Sergeant Robert Brown was the grandson of Mark and Eliza Brown of Ketton, and was born in the village on 20 December 1888. He was a reservist, having served eight years in the 1st Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment, seven of which he spent in India. He rejoined his regiment on 4 August 1914, the day war broke out, and went to France the next day. He was in the retreat from Mons and the Battle of the Marne, when the battalion suffered heavy losses by quick-firing batteries shrouded by the woods which flanked the river. He fought in the Battle of the Aisne and in the La Bassee-Armentieres operations when his battalion, with the Royal Fusiliers, captured the village of Herlies, north-east of La Bassee using bayonets. He was in action again at the first Battle of Ypres where, in the road between Kemmel and Wytschaete, the Lincolnshires were surprised by the Germans and lost 16 officers and 400 men. It was here, on 1 November 1914, where he was wounded. He was invalided home, and on recovering he went out to India, now with the North Staffordshire Regiment, and died on 15 November 1918, of influenza at Abbottabad, aged 29. He was presumably buried there but the military graves could not be maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and so he is remembered on the Karachi 1914-1918 War Memorial, as well as in Ketton. 

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