b. 1878 Birmingham, Warwickshire. d. 03/1937 Wrexham, Wales.
DATE OF AM ACTION: 22/10/1916 Ostrevo, Serbia.
Albert was born in Birmingham in the latter part of 1878. He was the youngest of five children born to William Henry and Fanny Usher (nee Dunn). Following his father’s death in 1896, Albert moved to North Wales where he is noted on the 1901 living with his uncle in Hope, Flintshire. In 1904, he married Emily Sigley in Hawarden, Flintshire, and they had a daughter, Ella in 1906. Sadly, tragedy struck the following year, with the death of Emily. Albert remarried in 1914 in Wrexham to Mary Driver, and they went on to have eleven children of their own, the last born in 1933. Following his First World War service in the Army Service Corps, he returned to Wrexham, where he became a motor mechanic. He died in March 1937, and was buried on 8th March in Wrexham Cemetery.
AM CITATION:
On the 22nd October, 1916, a French motor lorry, loaded with 3,000 Ibs. of aeroplane bombs, caught fire in the middle of a camp of the Serbian Army. Efforts to beat out the flames with earth proved ineffectual, and, after the fire had been burning for seven or eight minutes, and the bomb cases were already involved, Major Bearne and Private Usher ran up with extinguishers. Both immediately crawled underneath the lorry, and eventually succeeded in extinguishing the flames, thus averting a serious disaster at the risk of their own lives. Major Bearne was severely burnt about the hands and arms.
BURIAL LOCATION: WREXHAM CEMETERY, WREXHAM, WALES.
GRAVE 7545.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: UNKNOWN.
