The final resting place of Benjamin Herbert Payen had, until about 1997, been a bit of a family mystery. All that I knew from my father was that Ben had died during the First World War. We did not know if Ben had a grave or if he was one of the many soldiers still in still in the mud of Flanders. No one really knew.

Finding the actual whereabouts of Ben’s final resting place was the result of some interesting, old fashioned, detective work that started shortly after the death of my father’s and Ben’s cousin Gwen (Dorothy Gwenllean Lewis) in 1997 when two copies of a photograph of Ben in uniform were given to me.

On the back of one photograph of Ben in his army uniform the words "Our beloved son Ben Payen. Died May 6 1917, aged 28" are written. There is an additional reference to Ben's death in an autograph book that had also belonged to Gwen and had found it’s way to me. In the book is a copy of the same photograph with a note in Gwen's hand writing saying that he died trying to rescue a comrade from no man's land. How true that is has yet to be proved.

From the photograph I managed to deduce that Ben had been in the Essex regiment by identifying his cap badge. With this snippet of information I wrote to the Chelmsford Museum Service (Chelmsford and Essex Museum and Essex Regiment Museum). They were kind enough to confirm that Ben had been in the Essex Regiment and that they had found a reference to him in HMSO Volume 'Soldiers Who Died, 1914 - 1919'.

I now had more to go on and wrote to the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission with the information I had (these days I would have simply used their web site). The Wargraves Commision came up trumps when the wrote back with the following information:

"Death: Killed in action while serving with the 9th Battalion, Essex Regiment. Burial: Happy Valley British Cemetery, Fampoux, Pas de Calais, France. Row B. Grave 8. Fampouxe is a village 7 Kilometres east of Arras (D33). Happy Valley British Cemetery is 5 kilometres south of the village down a 2 kilometre track on the road to Monchy-le-Preux."

The Commission also confirmed his army number, 26838.

The above information on Ben's death and place of burial can now be found on the The Commonwealth Wargraves Commission web site.

At last one family mystery can be put to rest.

Thanks to Phil and Paulette Jones for taking time out from a holiday in France to find and photgraph the grave.

Ben is also remembered on the grave of his parents in the City Of London Cemetery And Crematorium, Manor Park.

©Barry Miller 2005