13191 Corporal George Richard Arthur Bell, 34, was a motor mechanic having completed a five-year apprenticeship at the Clyde Engineering works. He was married to Ethel Maud Bell and they lived in Harrow Road, Auburn.
George, a member of St Philip’s Anglican Church Auburn, enlisted at the R A S Showgrounds, Moore Park, on 25 September 1916 and embarked on the Persic on 22 December 1916.
Disembarking in Devonport, United Kingdom on 3 March 1917, he had further corps training on the Salisbury Plain before proceeding to France on 20 June 1917, where he was posted to the 4th Australian Division Supply Column. It does not appear he served much time, if any, in areas of danger. He had a stay in hospital for Scabies and then in April 1918 he was invalided back to the UK, to the 2/1st General Hospital in Birmingham, suffering from Trench Fever. He did not return to France until 27 October 1918, where he died shortly afterwards of appendicitis.
Corporal G R A Bell has the sad distinction of being the last identified Auburn Memorial man to have perished in the Great War. He lies in the Villers-Bretonneux Military Cemetery, a greenfields cemetery set up immediately after the war to receive bodies from numerous surrounding battlefield plots. An image of his headstone is shown below. Corporal Bell had originally been buried in the Dury Hospital Military Cemetery, about 25 kms away, a cemetery adjacent to a British hospital on the southern side of Amiens.
13191 G R A Bell is not related to the other Bell on the Auburn War Memorial, 2331 William Stanley Bell.