PRIVATE FRANK BAKER
EAST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT
25TH SEPTEMBER 1916 AGE 21
BURIED: GUARDS' CEMETERY LESBOEUFS, FRANCE
One of the most popular of all headstone inscriptions is the phrase "Not forgotten". I'm never quite sure whether it's meant to assure the dead man that he has not been forgotten or to tell passers-by that the man buried here has not been forgotten. But Frank Baker's inscription is different because it says "Forget me not", as though he himself is asking not to be forgotten. This could be its meaning but I think it's more likely that Ellen Baker, Frank's mother, was familiar with the Victorian language of flowers. Here a forget-me-not signifies undying love, and remembrance after death.
In Newfoundland, in the years after the First World War, people wore forget-me-nots on 1 July to commemorate Newfoundland soldiers killed in action on the first day of the Somme campaign. The custom gradually died out as people took to wearing poppies but there has been a popular move to revive the wearing of the flower on the anniversary of this day.
Frank, who in 1911 aged 15 was working in a steel works in Sheffield, was the eighth of Ellen Baker's eleven children to die. There are three columns in the 1911 census: Total Children Born Alive; Children Still Living and Children Who Have Died. In 1911 she wrote eleven, four and seven in the relevant columns.