Walter Burgess Fry

Walter Fry was a professional soldier becoming a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps on 21^st December 1911. He went over to France on 21^st August 1914. By February 1915 he had been taken prisoner by the Germans and on 10^th February he and five other medical officers who had been detained at Halle were sent to Wittenberg Prisoner of War Camp. There was an outbreak of typhus, no British medical officers there and the German medical and military officers had left the camp. The situation that greeted them was so grim that “when they got into the open air again Major Fry broke down. Two of the medical officers were then sent to two temporary hospitals outside the camp. “Drugs and dressing were impossible to obtain in adequate quantities. Limbs became gangrenous and had to be amputated for lack of them, and when the dead were carried for burial, outside the camp by their comrades the coffins were frequently greeted with jeers by the inhabitants of Wittenberg who stood outside the barbed wire and were permitted to insult them” (The British Journal of Nursing, Saturday, April 15^th 1916,in it’s editorial which recounted the story from a report by the government on the treatment by the enemy of British Prisoners of War). They tried their best in quite shocking circumstances but there were over fifty new cases of typhus a day. Of the four remaining officers only Captain Lauder survived this, Major Fry, Captain Sutcliffe and Captain Field all succumbed to Typhus. Major Fry died on 17^th March 1915 aged 37. His remains were re-interred in a grave in Berlin South-Western Cemetery after the war.

Walter Burgess Fry was born (September) 1877 in the Bromley District to Lewis and Isabella Fry. The 1881 census shows the fry family living in Orpington and his father’s occupation was described as civil service, metro police officer. The children were Charles, Isabel, Hilda and Walter. His fathers address after the war was in Nice, France. The only connection with Folkestone is Walter’s Uncle William Walter Baldock Fry M.B, C.M, who lived at 17 Marten Road Folkestone (1916 directory).