Tag: 2nd cousin 3x removed

Norman Henry Hughes: Casualty of the Great War’s Gas Warfare

Private Norman Henry Hughes, 229339, formerly 4496 East Kent Regiment and later serving with the London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), died of wounds from gas shell injuries on 22 May 1918 and was buried at St Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen.

Family report and commemorative casualty listing

Early Life and Family

Norman Henry Hughes was born in the closing months of 1898 at Willesborough, Kent, before being baptised on 5 February 1899 at St Mary the Virgin, Willesborough.[file:122] He was the son of Thomas Henry Hughes and Lucy Annie Cook, and by the 1901 census he was living in Folkestone, where he was recorded as a two-year-old son in the household.[file:122] The family remained in Folkestone, and in the 1911 census Norman was living at 32 Marshall Street, where he was still a scholar.[file:122]

By 1918 the family’s addresses linked him both to Folkestone and to Dover, with the report giving 32 Marshall Street, Folkestone, and 23 Victoria Dwellings, Dover, as places associated with him or his family at the time of his service.[file:122] These addresses place Norman firmly within the east Kent coastal communities that supplied many recruits to the British Army during the Great War.[file:122] The report records no marriage and no children, so his life remained closely tied to his parents’ household and wider family circle.[file:122]

Military Service

Norman enlisted at Canterbury, Kent, in 1918, entering military service during the final and most intense phase of the war on the Western Front.[file:122] His rank was Private, and his principal service number is given as 229339, though the report also records earlier or associated numbers including 201572 in the East Kent Regiment and former number 4496.[file:122] Such multiple numbers were common in First World War service, especially where men transferred between battalions or were renumbered within Territorial and county regiment systems.[file:122]

The family report identifies him as serving with the London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), while also noting service with the East Kent Regiment and stating that he was “1st Battalion; posted to 10 Battalion”.[file:122] A commemorative casualty listing from the Dover War Memorial Project gives a more specific combined wording, describing him as “Private, Norman Henry, 229339, 1st Bn, London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) posted to 10th Bn, Royal Fusiliers, died of wounds (gas) 22 May 1918”.[web:124] Taken together, these records strongly suggest that Norman’s service involved transfer or attachment between related London Regiment and Royal Fusiliers formations while retaining traces of earlier East Kent Regiment service in the paperwork.[file:122][web:124]

Unit Context at the Time of Death

Although the surviving summary is brief, the evidence indicates that at the time of his fatal wounding Norman was associated with a London Regiment battalion linked to the Royal Fusiliers, and had been posted to a 10th Battalion designation by May 1918.[file:122][web:124] By that stage of the war, infantry battalions on the Western Front were operating under relentless pressure from the German spring offensives launched in March 1918 and from the subsequent defensive and counter-offensive fighting that continued through the spring.[web:124] Men wounded by gas shelling in this period often died not immediately in the trenches but later in casualty clearing stations or base hospitals further to the rear.[web:128][file:122]

Norman’s burial at St Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen, is highly significant in understanding the military context of his death.[file:122] Rouen was one of the principal medical and logistical centres behind the British lines, and St Sever Cemetery Extension became the burial place of thousands of soldiers who died in the city’s hospitals after being evacuated wounded from the front.[web:128][web:133] His grave there therefore fits closely with the report’s statement that he died of wounds caused by gas shells, indicating that he was evacuated from the combat zone but did not recover.[file:122][web:128]

The phrase “died of wounds/Gas shell wounds” in the family report tells us that his death was the result of chemical shellfire rather than an instantly fatal battlefield injury.[file:122] Gas warfare remained a brutal feature of the Western Front in 1918, with mustard gas and other agents causing terrible burns to lungs, skin and eyes, and often leading to prolonged suffering before death.[file:122] In Norman’s case, the move from the front to hospital at Rouen and then burial at St Sever Cemetery Extension reflects the grim medical chain through which many gas casualties passed in the final year of the war.[file:122][web:128]

Norman Henry Hughes was one of the many young infantrymen of 1918 whose war ended not in an identified battlefield grave, but in a base hospital far behind the line after gas shell injuries proved fatal.

Family report and St Sever Cemetery context

Circumstances of Death

Private Norman Henry Hughes died in France on 22 May 1918 at the age of nineteen.[file:122] Both the family report and the commemorative casualty entry agree that he died of wounds resulting from gas shell injuries.[file:122][web:124] This places his death among the many casualties of the attritional fighting of 1918, when poison gas remained an effective and feared weapon even in the last months before Allied victory.[file:122]

Because he was buried at Rouen rather than in a front-line cemetery, it is likely that he survived long enough to be transported away from the battlefield for treatment.[file:122][web:128] St Sever Cemetery Extension was closely associated with the hospitals of Rouen, and burials there usually represent men who died after receiving medical attention rather than those buried near where they fell.[web:128][web:133] In that respect Norman’s death is a reminder that fatal war service often continued beyond the trench itself, through the hospital system that struggled to cope with the scale and severity of modern industrial warfare.[web:128]

Burial and Commemoration

Norman was buried in St Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen, in grave reference Q. III. N. 17.[file:122] This cemetery extension contains a very large concentration of First World War burials and is especially associated with the medical establishments of Rouen, one of the British Expeditionary Force’s most important rear-area centres.[web:128][web:133] His burial there confirms both the official care taken over his commemoration and the fact that his final days were spent away from home in one of the war’s great hospital cities.[file:122][web:128]

The report also notes his entitlement to the Victory Medal, British War Medal, and Memorial Death Plaque.[file:122] These standard awards marked overseas war service and death in service, and would have been issued to or in memory of his next of kin after the war.[file:122] They formed part of the material culture of remembrance for bereaved families in Kent and across Britain.[file:122]

Legacy

Norman Henry Hughes belongs to that large and poignant group of British soldiers who were scarcely out of school before the war claimed them.[file:122] The movement from childhood in Folkestone to enlistment at Canterbury and death in France in 1918 traces a short life shaped almost entirely by east Kent and then broken by the demands of total war.[file:122] The supplied report identifies him as a second cousin three times removed to the researcher, ensuring that his memory survives not only in official records but within the living framework of family history.[file:122]

Sources and Further Reading

Remembering Walter James Deal: His Service and Sacrifice

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Private Walter James Deal, 23238, 2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, died of wounds on 12 May 1918 in France and Flanders.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission and family report

Early Life and Family

Walter James Deal was born about March 1886 in Denton, Kent, his birth registered in the Dover registration district in the March quarter of 1886.[file:42] He was the son of Henry Deal and Emily Goldfinch, and census records show him growing up in Denton Street, first as a five-year-old in 1891 and later as a fifteen-year-old labourer in a garden in 1901.[file:42] These records place him firmly within a working Kentish family rooted in the villages south-east of Canterbury.[file:42]

By 1911 Walter was living in Petham, Kent, where he worked as a gardener and domestic boarder at The Bakery on Petham Street.[file:42] On 26 December 1912 he married Ethel Emma Smith at All Saints, Petham, and the couple had at least one child, Arthur James Deal.[file:42] His pre-war life therefore combined rural labour, marriage and family responsibilities, giving a fuller picture of the man behind the military record.[file:42]

Military Service

Walter enlisted at Caversham, Berkshire, while living at Sonning Common, Berkshire, between 1916 and 1918.[file:42] He served as a Private with service number 23238 in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.[file:42] The family report also links him to medical records held under the National Archives reference MH106/963, showing that he was treated in late 1916 for trench feet, a common and often debilitating condition caused by prolonged exposure to cold and wet conditions in the trenches.[file:42]

His medical note records his admission on 19 December 1916 and transfer to a sick convoy the following day, with the observation that he passed through No. 14 Ambulance Train and the hospital ship Glenart Castle.[file:42] Those records place him within the wider medical evacuation system that supported British forces on the Western Front, and they show that his service was affected by the harsh realities of trench warfare before his final illness or wound.[file:42] Walter qualified for the Victory Medal, the British War Medal and the Memorial Death Plaque.[file:42]

2nd Battalion Context at Death

The key unit at the time of Walter’s death was the 2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, an experienced regular battalion that had begun the war stationed at Aldershot as part of the 5th Brigade, 2nd Division.[file:42][web:46] It mobilised and landed at Boulogne on 14 August 1914, then served continuously on the Western Front through the early battles of the war, including Mons, the Marne, the Aisne and First Ypres.[file:42][web:43][web:46] By 1918 the battalion had become a battle-hardened formation, having already fought in the great offensive and defensive battles of 1918 from St Quentin to the Selle.[file:42][web:43][web:46]

Because Walter’s death was recorded in France and Flanders on 12 May 1918, his battalion’s operational setting matters greatly to understanding his final days.[file:42] The 2nd Battalion’s long service on the Western Front meant it was part of the British Army’s hard-fought response to the German spring offensives, and by the spring of 1918 it was moving through the sequence of battles listed in the family report, including St Quentin, Bapaume, First Arras 1918, Albert, Second Bapaume, Havrincourt, Canal du Nord, Cambrai 1918 and the Selle.[file:42][web:43] The battalion’s later record also notes that it ended the war at Villers Pol, France, confirming its presence in the closing stages of the 1918 campaign.[file:42]

Although the supplied record does not identify the exact action in which Walter was wounded, the combination of his date of death, his French burial, and his battalion’s 1918 operations strongly suggests that he died from wounds received during the intense fighting of that year.[file:42][web:46] The 2nd Battalion’s wartime history shows that it was a front-line regular battalion throughout the conflict, which makes Walter’s service part of the broader story of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry’s sustained infantry campaigning on the Western Front.[file:42][web:43]

Circumstances of Death and Burial

Walter James Deal died on 12 May 1918 in France, with his cause of death recorded as died of wounds.[file:42] He was thirty-two years old, born in Denton, Kent, and living at Sonning Common, Berkshire, when he was taken to France and Flanders with the British Army.[file:42] His father is named in the death notes as Henry Deal of Denton, Canterbury, confirming the family link already established in the earlier civil and census records.[file:42]

He is buried in Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension No. 2, Somme, France, in Plot II, Row B, Grave 9.[file:42] Doullens was a major medical and evacuation centre on the Western Front, and by 1918 its cemetery extensions were being used for casualties from the fierce fighting on the Somme and Arras fronts.[web:48][web:51] That setting reinforces the likely sequence of wound, treatment and death that is reflected in Walter’s military and burial records.[file:42][web:48]

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records his full identity and burial details, while Find a Grave preserves his memorial under ID 56396944.[file:42] These records ensure that his sacrifice remains marked both in France and in digital remembrance spaces used by family historians and local researchers.[file:42] Walter’s grave is therefore both a family memorial and part of the broader landscape of Commonwealth remembrance on the Somme.[web:51]

Legacy and Family Memory

Walter married into local Kent family life before the war, and his wife Ethel Emma Smith and son Arthur James Deal are named in the family report.[file:42] His story therefore belongs not only to military history but also to the history of a young husband and father drawn from rural labour into the first industrial war of the twentieth century.[file:42] The family report identifies him as a second cousin three times removed to the researcher, showing that his memory still links living descendants and wider family networks.[file:42]

His military experience also illustrates the way ordinary soldiers moved through several stages of the Great War: pre-war rural labour, enlistment in the mid-war period, trench illness, front-line service, wound treatment, and burial in a casualty cemetery near the combat zone.[file:42] The 2nd Battalion’s history supplies the necessary military frame for that story, showing that Walter served within one of the British Army’s most continuously engaged regular battalions.[file:42][web:46] In a local history context, his biography can be used to connect Denton, Petham and Sonning Common with the wider story of the Western Front.[file:42]

Sources and Further Reading