LIEUTENANT EDWARD CRAWFORD
ROYAL INNISKILLING FUSILIERS
27TH MAY 1915 AGE 35
BURIED: WIMEREUX COMMUNAL CEMETERY, FRANCE
Captain Crawford's ancestor has to have been one of the thirty-eight survivors of the Royal Naval frigate HMS Quebec sunk by the French frigate Surveillante off the island of Ushant on 6 October 1779. Quebec had fought a bloody action to the death and once her magazines had exploded and the ship had sunk there were few survivors. However, the French ship managed to pick up some of them. Surveillante herself was in a desperate state and had lost many of her crew, so the British sailors helped get this enemy ship back to port. Once there the captain, Lieutenant Charles Louis Du Couëdic de Kergoualer, treated the British sailors as castaways found at sea rather than as prisoners-of-war, and made sure they were repatriated without either parole or ransom. The whole story can be read here.
Edward Crawford, together with his twin brother Frederick, were regular soldiers serving in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers having been gazetted lieutenants in April 1906. Edward went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in October 1914, was invalided home with frostbite in December 1914 and, having returned to the front, died in hospital at Wimereux on 27 May of gas poisoning and wounds received some time around the 25th.
By the time the war broke out in 1914 both Crawford's parents were dead. It was one of his older brothers, Robert Karl Crawford, who chose his inscription - "His life for the life France gave us off Ushant 6th October 1779".