Cyril Frank Moss

  Research Notes:

Michael Moss notes:
Aunt Sarah ' s memoir also contradicts the tale that the Mosses did not go to war. Two of my grandfather ' s cousins were killed. The first to die was Cyril Frank, who fell at Loos in September 1915. He and his brother Frederick William had only volunteered earlier in the year as part of Kitchener ' s army. According to his aunt - 'He was always of a bold dashing spirit, afraid of nothing, and he with a comrade of kindred spirits, fought their way through the German wire entanglements, and were the first to throw hand grenades into the enemy trenches, he was the first to fall, and never did a German shell do a more dastardly deed than take the life of Cyril Moss ' . Nevertheless it was his brother Frederick who won the Military Cross for acts of exemplary gallantry in August 1916. On learning of his brother ' s death his elder brother Arthur Dudley, who was working as an electrical engineer at Burwood, immediately volunteered to join the Australian forces. He was killed at Villers-Bretonneux, near Amines in Picardy in May 1917 leaving behind a young widow just like my grandmother Burns far away in Northumberland. Apart from being commemorated at the national war memorial where his name will be projected on the outside wall at nine minutes past one on the 14^th of November, his name is also engraved on the Masonic memorial at Baulkham Hills. Frederick William Moss survived the war and emigrated to America where he became vice-president of Standard Oil under John D Rockefeller.