The face that reminds at Christmas

Published: Tue 23 Dec 2025, 11:26 AM

It was in the days leading up to Christmas 2014, one hundred years on from the outbreak of World War One, as I walked up along Darling Street in the town of Enniskillen to light a candle before the beautiful crib erected in the Church. As I passed the displays of Christmas decorations in the shop windows along the street, I happened upon the face of a young man staring out at me dressed in a uniform from a most beautiful painted portrait that hung in the window of a pop-up antiques shop that had opened for the weeks before Christmas. It was a substantial oil painting of a young soldier in military uniform with a band of colours on his chest, a most striking portrait that I stood and gazed on for several moments studying the brush strokes that had created the image that stared out at me and stopped me in my tracks along the street of Enniskillen in those Christmas days.

I wondered how anyone, most especially a descendant, could sell this portrait of a family member who had died, the name plate told me, coincidentally in these Advent days on the battlefields of Northern Europe in 1922 at just 24 years of age. I thought on how I would have been proud to have claimed him as my forefather and to have his portrait hanging proudly in my home. But as with all the other Christmas shoppers I passed on by, but his face remained etched in my mind as I lit a candle before the empty manger in the chapel on the hill. I wondered how Christmas would have been for him those one hundred years ago, how he may have played football across No Man’s Land with the German soldiers on that Christmas night one hundred years ago. Over the days to come the young soldier’s face kept returning to my mind and after Christmas when I returned to buy the portrait, the shop was closed.

Reacquainted

So, in the early days of January, I telephoned the antique’s shop to ask if the portrait had been sold. The lady who answered told me that it hadn’t and that it had returned to the storeroom it had been kept in for a number of years now. Intent on retrieving the portrait from the dusty backroom I drove to Enniskillen and was reacquainted with my friend from across the ages and in the back seat of my car brought him across the border to my home.

In days that followed I began researching the name on the portrait. The face that stared out at me was that of a 24-year-old Lieutenant, George York Henderson born on the 12th of May 1893 to Sir James and Lady Martha Henderson of Oakley House, Windsor Park in Belfast. His father, Sir James, was a Magistrate, an Alderman and Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1898. He was also the owner of The Belfast Newsletter. George, was the fourth in a family of six siblings, five boys and a girl.

At the outbreak of the war, he and his older brother Richard enlisted in the officer corps of the Royal Irish Rifles, George in the tenth battalion and Richard in the first. George was appointed to the Army Service Corps and was later appointed Adjutant of the Ulster Divisional Train. He accompanied the Division to France in the rank of Captain. He was subsequently transferred, voluntarily, to the infantry and in March 1916 was then appointed to a Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles. He was wounded in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme but made a full recovery and returned to full active service.

In June 1917, during the victorious attack on the Messines ridge in Flanders he was awarded the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in commanding his company after their commander had been killed’. He was said to have personally knocked out one machine gun with rifle grenades and showed great ability in restoring the direction for his Battalion to advance when all landmarks, trees, houses and such like were obliterated.

But sadly, less than six months later, the young Lieutenant George York Henderson MC was killed in action in the days leading up to Christmas in 1917 at just 24 years old. It was two days into the Ulster Division’s advance in the region of Cambrai, one of the most pointless and bloodiest battles on the western front, that produced casualties of near 80,000 Allied and German soldiers. He died in a grenade explosion and his young body was never recovered.

The news of his death wrought heartbreak for his mother Martha and family at home the morning she received the blacked etched telegram saying that their son had been killed in action. Knowing that his body would never have the dignity of a Christian burial in Flanders fields nor a grave stone to remember him by, but a mere inscription on a wall, his mother commissioned the portrait of her son to hang as an ever present memory of his ultimate sacrifice, the giving up of a young life, like those of all the millions of other young men of all nationalities who died in bloody battle in those four years of war.

Why his portrait was sold by the generations that followed we will never know but it now hangs to remind in a County Cavan hallway. And there his face looks out at all who take a glance at this portrait and are reminded of this young man and the pain his death had wrought over one hundred years ago on Flanders fields in the days leading up to Christmas.