Armistice brought fighting to an end but not the family losses.
The
Armistice signed on 11th
November, 1918 brought the fighting of the Great War to an end
(except in East Africa where it continued for several more days). The
joy for some at home however was often shattered by the continuing
receipt of news that a loved one had died of wounds or was discovered
to have died in a prisoner of war camp.
In
addition, the poor
state of health of many who had served in the war, brought on by the
conditions in the battlefields, meant that many men succumbed to
general illness. We do not know when Lieutenant George Frederick Ball
was sent to Ireland at Balla, County Mayo, when he died in December,
1918 serving with the 2nd/1st
Highland Cyclist battalion but many troops had been deployed to
Ireland in the wake of the continuing political agitation and
disorder surrounding the campaign by nationalists for separation from
the United Kingdom.
The
Shields Daily News announced on 10th
December, 1918 that George Ball, who was the younger son of Henry and
Mary Ball, of 3 Milton Terrace, North Shields, and Lately Assistant
Scout Master of the Christ Church Troop Boy Scouts would be interred
at Preston Cemetery that week.
The
Tynemouth Parish Church Monthly Magazine in January 1919, noted in
its IN MEMORIAM. Section ‘Our sympathy goes out to the relatives of
three of our promising young men, who have given their lives as part
of the toll exacted by the War... Dec. 6th brought the news of the
death in Ireland from pleurisy of 2nd Lieut. Geo. F. Ball, our
Assistant Scoutmaster, who was exceptionally keen in all that he
undertook. We shall miss them all tremendously, and to the relatives
of each we offer our deepest sympathy. The friends of Geo. Ball had
the melancholy satisfaction of a military funeral here at home, which
was attended by a large number of Scouts’.
George
Ball had attended Tynemouth High School and is remembered in the
school’s Record of Service compiled by the Headmaster, Wallace
Heaton who knew every pupil who served in the war and followed their
lives during the war. (The school opened in 1904, and of 381 former
pupils who were known by Heaton to have served in military or naval
service, some 69 had died on active service or through war related
causes).
Ball
is named on several memorials including on the Honour Boards of the
High School – now part of the Queen Alexandra Sixth Form College,
on the bronze tablets set into the school gates (one of which was
stolen in 2010), and on the Pulpit in Christ Church which carries the
names of members of the parish who were regular attenders at the
church before enlistment. His parents at least had the comfort denied
to most of being allowed to repatriate his body for burial in Preston
Cemetery (picture).
The
toll of deaths from war related causes would continue for years to
come and the last death recorded in
the Tynemouth Roll of Honour is for a man who died in July, 1921 –
just two months before the last qualifying date for the grant of an
Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission headstone.
