Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1915, Gunner Frank Rayment, 23rd Battery, Royal Field Artillery, died while in service at Woolwich Barracks in London.
The youngest of ten children, he had worked as a farm bailiff before enlisting at the outbreak of the Great War. While at the barracks he sustained a skull fracture in an accident, and was taken to the Royal Herbert Hospital – he developed cerebral meningitis and could not be saved. He is buried in the Greenwich Cemetery in London.
Gunner Rayment had enlisted along with five of his brothers and a nephew, who all saw active service in France and Belgium; it is interesting to note that each had enlisted in a different regiment. Unlike the case with many families, they all survived the war, two of them living well into their 90s.
Frank, from Milton Ernest in Bedfordshire, was 21 years old.