George Hart was one of four brothers who are commemorated at St Mellitus. He returned safely from the war, along with the youngest of the four, Albert, but two brothers were killed in action on the Western Front.

The Hart family lived at 33 Regina Road, Stroud Green, when George was born in 1885. In the 1901 census his father, Frank Hart, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Harriett, nee Gibbons, looked after the children, of whom she had 13, though two died quite early in life. In 1901 George, aged 16, was a Cheesemonger’s Assistant. His oldest sibling at home was Beatrice, who was 20 and a dressmaker, and his youngest was Louisa, aged just seven months. In 1907 George’s father, Frank, died. That same year his brother John joined the British Army at the age of 20 and a couple of years later his battalion was sent to India. He never came back to live in Britain.

The 1911 census shows that the family had moved to 23 Fonthill Road, and Harriett had eight children living at home ranging in age from 29 to 7. Harriett herself was a Monthly Nurse; her daughter Eugenie was a Daily Nurse; Harriett the younger and Florence were Machinists in a blouse factory. George was now a Butcher’s Assistant, a trade he would continue after the war. Joseph was an Engineer’s Errand Boy and Harry, who was 13, a School Hairdresser’s Lather Boy. Albert and Stanley were still at school.

Unfortunately it has not proved possible to identify George’s war service as many service files were lost in the Second World War. There were hundreds of men called Hart with the initial G in the British military during the First World war, and dozens of George Harts. George might have joined one of the same regiments as the other men on the plaques at St Mellitus, but there are 47 George Harts in the Middlesex Regiment alone and no means to identify the right one.

Whatever he did in the war, George survived and returned to civilian life in Stroud Green. On 18 December 1921, at the age of 37, he married Rose Ellen Paget at St Mark’s Church in Tollington Park, close to 23 Fonthill Road. They continued to live at the same address through the 1920s and 30s, and their son Henry was born in 1922.

The Hart family lost two sons in the war: Harry, aged 19 in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and John, the Regular Soldier who had been on the Western Front since the start of the war, in the Second Battle of the Somme in 1918. Albert, like George, returned and continued to live locally.