CORPORAL EDWARD DWYER VC
EAST SURREY REGIMENT
3RD SEPTEMBER 1916 AGE 20
BURIED: FLATIRON COPSE CEMETERY, MAMETZ, FRANCE
My eye was caught by a pencilled note at the bottom of a standard page in one of the Commission's cemetery registers: "* This headstone is to be engraved at the Commission's expense". Curious, I looked to see if I could work out why the Commission had decided to pay for this inscription. The man had no recorded next-of-kin but what he did have was the Victoria Cross. His name was Edward Dwyer and at the time it was awarded he was the youngest soldier to win the award.
Wounded soon after incident, Dwyer was sent back to England to recover where, lionised by the public and the press, he became something of a celebrity. You can hear him talking - and singing! - in this interview.
Dwyer won his VC for "most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty at "Hill 60" on 20th April, 1915", single-handedly fending off an enemy advance when the rest of his platoon were either dead or wounded. In an interview published in the Daily Chronicle War Budget 8 July 1915, and republished by the Western Front Association, Dwyer, with typical British self-deprecation, says, "They gave me the VC because I was in a dead funk at the idea of being taken prisoner by the Germans".
Dwyer's celebrity was undoubtedly used and promoted by the Government for recruiting purposes, and much of what he says in his interviews will have been suggested by them. Nevertheless, it may be Government propaganda but it's Dwyer's words; to the 'slackers' who grouse about the conditions they'd have to put up with if they volunteered, "I say that if the officers can put up with the grub and the grind, and men with money can serve as privates who've always lived soft before, nobody has any right to be too particular".
Dwyer returned to the front, it is thought at his own request, and was killed in an attack on the German lines at Guillemont on 3 September 1916. His inscription, the Commission records don't say who chose it, comes from the First Epistle General of John Chapter 3, verse 24:
And he that keepeth His commandments dwelleth in Him, and He in him. And thereby we know that He abideth in us, by the spirit which He hath given us.