Name
Bertram William Newbury Wilson
Conflict
First World War
Date of Death / Age
27/03/1918
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Private
23187
Bedfordshire Regiment
4th Bn.
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
Not Yet Researched
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
ARRAS MEMORIAL
Bay 5.
France
Headstone Inscription
Not Researched
UK & Other Memorials
Pirton Village Memorial, St Mary’s Shrine, Pirton, Methodist Chapel Plaque, Pirton
Biography
Bertram appears as Bert on the Village memorial and, as that is how they wished him to be remembered, that is how he appears here. Also he appears on the Pirton memorial as being of the 8th Battalion, but records show he was in the 4th Battalion in official records.
Bert was the only recorded son of Martha Matilda Wilson. He was born in Pirton and baptised on May 13th 1894 and it is reasonable to assume that he was born earlier that year. Wilson was the surname of Martha’s parents, James and Hannah, so she was unmarried. Newbury is an unusual middle name and as there were a number of families with the surname of Newbury living in Pirton, it could be a clue to the father. James and Hannah died in 1900 and 1899 respectively leaving Martha, their eldest child, the head of the family.
In 1911 the family consisted of Martha, Bert and Martha’s siblings Ellen, Emma and Charles. Martha’s work is not recorded, but Charles and Bert were earning money as farm labourers. Bert enlisted some time between October 21st 1915 and March 1st 1916, joining the Bedfordshire Regiment. Official records give his Battalion as the 4th when he died, although the 8th is given on the Pirton War Memorial. This cannot be correct because the 8th were disbanded in France on February 16th 1918, which was about six weeks before his death. It is possible that he was in the 8th and was one of the 299 other ranks who moved from the 8th to the 4th Battalion on February 7th 1918, but it is also possible that this detail is an error and that he was never in the 8th. For this reason a very brief history for both Battalions is given below and then more detail from February 7th 1918 when he must have been in the 4th Battalion. Hopefully in the future we can be more certain of Bert’s exact experience.
8th Battalion
The 8th was formed in October 1914 as part of Kitchener’s 3rd Army. It was a service battalion formed for the duration of the war and after training was ordered to mobilise in August 1915 and then left for France on the 28th and arrived in Boulogne on the 30th.
During their service in the Great War, the Battalion saw action in the following major battles: The Battle of Loos - September 1915, the defence of Ypres - 1916, the Battle of the Somme - July to November 1916, the Battle of Arras - April and May 1917 and the Battle of Cambrai - November and December 1917
Given that Bert enlisted between October 21st 1915 and March 1st 1916, he could not have been involved in the Battle of Loos, but could have seen service in the others.
Ypres was a bloody area, with the British holding on to a small salient (*1), preventing the capture of the Belgian town of Ypres and the Germans from reaching the coast and the British Army’s supply ports. The Battalion’s war diary gives the losses between January and July, as 94 killed, 205 wounded, 91 missing believed killed and 550 sick in hospital or evacuated to base.
In August 1916 they moved to the Somme where casualties from the Battle of the Somme had been horrendous, but at least they had missed the first few bloody days. Here they saw action in the trenches in the infamous areas of Auchonvillers, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Guillemont, Ginchy and others, and between August 1916 and March 1917 casualties were 149 killed, 367 wounded, 103 missing believed killed and 1,209 sick in hospital or evacuated to base.
They moved to Arras and in the next 2 months another 59 men were killed, 263 wounded, 8 missing and 206 sick. The final actions of this Battalion were around Cambrai in December 1917 with another 57 men killed, 246 wounded 16 missing in action and 246 sick in hospital.
The remaining time, until the Battalion was disbanded in February 1918, was thankfully quieter, but during their service in the First World War some 700 men were killed and 5,000 became casualties (*4).
4th Battalion
Their service in the Great War included the following battles: The Battle of the Somme - 1916, the Battle of the Ancre - 1916, the Battle of Arras 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) - 1917, the German Spring Offensives - 1918 and the final "Hundred Day" offensive – 1918.
The 4th (Extra Reserve) Battalion, in existence long before the war, was effectively a training unit. Within a few days of the beginning of the war they were moved to Felixstowe for home duty with the Harwich Garrison and to stand ready to supply replacements for the front line troops.
The disaster of the losses in the first day of the Battle of the Somme has been mentioned before, but obviously the numbers of casualties continued to rise over the next days and weeks so the 4th were called to service and landed at Le Havre in France on July 25th 1916.
Their first experience in the front line came on September 11th 1916. The casualty figures for the 4th were not recorded as comprehensively as those of the 8th Battalion above, but the following perhaps gives a sense of their part in the war.
In November 1916 they were at the Somme, in the tail end of the action known as the Battle of the Somme. The war diary records that on the 13th they attacked the Germans between Beaumont Hamel and the River Ancre.
‘Bn attacked at 6.45am Operations on the North Bank of the ANCRE - Nov 13th 1916 The Battalion advanced with the remainder of the Brigade at 6.45 am and sustained heavy casualties among Officers and NCOs in and near the enemy front line from a strongpoint established between enemy front line and second line which had been passed over by the leading Brigades. Battalion advanced to enemy second line and from there parties pushed forward to Station Road and beyond.’ In this action 14 officers and 48 other ranks were killed, 9 more died of wounds, 108 were wounded and 16 men were missing.
In the same area, between February 11th and 16th 1917, they were ordered to ‘push forward their line of posts’. An artillery barrage started at 9:00pm; it was to be a creeping barrage, with shells moving forward in front of the men. They were held up by uncut barbed wire and heavy machine gun fire - presumably the creeping barrage had continued forward, passing over the enemy, and allowing them to return to their machine guns. They achieved their target, but many died. Between the 6th and 16th, 68 men were dead, 90 wounded, 3 missing and 45 missing believed killed. Most of these were in the above action.
On April 14th 1917 they moved to Arras by motor bus. They took over the front line and were immediately in the thick of it, 2 with 2 men killed and 58 wounded. On the 22nd they assembled to attack and capture the main road through a village called Gavrelle. The attack was launched the following day at 4:45am. They were successful, but were shelled heavily during the day, and were counter-attacked in the afternoon. They held on, at the cost of 2 officers killed, 7 more wounded and 260 other ranks wounded or killed. Despite the losses it was not all fighting - in June the men had long rest periods, periods of training and even attended the Brigade’s horse show, taking five first and two second places in seven events!
In October they were involved in the Third Battle of Ypres (specifically in the Second Battle of Passchendaele) and on the 30th they were in position by 3:30am for an attack at 5:50am. The British barrage commenced, but the Germans replied with their own barrage aimed 100 yards to the rear of the British lines, where the support lines were positioned. This did enormous damage, almost completely wiping out the support line consisting of the Artists Rifles within five minutes. The Bedfordshire and Royal Fusiliers pressed on, but, as detailed elsewhere, the conditions were atrocious and their progress was held up by the mud. This allowed the creeping British barrage to get too far in front and when it had passed over the enemy’s machine gun posts the Germans had time to raise their heads and return fire. The Battalion came under fire from their front and their exposed flanks - 100 men and officers were killed and 400 more wounded, 11 of whom later died.
By January 1918 they were back in France fighting around Villers-Plouich and by the end of the month another 18 men had died, 39 were wounded and 28 had been gassed, but they did receive a draft of 111 men to help bring the Battalion back to some sort of fighting strength.
At this point, we do not know which of the above was Bert’s service experience; however from February 7th he was certainly in the 4th Battalion. He would have known fellow Pirton men Sidney Baines and Joseph Handscombe who had all been in the 4th, but they had died long before February 1918. If Bert had been in the 8th he would probably have received news of their deaths, but if he too had been in the 4th Battalion, he may even have seen them.
In February the men drafted from the 8th Bedfordshire Battalion arrived and they all had a relatively easy time, even reaching the final of the Division’s football cup, but losing out to the Hawke Battalion.
March saw them back at the Front and the worst experience of the month was on the 13th when they were shelled with mustard gas. Five officers and 264 other ranks had to be evacuated, but that was not Bert’s fate. On the 21st the German’s launched their Spring Offensive (more details can be found in earlier chapters). When the front line was attacked the 4th were in reserve and not immediately involved. Even so they were soon forced back, first to the second line, then, between the 21st and 23rd, to Havrincourt Wood, Neuville and to Ytres, but they fought all the way. The withdrawal continued under heavy machine gun fire, until the 25th, when they paused, regrouped and counter attacked. They forced the Germans back from Thiepval to High Wood, but when all their ammunition had been fired, they were again forced to retire and returned to Thiepval to defend the ridge. On the 26th they marched to Aveluy Wood where they were relieved, but were then ordered to Bouzincourt. So on the 27th they were west of Albert, where they attacked the railway at 7:30am. If the official date of Bert’s death is right then this is the action in which he died, but obviously records around this time were very confused. Between the 20th and 28th they had 21 men killed, 88 wounded and 124 missing. Bert was one of the missing.
Although Bert was recorded as killed in action on March 27th 1918, there was a long period of uncertainty for family and friends. Newspapers dated May 2nd and 4th and July 6th all recorded that he was only missing and cruelly the Parish Magazine suggested that he was a prisoner of war – if fact he had been dead for over three months. His body was not found and his name is recorded on the Arras Memorial along with five other men with a Pirton connection. He is the last Pirton man to be recorded there and consequently this memorial is described many times elsewhere in this book. Perhaps in Bert’s case it can just be said that although it is terribly sad that his body was lost, there is no finer memorial for a man’s name to be recorded than Arras. He shares that honour with 34,749 other men.
(*2) an area protruding forward from the rest of the line and therefore liable to attack on three sides.
(*3) To put the casualties into perspective they need to be set against the strength of a battalion, which in ideal circumstances would be about 1,000 men. Numbers obviously include new drafts and men who returned to service following recovery from wounds or illness.
Additional Information
Text from the book: The Pride of Pirton
Acknowledgments
The Pride of Pirton book – www.pirton.org.uk/prideofpirton Chris Ryan / Tony French / Jonty Wild
