Name
George Finch
Conflict
First World War
Date of Death / Age
08/10/1918
45
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Captain
Royal Army Medical Corps
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
Not Yet Researched
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
BASRA WAR CEMETERY
I. O. 21.
Iraq
UK & Other Memorials
Rickmansworth Urban District Memorial
St. Peter’s Church Memorial, Mill End, Nr Rickmansworth
St. John's Church Memorial, Heronsgate, nr Rickmansworth
Pre War
George was born in 1873 in Kensington, his father also being named George.
George junior was educated at Bedford Grammar School and then studied engineering at University College, London. He worked on the construction of the Central London Tube Railway, but after an illness decided to take up medicine. He studied at Leeds University and then at St Thomas’s Hospital before qualifying in 1905. Over the next few years he worked in various London hospitals and is believed to have been living at 11 Hill Place, Oxford Circus.
By 1911 he was an Assistant School Medical Officer working for East Sussex County Council and living at 9 St Anne’s Crescent, Lewes. On the 11th of April 1912, aged 39, he married Winifred Foster, aged 40, at St Peter’s Church, Mill End. Her father was Professor George Carey Foster FRS of Ladywalk, Heronsgate. They had one child, Elizabeth, born in 1916. When war broke out George was Assistant to the County Medical Officer for East Suffolk and living in Ipswich.
Recorded as probably enlisting in Ipswich, Suffolk.
Wartime Service
On the outbreak of war George immediately volunteered and was granted a commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps before the war was a week old.
He was attached as Medical Officer to the 3rd East Anglian (Howitzer) Brigade RFA but later transferred to the military side of St Thomas’s Hospital and therefore to the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth.
In July 1916 he was one of the hospital’s unit chosen for Mesopotamia by Colonel Bruce-Porter. Shortly after arriving in Basra he was appointed Port Health Officer there, a post he held until his death from pleuro-pneumonia in the Officer's Hospital on the 8th of October 1918.
Acknowledgments
Our Village in the Great War, Mike Collins
