CWGC thanks Spink & Son Ltd for this story.
The terrible sacrifice occasioned by the Great War is painfully apparent in the grief surely suffered by Joseph Cooper, a jobbing gardener from Braintree, Essex. Having witnessed his wife’s early demise in the summer of 1898, he was left to raise their six sons and two daughters.
By 1911, he was living with four of those sons, Arthur, Harry, George and Bertie, a close knit family unit that was destined to be wiped out on the Western Front in less than a year.
George Cooper was born at Braintree in 1893, the son of Joseph Cooper, a widower, who was left raising six sons and three daughters before the Great War.
Working as a matt maker at a Matt Factory along with his brother, Harry Cooper, and enlisted with the Essex Regiment, joining two of his brothers upon the outbreak of the Great War. He was transferred to the 10th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles at some stage after entering the war in France.
Stationed with this unit in August during the build up of forces around Ypres, in preparation for the Battle of Passchendaele, Cooper was killed in action on 5 August 1917.
Commemorated upon the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, he was the last of the Cooper brothers to be killed.
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