Thomas Theodore Hunt: A World War I Soldier’s Story

Thomas Theodore Hunt was a Kent-born soldier of the Leicestershire Regiment who died in France on 13 June 1917, aged thirty-six, during the fighting in the Arras sector.[file:336] His story moves from the lanes of Cheriton, near Folkestone, to the battlefields of France and Flanders, and it reflects the experience of many older reservists and wartime volunteers who left civilian labour to join the infantry.[file:336]

Private Thomas Theodore Hunt, 40132, Leicestershire Regiment, was killed in action in France and Flanders on 13 June 1917.

Family report and Commonwealth War Graves Commission record

Early Life and Family

Thomas Theodore Hunt was born on 29 July 1880 in Cheriton, Kent, the son of Henry Hunt and Sarah Ann Fisher.[file:336] He was baptised at St Martin’s, Cheriton, on 3 October 1880, confirming his place in the parish community close to the Channel coast.[file:336] The family report places him at Cheriton Road in 1881 and at Enbrook Terrace in 1891, showing a settled local upbringing in a village that later became increasingly suburban as Folkestone expanded.[file:336]

By 1901 Thomas was living on Church Road in Cheriton and working as a gardener’s domestic, a post that suggests service in a private household rather than independent employment.[file:336] In the 1911 census he appears again in Cheriton, now at 35 Church Road and working as a general labourer, which indicates a move into heavier manual work as an adult.[file:336] He did not marry and left no children, so the family line preserved in the report passes through collateral descendants rather than direct issue.[file:336]

Military Service

Thomas enlisted at Loughborough, Leicestershire, and went to France on 2 August 1916.[file:336] His service number was 40132, and he served as a Private in the Leicestershire Regiment.[file:336] The report identifies his sub-unit as the 3/5th Battalion, while the accompanying notes place him within the wartime 8th (Service) Battalion lineage, showing how wartime administrative changes and surviving summaries can compress several battalion identities into one record.[file:336]

The Leicestershire Regiment expanded rapidly during the First World War and fielded several Service battalions, including the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th Battalions within the 110th Brigade of the 37th Division.[web:353] The 8th (Service) Battalion had been formed at Leicester in September 1914 as part of Kitchener’s Third New Army, initially attached to the 23rd Division before moving to the 110th Brigade, 37th Division.[web:353] By July 1916 it had transferred to the 21st Division, where it remained through much of the fighting of 1916 and 1917.[file:336][web:353]

Thomas’s arrival in France in August 1916 placed him in a battalion that had already seen action on the Somme and was soon to be committed to the bitter battles of 1917.[file:336][web:353] The Leicestershire Regiment’s wartime battalions were heavily engaged across the Western Front, and the 8th Battalion in particular fought at Bazentin Ridge, Flers-Courcelette, Morval and Le Transloy in 1916 before moving into the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line, the Scarpe battles, Bullecourt, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, the Second Battle of Passchendaele and the Cambrai operations in 1917.[file:336][web:353]

By the summer of 1917, the Leicestershire Regiment’s 8th Battalion was a battle-tested infantry unit engaged in the violent trench warfare of the Arras front.

Regimental history and battalion notes

Unit Context at Time of Death

Thomas died on 13 June 1917 in the Pas-de-Calais area of northern France, and the report gives his duty location as France and Flanders.[file:336] In June 1917 the 21st Division and the Leicestershire battalions in its 110th Brigade were operating in the wider Arras sector, where the British Army was maintaining pressure after the opening offensives of spring 1917.[file:336][web:338] This was a period of hard infantry work rather than a single dramatic set-piece battle, with units frequently rotating through shell holes, trenches, forward posts and local attacks.[web:338]

The regiment’s service in 1917 included the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, the First and Third Battles of the Scarpe, the flanking operations around Bullecourt, and later Ypres fighting such as Polygon Wood and Broodseinde.[file:336] These operations show that by mid-1917 the Leicestershire battalions were deeply embedded in the British Army’s offensive sequence on the Western Front, taking part in attacks that combined artillery preparation, infantry advances, consolidation of captured ground and defence against German counter-attacks.[web:338][web:353] Thomas therefore belonged to a battalion whose role at the time of his death was that of a hard-worked line infantry formation sustaining the front and supporting continuing offensives in northern France.[file:336][web:338]

Circumstances of Death

Private Hunt was killed in action on 13 June 1917, only months after his arrival in France.[file:336] The family report does not preserve a detailed account of the exact action, but the date and location place his death in the intense fighting that followed the Arras battles and the continuing pressure along the British front in Pas-de-Calais.[file:336][web:338] Men killed in these circumstances were often lost in shellfire, trench raids or local infantry actions, and their bodies were not always recoverable in the confused conditions of the front line.[web:338]

His death at the age of thirty-six also marks him out from the many younger recruits of the war.[file:336] He had already lived a full civilian life as gardener and labourer in Cheriton before volunteering or being called up, and his service record shows the transition from local working man to infantryman in the British Expeditionary Force.[file:336] The few official words “killed in action” therefore conceal a much larger story of movement, hardship and sacrifice.[file:336]

Burial and Commemoration

Thomas Theodore Hunt was buried in grave I.D.11 in a cemetery in Pas-de-Calais, France, after his death on 13 June 1917.[file:336] His CWGC record is linked in the report, and the family also notes a Find a Grave memorial, preserving both the official burial data and a modern public memorial reference.[file:336] The fact that he has a known grave is significant, since many soldiers of the same period were later commemorated on memorials to the missing rather than in identified burials.[file:336]

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission entry confirms his rank as Private, his regiment as the Leicestershire Regiment, and his date of death as 13 June 1917.[file:336] His burial in France and Flanders places him among the thousands of British soldiers interred in northern French cemeteries after the battles of 1917.[file:336] For his family in Cheriton, the grave provided a fixed place of remembrance and a link between Kent and the battlefields of France.[file:336]

Legacy

Thomas’s life story is typical of many First World War casualties in one important respect: he came from an ordinary working background and was drawn into an extraordinary conflict.[file:336] He moved from domestic gardening and labouring in Cheriton into an infantry battalion that served through some of the hardest fighting on the Western Front.[file:336][web:353] The record identifies him as a fourth cousin twice removed to the researcher, which shows how these wartime losses still resonate in family memory more than a century later.[file:336]

Sources and Further Reading

• Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Thomas Theodore Hunt.
• Find a Grave memorial for Thomas Theodore Hunt.
• Royal Leicestershire Regiment: A Short History of the Regiment.
• Goadby Marwood History: Cecil Thomas Foister and the 8th Leicestershires.
• Western Front Association: The 21st Division in World War I.
• Compiled family report: Individual Report for Thomas Theodore Hunt.