25 SEPTEMBER 1915

After writing the first of these web pages I visited the Public Record Office to see if I could find out what had happened to my great grandfather. My first task was to see if I could find out any additional information from the medal rolls, which cover awards of the following medals to officers and other ranks:

British War Medal
Victory Medal 1914 Star
1914 -1915 Star
Territorial Force War Medal
Silver War Badge

This is what I found:

I then looked through the commander's war diary which lists daily events such as the movements of the regiment, numbers of men to and from hospital, replacements and of course descriptions of actions in which the regiment participated.

The following is the extract for 25 September 1915 taken from the 2nd Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment Commander's War Diary:

The Battalion took part in an attack on the German position, and during the day sustained the following casualties:-

Officers killed: Captain RWL Oke, Captain WA Guest-Williams, Lieutenants GF Gregory, RHG Trotter, J Vesy, RHL Simmons and 2nd Lieut. B Russell.

Officers wounded: Captain GH Sawyer, Lieut. GE Hawkins, 2nd Lieuts HFR Merrick, R Lewis and GW Lindley (the last two named were not admitted to hospital)

Other ranks: Killed 32, Missing 143, wounded 216.

For the record of the operation see Appendix III "Report by Lieut.-Colonel GPS Hunt, Commanding 2nd, Royal Berkshire Regiment.

Lieut.-Colonel GPS Hunt's report is reproduced below:

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Map

© Crown Copyright. These reproduced pages may be downloaded and/or copied for personal or research purposes only. Permission for any other use must be obtained from the Public Record Office, Kew, London.

Although I now had a detailed description of the action in which my great grandfather had probably participated and lost his life, I was still no nearer finding any personal information.

My next step was to send all the known information to the Ministry of Defense Archive (address: Ministry of Defense, CS(RM)2b, Bourne Avenue, Hayes, Middlesex UB3 1RF). For a small fee the archivists will search all the records for any information on a given individual. However, applicants are advised that the majority of the service records dating from the First World War were destroyed by enemy action in 1940.

Unfortunately my great grandfather's records were amongst those destroyed and I had, therefore, come to the end of the line. Although I was obviously very disappointed to have ended my search in this way I felt that I had come to know a bit more about my great grandfather.