George Vizard
Memorial: Chipping Sodbury Town Cross - Broad Street
Regiment: Royal Engineers
Medals: British War Medal, Next of Kin Memorial Plaque 1914 - 1921, Victory Medal
Rank and number: Sapper 1079
Parents: Albert Henry and Edith May Vizard
Home address: Rock House, High Street, Chipping Sodbury, Bristol
Date of birth: 1897
Place of birth: Chipping Sodbury, Bristol
Date of death: 20/08/1916
Age: 19
Further information:
1st/2nd (SM) Field Company, Royal Engineers, British Army
George was one of a large family of Vizards, spread all over Chipping Sodbury and surrounds. He and his younger sister Ethel lived at home in Rock House on the corner of the High Street and Quarry Road with their parents, Albert Henry and Edith Mary Vizard. Albert worked at that time as a brewers’ traveller, but came from a long line of stonemasons associated with the wider family’s stone quarries nearby
George had three special school-friends one was Percy Dash, killed nearly two years before and the other was Leonard Andrews who was not to follow them for a further two years and P A Colwill who alone survived. These four lads seem to have lived life to the full in the fields and meadows around Chipping Sodbury, in those carefree days of growing up before the days of world wars
Captain Colwill reminisces about the outbreak of war on August 4th 1914, and how that date “still wrings my heart. I shall never forget as I was driving the men to work on the Badminton Estate as we passed Mrs Williams’ paper shop, the one word in giant letters ‘WAR’ on the placard outside. . . There were whist drives and dances and concerts we arranged ourselves, and those long walks on a Sunday afternoon over The Ridings in cowslip time, or to stand under that chestnut tree in the Churchyard in full bloom. What fragrant memories!” (quoted from P.A. Couzens: “Annals of a Borough viz. Chipping Sodbury”, p.51)
Young George Vizard at 19 was the first of the two men named on the Sodbury War Memorial whose death was directly attributable to the Battle of the Somme. (The second was William Greenaway). George’s skills and training with the Royal Engineers would have been particularly valuable for such things as laying battlefield telephone lines, and anything involving digging or quarrying. The 3 battle wounds George Vizard died from were incurred in the later days of that first part of the Somme battle, when the fighting had moved nearer the Channel, towards Albert
The battle of Delville Wood seems likely to have been George’s last action. This battle was raging fiercely with high casualty levels right through from mid-July to mid-August. After it, George’s body was picked up by a Field Ambulance and taken to the new Cemetery being marked out by the 39th Casualty Clearing Station. This became the Military Cemetery at Varennes, between Albert and Amiens. Smaller battlefield cemeteries had already been filled by the first casualties from the Somme in July. By the time of the Armistice in 1918, this Cemetery at Varennes, designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, had been filled by 1,219 war casualties, including many from Canadian and Welsh Divisions
George Vizard is remembered on the Chipping Sodbury War Memorial Cottage Hospital board, now at Yate and District Heritage Centre under Chipping Sodbury
By kind permission, this information is based on the following source(s):
Alison Benton (2014) Remembered with Honour. Sprint Print, Yate. Forces War Records