‘Blind Dave’ Heeley will carry the cap of a former centre-forward, who was tragically killed in the First World War, when he cycles the Western Front Way for The Albion Foundation later this month.
Team Blind Dave will have the cap of Harold Bache in their possession for all 1000km of their ride through France and Belgium, where they will pause to pay their respects at the Menin Gate.
The Baggies present caps to all who have represented the club in a league fixture and when a player has sadly passed, the club seek surviving family members to receive the tribute on their behalf. Albion hope to present Bache’s cap – No. 234 – on Dave’s return.
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Bache died at the Battle of Ypres in 1916, aged just 26, having just a few months earlier departed the club as a volunteer for service.
Bache was the embodiment of the Edwardian adventurer. A Cambridge Blue, accomplished cricketer with Worcestershire, an England amateur international footballer, a Corinthian and at the time an exciting new centre forward at the club. The world was at his feet.
But 1914 changed everything.
On August 4, after Bache had won two lawn tennis events in Kidderminster, war was declared. On September 2, he was in the Albion team which started the season with a 2-1 at Newcastle.
Just 17 days later he walked into a recruitment office and joined up specifically asking for a Commission in the combat unit of the Lancashire Fusiliers.
On Flanders Field, he was a grenade officer, in charge of bomb throwers, squads known in the trenches as “the suicide club.”
On February 15, 1916, the seemingly inevitable happened and on a battlefield in Ypres he was gunned down by a sniper’s bullet. His life was over at the age of just 26 years and 179 days.
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