Maurice Jack Kirby

Maurice Jack Kirby was born in Hambledon on 23rd August 1920, the son of John William and Annie Kate Kirby. The family lived in the High Street and later in a cottage beside The Vine in West Street, and he grew up in a working agricultural household where his father was employed as an engine driver on local farms. By 1939 Maurice himself was working as a heavy labourer in coal delivery, typical of the manual trades carried out by many young men of the village.

He enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps as a driver, one of several Hambledon men tasked with transporting ammunition to the guns. The work was dangerous and exposed, requiring long journeys along roads regularly shelled or attacked from the air. By 1944 he was serving in Italy during the fighting around the Anzio beachhead, where Allied forces had landed in January in an attempt to outflank the German defensive line south of Rome.

Conditions at Anzio were particularly hazardous for supply drivers. The beachhead was confined and overlooked by enemy positions, and ammunition dumps were often closer to the front line than the gun batteries they supplied. Drivers therefore had to move forward repeatedly under fire to keep the artillery operating. Maurice was seen by fellow driver Longman the day before he died, and the news of his death was later passed to another Hambledon man serving in the same role.

He was killed on 18th April 1944 and is buried in Beach Head War Cemetery at Anzio, created close to a casualty clearing station where many men were buried directly from the battlefield during the bitter fighting of that spring.

Maurice Kirby was one of the younger generation of Hambledon men whose war was fought not in the infantry assault but in the vital and dangerous work that sustained it. At twenty-four years of age his life ended far from home while keeping the guns supplied during one of the most difficult campaigns of the Italian campaign.