Fred Campbell was a maternal great uncle. According to family stories he was a restless young man who had found it difficult to settle down to anything. For a while he had worked in Harland & Wolff shipyard before emigrating. He was one of seven children to Willie and Jennie Campbell - two died in infancy and Fred was the elder of two surviving sons. He was also the apple of his mother's eye. He emigrated to Canada in 1912. As a child, I had heard that his first return to Belfast was in uniform as a Canadian soldier on sick leave, following severe wounding in action in 1915. If my memory serves, the family story is that his mother, on greeting him, realised that he was literally lousy - he was marched straight through the house into the back yard and ordered to strip. His mother, Jennie - by then fifty years old - scrubbed him from head to toe in a zinc bath; his sisters were instructed to cut all the buttons and badges off his uniform and underclothes, and they were burnt in the entry outside the back yard door! His much younger sister, Jessie (my great aunt) told me that he got a last leave at Christmas 1916 (when she was only seven) and turned up with a "flame-haired" Canadian soldier pal. They spent Christmas and New Year at the Campbell family home - 39, Rushfield Avenue, Ballynafeigh, Belfast. Jessie remembered that Fred would lie on a chaise longue in the sitting room and tease her by pretending to fall off and calling on her to save him. Less than four months later he was dead. As a small child I knew his mother - my maternal great grandmother - as a tiny, impossibly old (she lived on to one hundred and two!), fearless and very strong-willed woman who still ruled the household with a rod of iron. Years later, as a young man, I was told by great aunt Jessie that when the telegram came that same woman went screaming down the avenue and had to be restrained by the women neighbours. Some years later Fred's parents visited his grave in France - apparently Jennie Campbell threw herself on his grave, distraught. Many years later, and after her death, I came across his medals and Death Penny in a family wardrobe. There was also a large, smooth pebble - my great aunts informed me that Jennie Campbell had dug it out of the earth over his grave and brought it home with her. In 2000, I went to the cemetery in France to pay my respects to him and to let him know that he was not forgotten and that he still had a family. David Morrison (Great Nephew).
Fallen
