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St Matthew’s and the Belgian War Memorial Guy Leus sent a larger picture of this commemorative plaque in PDF format (size 1.2MB)

Back in February, I was contacted, via our website, by Guy Leus, an historian in Belgium, who was involved in erecting a new memorial to the crew of an RAF bomber that crashed there in 1943. He was trying to trace the family of one of the crew, a local man from my road, who had lived with his wife at 39 Hillcroft Crescent. Lewis William Curtis was a 32 year old air gunner aboard a Short Stirling bomber of 149 squadron, when it was shot down by a German night fighter and crashed in Geetbets on 4th July 1943. Guy had already tried to trace the family and had contacted various people in Watford, as well as the Watford Observer, but without success.

I love searching through old documents, so I set off to the County Records Office at Hertford to look at our old parish records which are stored there. I wanted to see if I could find any more details of Lewis Curtis’s wife and any family he may have had. From our baptism register, I quickly discovered that he had a daughter, Jessie Annie Curtis, who was born in the first quarter of 1941 and who was baptised at St Matthew’s on 13th April 1941, but, despite scanning the 44 microfiche birth indices from 1932 to 1943, I failed to find any other children. There was no trace of him or his wife in our marriage register, but the national marriage index showed that he married Louise A Brill in Kingston upon Thames, sometime during July-September 1932 and, crucially, gave his place of birth as Okehampton in Devon.

I immediately emailed this news back to Belgium, where Guy then made rapid progress. He began by looking for relatives of Lewis William Curtis and his daughter in and around Okehampton. He found the Curtis family in Northlew near Okehampton, where his second phone call was to a nephew of Lewis Curtis. This led to the nephew’s uncle, a brother of Lewis, who gave him the phone number of the daughter I had discovered. She was very excited when Guy told her about the new memorial and she sent him a picture of her father the same day.

Guy ultimately found pictures of all eight crew members and on 3^rd June 2008, Patrick Hodgkinson, (the nephew of one of the crew members also called Patrick Hodgkinson), unveiled the new commemorative plaque in Geetbets. Guy says that it was a very emotional moment for all present. The final sentences on the memorial are, "Heroes are often common people who only do their duty. This commemorative plaque wants to keep the memory of these young people alive".

Colin Richards

Here is a link to an article in Dutch  about the unveiling ceremony, with a picture of the plaque and Patrick Hodgkinson.

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