George Moon

George Moon was born in Hambledon about 1889, the son of George and Emily Moon of East Street. He spent his entire life in the village and grew up within the rural community that would later remember him on its war memorial. Baptised in Hambledon in March 1889, he was raised among a large family and attended school locally before entering working life.

By 1911 he was employed as a domestic gardener, a common occupation in a parish surrounded by farms and larger houses requiring regular maintenance. His father had died in 1903 while George was still a boy, leaving the household to be supported by the remaining family. He remained unmarried and living at home, part of the steady labouring population that formed the backbone of village life before the war.

After the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted at Portsmouth into the 1st Battalion Hampshire Regiment. The battalion served on the Western Front and took part in the later stages of the Battle of the Somme during the autumn of 1916.

On 21st October 1916 George was wounded in action, suffering a gunshot wound to his right side. He was evacuated from the front line through the chain of medical posts to No. 34 Casualty Clearing Station at Grove Town, near Méaulte, just behind the Somme battlefield. Casualty clearing stations were the first proper surgical hospitals reached by the wounded, and his survival long enough to arrive there shows he had been brought back alive from the trenches and treated by army surgeons.

Despite treatment he died three days later on 24th October 1916, aged twenty eight. He was buried beside the hospital in Grove Town Cemetery, which was created for men who died of wounds during the Somme fighting.

George Moon’s life had been entirely rooted in Hambledon, and his death came far from the village fields he had worked as a gardener. His name remains among those of the parish who did not return from the Somme.