A Crocus From Jerusalem

Fred Gubbins’s war was overshadowed by the big bloody battles of The Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele. A country boy born in the reign of Queen Victoria, Fred became a farm worker and later a gardener on a country estate before volunteering in the First World War.
He survived the sinking of the troopship Transylvania in a U-boat attack and marched with General Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force through the Holy Land to capture Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks.
On December 21, 1917, he was k...