Tag: Croisilles British Cemetery

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

Heroic Actions of Cecil Martin in WWI’s Croisilles Battle

Private Cecil Edward Augustus Martin (service number G/12130) served with the 2nd Battalion, Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment), and was killed in action on 2 April 1917 during operations near Croisilles on the Western Front.

He is buried in Croisilles British Cemetery in the Pas‑de‑Calais, France, where his grave lies among those of many comrades from the 7th Division who fell in the same fighting.



Early Life and Family

Cecil Edward Augustus Martin was born in Barham, Kent, in 1883, his birth registered in the Bridge district (volume 2A, page 781, line number 49). He was baptised at St John the Baptist, Barham, on 21 August 1883, confirming his roots in this rural East Kent parish.

He was the son of George Martin, an agricultural labourer and later an army pensioner, and his wife Isabella (née Hawkins), who married at St Mary Northgate, Canterbury, in 1878. The family moved between Surrey, Jersey, and Kent with George’s army service before settling in The Street, Barham, where several of Cecil’s siblings were also raised.

In the 1891 census Cecil appears as a scholar in Barham, living on The Street with his parents and siblings, reflecting a modest village upbringing in the Kent countryside. By 1901 he was still in The Street, Barham, recorded as a 17‑year‑old (the report notes him as 19) working as an errand boy, a typical occupation for a young man moving from school into casual employment.

By the 1911 census he is listed at Derringstone, Barham, near Canterbury, employed as a general labourer, a flexible role that could embrace farm work, building, and other manual jobs as required. No spouse or children are recorded in the individual report, and later notes describe him as having no wife or offspring, suggesting that Cecil never married and left no direct descendants.

Born, baptised, and brought up in Barham, Cecil Martin was very much a son of rural East Kent.

Reconstructed from civil registration and census records



Military Service with the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment)

The individual report records Cecil’s military service between about 1908 and 1917, with his enlistment age given as twenty‑three and his theatre of war as Western Europe. He enlisted at Canterbury and served as Private G/12130 in the 2nd Battalion, Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment), known formally as the Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey), the senior English line infantry regiment of the British Army after the Royal Scots.

The Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey) traced its origins to 1661 and saw service across the British Empire before the First World War. In 1959 it amalgamated with the East Surrey Regiment to form the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment, and through later amalgamations its lineage today is carried by the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.

At the outbreak of the First World War, the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s was stationed at Pretoria in South Africa. On 27 August 1914 it embarked from Cape Town for England, arriving at Southampton on 19 September 1914 and moving to Lyndhurst to join the 22nd Brigade of the 7th Division. On 6 October 1914 it was mobilised for war, landing at Zeebrugge and quickly entering the fighting on the Western Front.

The battalion and its division fought in some of the hardest‑fought early battles of the war, including the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, where the 7th Division suffered such heavy casualties that it took until 1915 to rebuild its strength. In 1915 the 2nd Queen’s took part in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the Battle of Aubers, the Battle of Festubert, the second action of Givenchy, and the Battle of Loos, forming part of the British effort to break the German lines in northern France and Flanders.

On 20 December 1915 the battalion transferred to the 91st Brigade within the 7th Division. In 1916 it fought on the Somme in the Battle of Albert, the Battle of Bazentin, the Battle of Delville Wood, the Battle of Guillemont, and subsequent operations on the Ancre, enduring prolonged trench warfare and repeated assaults against the German defences. Cecil’s service in the Western European theatre would have placed him amid this cycle of attack, consolidation, and attrition.

As a private of the 2nd Queen’s, Martin marched and fought with the 7th Division in many of the British Army’s hardest campaigns on the Western Front.

Summary of divisional operations 1914–1917



The 2nd Battalion at Croisilles, April 1917

In early 1917 the German Army withdrew to the strongly fortified Hindenburg Line, abandoning some forward positions. The 7th Division, including the 2nd Battalion, Queen’s, advanced to follow up this retreat and was tasked with attacking and capturing the village of Croisilles, south‑east of Arras, as part of these operations.

Croisilles British Cemetery’s historical summary notes that the 7th Division attacked Croisilles in March 1917 and took it on 2 April 1917. Plots I and II of the cemetery were begun between April 1917 and March 1918, initially to bury those killed in and around the village during the fighting, and later extended after the Armistice when graves were brought in from neighbouring battlefields and smaller burial grounds.

Other accounts of the 2nd Queen’s and 91st Brigade describe how the battalion moved forward from assembly positions to assault German positions covering Croisilles, suffering heavy casualties in the process. The majority of the dead from the 2nd Queen’s who fell on 2 April 1917 are buried in Croisilles British Cemetery, particularly in Plot I, Row A, underlining the intensity of the fighting on the day Cecil was killed.

Thus, at the time of his death, Private Martin’s unit was serving as part of 91st Brigade, 7th Division, attacking Croisilles against strong German opposition during the wider Arras–Hindenburg Line operations of spring 1917. His burial in Croisilles British Cemetery, close to the village the division captured on 2 April, ties his personal story directly to this key phase of the war on the Western Front.

On 2 April 1917 the 2nd Queen’s helped take Croisilles; many of those who fell that day, including Cecil Martin, now rest together in the British cemetery on the village’s edge.

Derived from Croisilles cemetery history and 7th Division accounts



Circumstances of Death

The individual report records that Cecil Edward Augustus Martin was killed in action on 2 April 1917 in France. This date coincides exactly with the day on which the 7th Division captured Croisilles, linking his death to the assault that secured the village from German control.

The cause of death is simply given as “Killed in Action”, with no surviving personal account in the report to describe the precise circumstances. However, the concentration of 2nd Queen’s graves from that date in Croisilles British Cemetery, together with divisional histories, strongly suggests that he fell during the attack or in the immediate fighting around the village’s defences.



Burial and Commemoration

Private Martin is buried in Croisilles British Cemetery, Pas‑de‑Calais, France, in grave I.A.19, as recorded in his individual report and corroborated by independent genealogical research. The cemetery lies to the south‑west of the village centre, off the road to St Léger, and today contains over 1,100 Commonwealth burials and commemorations from the First World War.

According to the cemetery history, most of the soldiers buried there belonged to the Guards, 7th and 21st Divisions, reflecting the units engaged in the fighting for Croisilles and the subsequent German offensives and Allied counter‑attacks in 1917–1918. Plots I and II, in which Cecil’s grave is located, were made between April 1917 and March 1918, after which further graves were concentrated there from surrounding battlefields and smaller cemeteries.[web:43]

His Commonwealth War Graves Commission entry can be accessed via the CWGC database: CWGC casualty details for Private C. E. A. Martin. A further genealogical summary, including his parents and siblings, is available at Faded Genes: Cecil Edward Augustus Martin 1883–1917.



Legacy and Descendants

The individual report records no spouse and no children for Cecil Edward Augustus Martin, and independent research similarly finds no evidence that he married. His immediate legacy therefore rests with his parents and siblings, with the Martin and Hawkins families of Barham and Canterbury preserving his memory privately in the years after the war.

More broadly, his story forms part of the collective legacy of the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment), whose battalions fought from Tangier in the seventeenth century through the major campaigns of the First World War. As one of many ordinary soldiers from rural Kent who served and died with the 2nd Battalion on the Western Front, Cecil represents the deep contribution of small villages like Barham to Britain’s war effort.

For descendants of his wider family, resources such as Ancestry and other genealogical databases can be used to reconstruct the Martin and Hawkins lines in greater depth, drawing on the civil registrations, census entries, and military sources referenced here. In this way, Private Cecil Edward Augustus Martin’s short life—rooted in Barham and ended at Croisilles—can be placed within a richer family and regimental narrative.

Sources

  • Individual report for Private Cecil Edward Augustus Martin (family tree compilation, including birth and baptism details, census entries for Barham and Derringstone, enlistment age, unit, medal entitlement, and Croisilles British Cemetery grave reference I.A.19).
  • Commonwealth War Graves Commission – casualty record for “MARTIN, –”, Private G/12130, 2nd Bn., Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment), Croisilles British Cemetery, grave I.A.19: CWGC casualty details.
  • Faded Genes – “Cecil Edward Augustus MARTIN 1883–1917” (family reconstruction with parents George Martin and Isabella Hawkins, census addresses in Barham, enlistment at Canterbury, and confirmation of Croisilles grave reference): Faded Genes: Cecil Edward Augustus Martin.
  • Croisilles British Cemetery, Pas‑de‑Calais – cemetery history and description (noting capture of Croisilles by 7th Division on 2 April 1917, and creation of Plots I–II for those killed in and around the village): Croisilles British Cemetery.
  • The Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey) – regimental history and lineage, including service as the senior English line infantry regiment and later amalgamation into the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment: National Army Museum overview The Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey) and Wikipedia entry Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey) (with supporting summary at Wikiwand).
  • Accounts and profiles of Croisilles fighting and 2nd Queen’s casualties (used for context on 7th Division’s attack on Croisilles on 2 April 1917 and the concentration of 2nd Queen’s graves in Croisilles British Cemetery): London War Memorial and related Arras/Croisilles material at London War Memorial – online resource.