Current Information:

Age-17

183, Hillingdon Street, Kennington

Point 110 Old Military Cemetery, Fricourt, France

The 11th Royal Fusiliers battalion arrived in France in July, 1915, as part of 54 Brigade, 18th Division. They moved south to the Somme, a sector that had only recently been taken over from the French Army by the British, where they undertook trench instruction near the villages of Suzanne and Bray. On 24th August, 11th Royal Fusiliers marched back to billets in Dernancourt from where half the battalion proceeded to Becordel-Becourt to work with the Royal Engineers. The battalion diary is anything but comprehensive about these early days on the Western Front and there is no entry at all for 1st September, the day on which Stephen Pepler was killed.