PRIVATE BRANSOME STRIDE
ROYAL NEWFOUNDLAND REGIMENT
13TH FEBRUARY 1920 AGE 21
BURIED: BROOKWOOD MILITARY CEMETERY, UK
In February 1920, James Stride, Bransome's father, wrote from Newfoundland to acknowledge receipt of his son Ambrose's memorial scroll, and to describe the comfort he had received from the King's message of sympathy. However, Bransome was still in hospital in England and his condition was causing increasing concern. He died later that month.
Bransome Stride enlisted in December 1917. He joined his battalion in the field on 9 July 1918 and was wounded on 26 October with a gun shot wound in his right leg. Passed rapidly down the casualty chain, he was in England by 29 October, where his right foot was amputated the next day. Whilst he appears to have recovered fairly well from this, and in July 1919 was fitted with an artificial foot, in the intervening time he appears to have caught influenza, which turned to pneumonia from which he never seemed to recover. By September 1919 he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was transferred to a sanatorium, where he died in February 1920.
Among Bransome's records, on the amazing Newfoundland Regiment and the Great War site, there is a pathetic letter that he wrote in November 1919 to Major Timewell, the regiment's Chief Staff Officer in London. "I am sorry to trouble you but I am very anxious to get home. I am now fited (sic) with my leg and can get about with the help of a stick ..." A draft of soldiers from the Newfoundland Regiment had been repatriated in July 1919 but Bransome Stride had not been thought fit enough to travel. He never got home.
Later that year, James Stride and his wife, Naomi, chose a personal inscription for their son,
He served his country as a hero
And was faithful until death
This time the inscription was inscribed unchanged, other than the fact that the word 'until' was changed to 'unto', whereas the inscription James Stride chose for his other son, Ambrose, is completely different from the one on his headstone.