Tag: Leicestershire Regiment

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

The Tragic History of the 7th Leicestershire Regiment

Private Thomas Edwin West, 41647, 7th Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, was killed in action on 27 May 1918 during the Third Battle of the Aisne and was buried at Hermonville Military Cemetery.

Family report and Commonwealth War Graves Commission details

Early Life and Family

Thomas Edwin West was born before 14 May 1899 in Elham, Kent, the son of Thomas West and Edith Hogben, and was baptised at St Mary the Virgin, Elham, on 14 May 1899.[file:184] The 1901 census places him on Elham High Street, while in 1911 he was living at Magpie Cottages, Elham, still recorded simply as a scholar.[file:184] By 1917 the family address was Park Gate, Elham, the home later cited in the records of his death and burial.[file:184]

These details present Thomas as a young Kent village boy whose life followed the pattern of many rural Edwardian children until the war intervened.[file:184] He never married and left no children, so the surviving record of his life rests almost entirely in parish, family and military sources.[file:184] The report identifies him as a fourth cousin twice removed to the researcher, ensuring that his memory continues through family history as well as official commemoration.[file:184]

Military Service

Thomas enlisted at Dover between 1917 and 1918 and served as Private 41647 in the Leicestershire Regiment.[file:184] The report notes that he had previously been associated with the Northamptonshire Regiment, 4th Battalion, in 1917, before serving in the 7th Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, by the time of his death.[file:184] Such transfers were common in the later war, when manpower needs often led to men being moved between regiments and battalions to reinforce depleted units.[file:184]

The 7th Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, was a Service battalion raised in September 1914 and by 1918 was serving in 110th Brigade of the 21st Division.[web:195][web:193] The battalion had already seen heavy fighting earlier in the war, and sources on its wartime movements note that in 1918 it fought on the Somme, at the Lys, and then at the Battle of the Aisne.[web:196] By the spring of 1918 Thomas therefore belonged to a battle-worn infantry battalion within a brigade closely identified with the Leicestershire Regiment.[web:193][web:196]

Unit Context at the Time of Death

The military setting of Thomas West’s death was the Third Battle of the Aisne, known to the Germans as part of Operation Blücher, launched on 27 May 1918 against the French front between Soissons and Reims.[file:184] The British IX Corps, including 21st Division, had been moved into what was thought a quieter sector to rest after earlier fighting, but instead found itself in the path of one of the most devastating German assaults of the year.[file:184] The attack opened at about 1.00 a.m. with a massive bombardment of high explosive and gas shells, followed by a major infantry assault around dawn.[file:184]

Thomas’s own unit, the 7th Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, formed part of 110th Brigade in the centre of the 21st Division line.[file:184][web:193] The family report’s military notes explain that the brigade had taken over the Châlons-le-Vergeur sector between the River Aisne and the Aisne Canal on the night of 14/15 May 1918, leaving it directly exposed when the German assault began on 27 May.[file:184] Communication lines were shattered by the bombardment, the forward companies were overwhelmed, and the brigade was compelled to fall back under intense pressure as neighbouring formations on the left were swept away.[file:184]

The collapse of 62nd Infantry Brigade on the left exposed the 7th Leicesters even more severely, and the report states that the battalion suffered extremely heavy casualties as it too was forced into retreat.[file:184] The 6th and 8th Battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment, together with the divisional pioneers and engineers, fought bitter delaying actions as the remnants of the division attempted to withdraw towards Cormicy and Cavoy, later stabilising briefly between Bouvancourt and Hermonville.[file:184] By the end of 27 May 1918 the 110th Brigade had suffered catastrophic losses, with 52 officers and 1,378 other ranks lost, including 33 officers and 1,168 reported missing.[file:184]

This context is crucial to understanding Thomas’s death, because he was not lost in an isolated trench skirmish but in one of the most destructive single days experienced by the Leicestershire Regiment in 1918.[file:184][web:196] The battle notes show that the brigade’s all-Leicestershire character, with the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th Battalions grouped together, meant the losses fell with particular intensity on men from the same regimental family.[file:184] Thomas thus died as part of a brigade-wide disaster that helped break the British line on the Aisne before the German advance finally outran its supplies and was checked.[file:184]

Thomas Edwin West died during one of the most shattering days in the history of the 7th Leicestershire Regiment, when the German Aisne offensive overwhelmed the exhausted British IX Corps sector.

Family report and battalion context

Circumstances of Death

Private Thomas Edwin West was killed in action on 27 May 1918 in France at the age of nineteen.[file:184][web:197] The date coincides exactly with the opening day of the German assault on the Aisne front, when the 7th Battalion was caught in the centre of the 21st Division’s collapsing sector.[file:184] The violence of that day, including sustained artillery fire, gas shelling, and close infantry attacks, explains the scale of casualties among his battalion and brigade.[file:184]

Because Thomas lies buried at Hermonville Military Cemetery rather than being commemorated as missing, it is likely that his body was recovered during or after the fighting and buried in the area to which the division fell back.[file:184][web:191] Hermonville became closely linked with the desperate rearguard fighting and subsequent withdrawals of late May 1918, and the report itself notes that the divisional line stabilised between Bouvancourt and Hermonville during the evening of 27 May before another retreat the following day.[file:184] His burial location therefore fits closely with the known route of the division’s withdrawal and resistance.[file:184][web:191]

Burial and Commemoration

Thomas was buried in Hermonville Military Cemetery, Marne, France, in grave III.B.3.[file:184][web:191] This cemetery contains First World War burials from the fighting in the area and lies north-west of Reims, close to the ground over which the 21st Division retreated and fought in the last days of May 1918.[web:191] His grave gives his parents as Thomas and Edith West of Park Gate, Elham, Canterbury, preserving the family connection within the official commemorative record.[file:184][web:197]

The family report records his entitlement to the Victory Medal, British War Medal and Memorial Death Plaque.[file:184] These items formed the standard package of commemoration for British soldiers who died in service overseas and would have been sent to his next of kin after the war.[file:184] In the absence of a longer adult life, these medals and his grave in France became the principal surviving symbols of his service and sacrifice.[file:184]

Legacy

Thomas Edwin West’s life was painfully short, taking him from village childhood in Elham to military service and death in one of the fiercest German offensives of 1918.[file:184] He was only nineteen when he died, one of many young infantrymen whose lives were cut short before marriage, parenthood, or settled working adulthood could begin.[file:184] His story embodies the cost paid by small Kent communities as well as by the hard-pressed front-line battalions that fought on the Western Front.[file:184]

Sources and Further Reading