Restrained celebrations as news became known

Scenes outside Buckingham Palace on Armistice Day when the Royal family appeared on the balcony to celebrate the end of the First World War Scenes of celebration in Burton in November 1918, HMS Britannia was the last British warship to be as reported in the Burton Observer/Chronicle lost to enemy action in this war

of the crew, of whom only 50 were lost. Thirty-nine officers and 670 of the crew were saved.

Able Seaman Brown and other wounded survivors were taken to Gibraltar, where Brown died from the effects of toxic smoke inhalation. He was the last Burton member of the Royal Navy to die as a result of enemy action.

HMS Britannia was the last British warship to be lost to enemy action in this war.

UB-50 was surrendered into captivity in January 1919.

We are not sure if the submarine commander knew that the German High Seas Fleet had mutinied on November 3 and refused to fight a last battle with the Royal Navy, ordered by the Kaiser. If he did, clearly it made

no difference to the outcome of the encounter with the Britannia. On that momentous day, November 11, only one Burton man is recorded as having lost his life. He was Private Frederick Knapp, from Anglesey Road.

However, the exact date of his death cannot be accurately substantiated, probably because on that date he was a Prisoner of War and his German guards would have retreated from where he was being held, days before the signing of the Armistice.

What does seem fairly obvious was that he must have been captured, probably severely wounded, just a matter of days before the end of the war.

One major clue to this synopsis is that he was buried in Tourmost

nai Communal Cemetery in Belgium. Clearly, there had been no time or opportunity to remove him along with others to a camp in Germany.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission tell us that he died between November 11 and November 30, 1918. There are no other records yet found to be more precise with the date of his death than that.

The likeliest scenario is that it was November 11 when anyone recalled last seeing him alive, and it was November 30 when his body was recovered and identified before he was buried.

This must have been a cause of much sadness among his family after the war, that they could never know exactly when and how he died.