thomas Walker and Sub-Lieutenant John Weightman - eight of the 1,725 British and Empire troops killed on that day.
The Rugby war register describes Brook's fate:
"During the attack by the Manchester Brigade on the Turkish trenches below Achi Baba, he was directing his men who were taking ammunition, under heavy fire, to the captured trenches, when he was shot and killed instantly, on June 4th, 1915."
The register also quotes from the letter Brook's colonel wrote to Mrs Brook: "He was absolutely cool and utterly fearless always and used to go out into the open, if necessary to get his guns about. He was not killed though carelessness; he was exposing himself necessarily, as a brave man should do, and he was a brave man."