Allen Luff
5th April 1884- 26th
September 1914
Allen is out on the very edge of my
tree as a 4th cousin 5 times removed but as I am researching all the
Luffs in Surrey and Surrey, he is part of my study. His 4x great grandfather
Nicholas was my 8x great grandfather born in Fernhurst, Sussex in 1685.
Allen Luff was born on April 5th
1884 and was baptised on 25 May at St Paul’s Dorking. St Paul’s was a fairly
new evangelical church having been built in the 1850s to serve the growing
community to the south of the town. At the time of the baptism, his father was
a bricklayer and the family lived at Orchard Street Dorking, just round the
corner from the church.
Allen’s parents were Benjamin and
Eliza. Benjamin was a bricklayer who was born at Leith Hill in 1852. He married
Eliza Martin in Dorking in the summer of 1879 and their first son Herbert was
born in the spring of 1880. A year later they had a daughter Olive Louisa and 2
and a half years after that Allen was born. He was followed three years later
by Mary in the spring of 1887 and Walter 18 months later. Benjamin Luff died in
1892 at the age of 40 when Allen was just eight years old leaving Eliza with
five children aged from twelve down to three. She did not marry again and supported
her young family by working as a laundress before she died herself in 1904.
Allen and his siblings attended
school (probably St Paul’s) and grew up at the same house in Orchard Street. At
some point in the early 1900s Allen got a job with the South Eastern Railway
Company as a porter and moved to Reading. He may have worked at Reading Station
or possibly at Earley as they lived an equal distance from both stations but
there are no records left giving that information.
In the summer of 1910 he married
Rosalind Hayes. Rosalind was born in Ramsbury in Wiltshire but moved to Reading
with her family and in 1901 they were living in Clarendon Road, a road of
Victorian houses to the east of the town. Her father was a builder’s labourer
and Rosalind was their only child. After their marriage, Allen and Rosalind
moved into a Victorian terraced house in Bishop’s Road in Reading, just round
the corner from Clarendon Road. In 1911 they were recorded as living in three
rooms of the house, the rest of the house being occupied by Rosalind’s parents.
The other occupants of the road
were all working men, many employed at Huntley and Palmers biscuit factory as
clerks, packers and bakers. Some were builders, carpenters and mechanics.
No records remain of Allen’s
decision to go to war except that he signed up in Guildford, but soon after the
war began, he was listed as a private in the 1st battalion of the
Royal West Surrey Regiment. Presumably he must have been a reservist as they
were the first men to be mobilised along with regular soldiers forming the
British Expeditionary Force.
The 1st battalion of the
West Surreys arrived in France in the middle of August 1914. By then the German
Army had swept through much of Belgium and north eastern France and was fast
approaching Paris. They were halted at the Battle of The Marne in early
September and stalemate was reached.
The Battle of Aisne began on September 13th when most of the BEF crossed the River Aisne in an attempt to push the German line back. The German weaponry was superior to the allies and the offensive did not succeed. The next day the soldiers were ordered to dig trenches but the initial trenches were shallow and did not provide enough cover. Over time they were deepened until they were about seven feet in depth, shored up and generally made more protective and defensive.
This is an extract from the battalion
war diary of September 18th 1914: “C & D company relived A &
B before dawn. Trenches further improved. Shelled from 6am till 3.15pm without
a respite. Casualties not heavy except for one platoon where the trenches had
not been deepened enough through lack of time.
Casualties 6 NCOs and men killed 48
wounded and 16 missing.
On the 26th September, the diary
reads: “The enemy commenced an attack at 4am before it was light and marched in
fours across our front at 200yds range. The right of D Company and left of C Company
opened fire with one machine gun and inflicted heavy losses. Our casualties
were Lt E.J.F Thompson wounded and 3 NCOs and men killed and 20 wounded.” One
of those killed was Allen Luff. His body was never recovered and he is
remembered on the memorial at La Ferte-Sous-Jouarre, on the banks of the river
Marne north east of Paris.
Too late for Alan, two days later
the Battalion were visited by General Haig who rode over to congratulate the soldiers
on doing so well particularly with their marching which had been noted as
excellent.
Allen was not a lone casualty of
the early weeks of the war; by the end of the first week of November 1914 there
were only thirty-two survivors out of a total of 998 men from the 1st
Battalion of the West Surrey Regiment. The 2nd Battalion had
suffered 676 casualties. Their ranks were to be filled by Territorials, men
from Kitchener’s “New Army” and then conscripts
In June 1919, Allen’s widow, Rosalind,
married Philip Fisher. They had a son, Roland, in 1920 who died at the age of
seven. Rosalind herself died in 1939.
