Thomas Robinson
Killed In Action 16th August 1917
“My Grandmother, Mary Ann McGarvey’s handbag was always very heavy and no-one could work out why. After she died in 1967 my father checked her handbag and found some First World War medals with the name of Thomas Robinson on them. It transpired that she had been carrying these medals around in her handbag for fifty years and that Thomas Robinson was her younger brother who had died in the First World War.
These medals lay in a drawer for several years until my daughter decided to try to find out what had happened to Thomas Robinson. She found out that he was born 18 May 1884 and served as a Sapper in the 150th Field Company Royal Engineers and that he married Edith Maguire, 44 Tennent St, Belfast at St Matthew’s Parish Church, Shankill Road, on 2 July 1917, only 3 days before returning to the Front.
He died six weeks later at Langemarck on 16th August 1917 at the age of 32 and his name is remembered on the Tyne Cot Memorial in Belgium.
Edith went on to marry Thomas’ cousin, John Craig and kept in touch with Mary Ann during her lifetime.”
— Faye Rice
Left: Photo of Edith Maguire Robinson, widowed six weeks after her wedding day to Sapper Thomas Robinson.
My Poor Brave Boys
The most famous Irish casualty of August 16th 1917 was Father Willie Doyle. Before he was killed, he wrote of those lost men shortly before he would join them, all of them asleep forever somewhere in Flanders fields.
“My poor brave boys. They are lying now out on the battlefield: some in a little grave dug and blessed by their chaplain, who love them all as if they were his own children; others stiff and stark with staring eyes, hidden in a shell-hole where they had crept to die; while perhaps in some far-off thatched cabin an anxious mother sits listening for the well-known step and voice which will never gladden her heart again.”