BURTENSHAW Vernon George

VERNON GEORGE BURTENSHAW
Private DM2/163148, 403 Mechanical Transport Company, Army Service Corps
Attached 11th ANZAC Corps Heavy Artillery
Died of wounds on Wednesday 1st August 1917
Brandhoek New Military Cemetery, Ieper, Grave I.B.17

Vernon Burtenshaw was baptised on the 2nd October 1887 at Cuckfield, Sussex, the son of William and Ellen Burtenshaw. By the time of the 1901 census their home was at New England Road, Haywards Heath, and at that time William's occupation was given as a bill poster. There were just two children still at home - Vernon, who was thirteen, and his sister Alice, seventeen. It isn't known when the family moved to Lancing, but definitely by 1911 when Vernon married Esther Matilda King at S.t James the Less. The wedding was on 8th April that year, both were twenty-three years old, the groom's occupation being given as 'van driver' and the bride's as 'domestic servant.' Esther already had one daughter, Kate, three years old, and within a short time the family was set to grow. After their marriage the couple moved to Old Shoreham Road, Hove, and in May 1912 their first children were baptised at St. James the Less, twin girls, Doris Mary and Phyllis Victoria Burtenshaw - at that time Victor was employed as a drayman. Then in November 1913, while still living at the same address, they returned to St. James for the next baptism, a second set of twins, Olive Marjorie and Raymond George. By November 1915, just before his enlistment, the couple were living at 3 Seaton Terrace, Lancing, just around the corner from Vernon's parents in Penhill Road, and had produced a third set of twins, Alec Vernon and Connie Hester Burtenshaw. Six children in three and a half years could well be a Lancing record!

Vernon Burtenshaw enlisted into the Army Service Corps on 7th December 1915, and trained as a driver in a Motor Transport Company. In August 1917 he was attached to 11 ANZAC Corps Heavy Artillery at 'Y' Siege Park near Ypres. The unit war diary, held at The National Archives in WO95/1014 makes unusual reading, and illustrates vividly the dangers that the men of the Army Service Corps faced every day. It's easy to joke about them moving pots of jam around, but in July 1917 the establishment of the Park was ninety officers, 3,376 other ranks, and sixteen hundred vehicles; motor cycles, cars, caterpillars and lorries. In that month alone casualties included:
One man who died after being crushed between two lorries.
One man found dead in the roadway following a hostile air raid.
Two men admitted to hospital having collided with a motor cycle and side car, one of whom later died.
Several men killed and wounded by hostile shell fire, and one man who died as the result of a self inflicted rifle wound. Many of the casualties are mentioned by name, but unfortunately Vernon Burtenshaw is not among them. A short item in the Worthing Gazette of 12th September 1917 reported his death:

DIED FROM SHELL WOUNDS - The death is announced, from shell wounds received at Ypres, of Private V. G. Burtenshaw, of the Army Service Corps, whose home was at 3, Seaton Terrace. Private Burtenshaw, who was a coachman in private life, had been at the front about four months.'

Vernon Burtenshaw is buried at Brandhoek New Military Cemetery, four miles west of Ieper [Ypres] near to the site of Casualty Clearing Stations and other medical facilities during that period of the war.

BLAKER Percy John

PERCY JOHN BLAKER
Sergeant C/580 16th Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps
Killed in Action on Friday 21st July 1916
Commemorated on Thiepval Memorial, Somme, Pier and Face 13A and 13B

Percy Blaker was born on the 22nd July 1883 and baptised on the 9th September 1883 at St. James the Less, North Lancing. He was the second son of John and Lucy Blaker who were living at 4 Thatch Cottage, South Street, Lancing. There were five Blaker children, Arthur, Annie, Percy, Herbert and Nathaniel, and their father worked locally as a market garden labourer. The Blakers had lived for generations in Sompting and Lancing, and were an integral part of village and church life. All the boys had connections with the local branch of the Church Lads' Brigade, and by 1910 Percy was Sergeant of the branch and 'second in command' to Captain Cass. On the 22nd September 1914, Percy and Nathaniel Blaker enlisted into the 16th Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade). Their service numbers were C/580 and C/582, and the man standing between them was Leonard Broomfield, C/581, another Lancing man who survived the war. Percy Blaker quickly gained the rank of Sergeant, probably due to the fact that he was a man of mature age and had held a similar position in the Church Lads' Brigade. The brothers were in the same company throughout their time with the Battalion, but at the time of their first attack at High Wood, the day that Nathaniel Blaker died, Percy was not with either his battalion, or his brother. A report from the Sussex Daily News dated the 11th August 1916 explains:

BROTHERS KILLED IN LANCING - Mr. and Mrs. John Blaker of 3 Cherry Tree Cottages, Lancing, have sustained a double loss, news having been received that two of their three soldier sons have been killed during the Offensive on a date towards the end of July. Sergeant Percy Blaker, the elder of the two, was thirty-three years of age, and Rifleman Nathaniel Blaker would have celebrated his twenty-first birthday this month. They were both in the King's Royal Rifles, their Battalion being one specially raised for 'old boys' of the Church Lads' Brigade, Percy being Company Staff-Sergeant. The elder brother had only passed a gunnery course on the 18th July, and as his birthday was on the 22nd July, it may be a melancholy coincidence that he met with his fatal injuries on that date. At any rate it was within a day or so of then that he gallantly fell, although the exact date has not transpired yet. Married little more than a year ago, it was on the anniversary of that day that his wife received the news that he was missing. Both brothers were in the same Company and must have gone into battle together, almost shoulder to shoulder. Lancing people will deeply sympathise with the bereaved family.'


The newspaper was not to know that Nathaniel had died on the 15th July, three days before Percy returned to the Battalion. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission gives Percy's date of death as the 21st July 1916, although his service record is ambiguous, stating that he died on the '20th/21st July.' It was a time when there was so much fighting, shelling, sniping and bombing, that it is easy to understand such confusion. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Theipval Memorial to the Missing. More about the Blaker brothers and the origins of the 16th King's Royal Rifle Corps can be found on the page of Nathaniel Blaker.

High Wood

High Wood today is privately owned and closed to the public - at a distance from the road there is silence except for the skylarks above, and there is no movement except for the crops moving in the fields. But the fields still produce their harvest of shells and within the wood still lie the remnants of battle, and of the men who fought the battle.

BLAKER Nathaniel

NATHANIEL BLAKER
Rifleman C/582 16th Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps Died of Wounds Saturday 15th July 1916 Delville Wood Cemetery, Longueval, Somme, Grave XVIII.G.9

Nathaniel Blaker was baptised on the 10th October 1895 at St. James the Less, North Lancing, the fourth and youngest son of John and Lucy Blaker. There had been Blakers in Lancing and Sompting since the middle of the eighteenth century, and John Blaker was, like so many local men, a market garden labourer, and three of his four sons, including Nathaniel, followed in his footsteps. The Blaker brothers were involved in village and church life, and were members of the local Church Lads Brigade from a young age, so it was an obvious step, at the outbreak of war, for them to enlist in the 16th Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade). The Battalion had been formed in Denham, Buckinghamshire, on the 19th September 1914 by Field Marshall Lord Grenfell, Commandant of the Church Lads Brigade, and just three days later Nathaniel and his older brother Percy enlisted at Worthing. On enlistment Nathaniel was nineteen years old, and described as 5ft 6ins tall, weighing 140lbs, with a ruddy complexion, blue eyes and dark brown hair, and he joined for duty on the 3rd October 1914, although he did not leave England until the 16th November 1915 when the battalion were posted to France.

On July 15th 1916, the 16th King's Royal Rifle Corps, as part of 100th Infantry Brigade, attacked the German positions at High Wood, and later that day Nathaniel Blaker died of wounds received in the attack. Nathaniel and Percy Blaker had been in the same Company throughout their time with the battalion, but on that day Sergeant Percy Blaker was on a gunnery course and not at his brother's side - he returned to his battalion, but was killed in action just six days later, also at High Wood. The Sussex Daily News reported on the death of the brothers on 11th August 1916:

BROTHERS KILLED IN LANCING - Mr. and Mrs. John Blaker of 3 Cherry Tree Cottages, Lancing, have sustained a double loss, news having been received that two of their three soldier sons have been killed during the Offensive on a date towards the end of July. Sergeant Percy Blaker, the elder of the two was thirty-three years of age, and Rifleman Nathaniel Blaker would have celebrated his twenty-first birthday this month. They were both in the King's Royal Rifles, their Battalion being one specially raised for 'old boys' of the Church Lads Brigade, Percy being Company Staff-Sergeant. The elder brother had only passed a gunnery course on the 18th July, and as his birthday was on the 22nd July, it may be a melancholy coincidence that he met with his fatal injuries on that date. At any rate it was within a day or so of then that he gallantly fell, although the exact date has not transpired yet. Married little more than a year ago, it was on the anniversary of that day that his wife received the news that he was missing. Both brothers were in the same Company and must have gone into battle together, almost shoulder to shoulder. Lancing people will deeply sympathise with the bereaved family.

Nathaniel Blaker's body now lies about two miles from High Wood at Delville Wood Cemetery, alongside another soldier from the same battalion who died on the same day, but it would not have been his original resting place. After the war bodies were recovered from many small battlefield cemeteries - there were no original burials at Delville Wood. There are members of the Blaker family still living in Lancing today.

*****

BASHFORD Reginald

REGINALD BASHFORD
Sergeant 47552, 29 Battery 42nd Brigade Royal Field Artillery
Killed in Action on Friday 30th August 1918
Achiet-le-Grand Communal Cemetery Extension, Grave II.L.6

Reginald Bashford had the longest wartime service of all the Lancing men who lost their lives in the Great War. He was born on the 18th September 1888 and baptised at St. James the Less, Lancing, on 4th November, the third child of John and Eliza Bashford. His father worked throughout his life as a market garden labourer, and the older boys followed him into this occupation. The 1901 census of Lancing shows that at twelve years of age Reg had already left school and was working as a grocer's assistant, but he was destined to move a long way from Lancing. In 1907 he joined the Royal Field Artillery - his service record does not survive at The National Archives, but from other sources we know that he travelled widely. When he left the Army in 1914 after six and a half years service, his last posting had been in Lahore, India, and on the 9th March 1914 he was transferred to the Army Reserve and following a few weeks work as a gardener, he was accepted as a police constable with the West Sussex Constabulary. His entry in the Examination Book of the WSC shows him as 5ft 9ins tall with blue eyes, brown hair, and with an eagle and snake tattoo on his left arm. His first posting as PC107 was to Horsham on the 28th May 1914, but his career as a policeman was to be shortlived - as an Army reservist he was recalled to his unit at the declaration of war, and he entered France on the 19th August 1914, following which he was involved in the retreat from Mons - truly one of the 'Old Contemptibles.'

The war diary for 42nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery shows that at the end of August 1918, after more than four years of war, the British were advancing quickly, capturing their objectives and taking prisoners as they went, and on the 30th August they were in the area around Sapignies. It is now known if Reg Bashford had escaped injury previously during the war - there are no newspaper reports to that effect - just the report of his death in the Sussex Daily News of 14th September 1918:

LANCING SERGEANT KILLED - Mr. and Mrs. John Bashford, 18 Cecil Road, Lancing, have had news of the death of one of their three soldier sons Sergeant R. Bashford, Royal Field Artillery, who was killed at the Western Front on 30th August. He would have been thirty years of age on 18th September and was an old soldier, accompanying the first British Expeditionary Force in the famous Retreat from Mons and thus having passed through four years of warfare. Of the other two sons, Signaller P. Bashford, Royal Engineers, is at the Western Front, while Sub-Conductor F. Bashford, Army Ordnance Corps, is also at one of the battle fronts.

Reginald Bashford's body lies in a grave at Achiet-le-Grand Communal Cemetery extension, Pas-de-Calais, France, just on the edge of the Somme battlefield area, today a sleepy village. The inscription on his grave reads:

Dearly loved and deeply mourned
Till the barrage lifts

Reg Bashford never married, but his nieces and nephews continued to live in the local area, and there are still related Bashford families in Lancing today.

BARTLETT Arthur Reuben Robert

ARTHUR REUBEN ROBERT BARTLETT
Private 10497 2nd Battalion Honourable Artillery Company
Killed in Action, Friday 26th October 1917
Hooge Crater Cemetery, Ieper, Belgium - Grave XII.L.8

Arthur Bartlett was born in London, the son of Arthur Robert and Emily Bartlett of 124 Trafalgar Road, off the Old Kent Road. His family had been in Sussex for many generations, and he was baptised at St. James the Less, Lancing, on 6th June 1897. At that time, his grandfather Robert Bartlett, was the sub-postmaster at Lancing, where he lived with his wife Esther, and Arthur spent a lot of time in the village, both with the Bartletts, and also with his maternal grandmother, Mary Greenyer. His service record held at The National Archives shows that he enlisted on the 27th February 1917 at Armoury House, London; his home address was 2 North Road, Lancing, where he worked as a railway clerk.
By late October 1917, as part of 22nd Brigade, the battalion was south of Ypres, near Vierstraat. The regimental history tells that on the day that Arthur Bartlett died they were struggling to relieve two battalions through waist deep mud and machine gun fire. Many of the Honourable Artillery Company were employed as stretcher bearers, attempting to rescue wounded men lying in water-filled shell holes. A newspaper report in the Worthing Gazette of 28th November 1917 shows that Arthur Bartlett was one of those men:

STRETCHER BEARER KILLED - Among the deaths that have been officially notified within the past few days is that of Private Arthur Reuben Robert Bartlett, a member of the Honourable Artillery Company, and son of Mr. and Mrs. A. R. Bartlett of the Post Office, North Road. He joined the Army in February of the present year, and in May he was sent to the Western Front. Recently he was one of a stretcher bearer company who were working under very heavy fire, and he was killed by a piece of shell. Before he undertook military duty Private Bartlett was booking clerk at Lancing Railway Station, and was highly esteemed.

The only personal possessions that are recorded as having been returned to the family were two identity discs. The service record contains a receipt, dated 14th May 1922, for the British War Medal and Victory Medal, signed by Arthur Bartlett's father. He has added a comment to the bottom of the form which states:

I am very grateful to the King for his recent visit to the graves of the fallen soldiers sleeping in France and Belgium

*****

AUSTIN Alfred Ernest

ALFRED ERNEST AUSTIN

Private 11453 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards Died of Wounds on Monday 22nd March 1915 Buried at Bethune Town Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France - Grave IV.A.86

The inscription on Lancing War Memorial states E. A. Austin, but it's not easy to decide whether he was Alfred, Ernest or Jack, and whether his closest links were with Lancing, Sompting or Worthing. He was born on the 30th November 1881, the son of Alfred and Emily Austin of Sompting, and baptised Alfred Ernest Austin at St. Mary's Church on 9th April 1882. The Austin family were one of the oldest and most numerous in Sompting, and Alfred Austin senior worked as a gardener in the village. At the time of the 1891 census they were living in Cokeham, and by 1901 they had moved to West Tarring where Alfred senior worked as a nursery garden labourer, and at sometime prior to the outbreak of war Jack married, and he and his wife Mary Jane moved to 'Glindor,' Brougham Road, Worthing. Jack Austin enlisted into the Coldstream Guards at Worthing on September 3rd 1914, giving his address as the family home in Brougham Road, and his occupation as 'nurseryman'. His time in training was relatively short for that period of the war, but men were already urgently needed to fill the gaps left by death and injury, and he arrived in France on the 3rd February 1915 to join his battalion. The Worthing Gazette of 7th April 1915 reports:

'ANOTHER MILITARY AND NAVAL FAMILY - We get another interesting illustration of patriotic service in the case of the relatives of Mr. Ephraim Austin of Sompting. His eldest son Harry Austin in the Instructor at the Gordon Boys' Home and he has three grandsons at the front, these being Harry Gordon Austin, Albert Austin and Jack Austin, all of whom have been wounded. Mr. Austin has also a nephew Harry Stripps in the Royal Field Artillery, whilst three other nephews are serving with the Royal Navy in the North Sea, and another is with the Territorial Force in India.'

March 1915 seemed to be a relatively quiet period for the battalion - since the beginning of the month they had either been in trenches at Richebourg L'Avoué, or in billets at Le Touret, with little obvious action. Jack Austin died of wounds on March 22nd 1915, probably at No.33 Casualty Clearing Station at Béthune, and we know from a report in the Worthing Gazette on April 7th that his injury had been sustained on the previous day.

SHOT BY A GERMAN SNIPER
Worthing Soldier Killed We have received a communicatioin from the Front which tells of another local soldier having given his life for his country. This is Private A. E. Austin, of the First Battalion of the Coldstream Guards, who was one of two Worthing men serving in that Battalion. The one remaining, Private J. Shepphard, in his communication to the GAZETTE says that Austin died as the result of wounds which he received on the day previously, having been shot, it is thought, by a German sniper. Private Sheppard thinks that Austin was getting a little too far away from the barricade when he was shot, and he mentions that this occurred in the day time.

*****

WW1 - The Names

The Memorial

Lancing War Memorial now stands in South Street, with the Parish Hall on one side, and the church of St. Michael and All Angels on the other, but originally it was erected immediately in front of St. Michael's, and on land belonging to the Church. Between the wars South Street was widened and the Church lost sixteen feet from its land, including the area of the Memorial, and it was at this tiime that it was moved to its present position. It takes the form of a stone cross on a rectangular base, with the names of those who died during the Great War on all four faces, with a second stone base added later to record the names of the men who lost their lives between 1939 and 1945. The wording above the names reads:

'To the Glory of God/
and the memory of Lancing men/
who laid down their lives for their country/
in the Great War 1914-1918'

A New Beginning

Last year my war memorial website disappeared overnight when the ISP withdrew free space with no notice. Since then I seem to have had too many fingers in other pies to get anything online again. A great many people have contacted me to know if it will reappear sometime, somewhere, so this is an experiment, to see if war memorial research will fit comfortably into such a simple concept as a blog. I know from experience how quickly Blogger posts are scooped up by search engines, and also that most visitors to memorial sites are drawn there by a particular name cropping up on a search, so perhaps this will be the start of a worthwhile experiment - if not, then nothing lost! All the content of the original site survives, but some will be reduced here for the sake of brevity - hopefully the details of the men themselves will appear complete.