In April 2009 I had the privilege of taking over the tending of
East Garston's War Memorial, the previous incumbent having left
the village.The names on the memorial became very familiar to
me, so much so that I felt the need to find out more about the
men behind the names. Fifteen in WW1 and four in WW2
In order to research the village's
war casualties a three pronged approach would be required. Firstly
to establish their identities in the context of village life,
bearing in mind that their lives were tragically short, secondly
to define their military records and, finally, to incontrovertibly
tie these two sets of data together.
The "village" approach,
using the relevant censuses (1891,1901 and 1911,) produced only
4-5 likely matches for name and age. The "military"
approach was far more fruitful however, particularly when using
the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission which claims
to hold the records of some one and three-quarter million service
personnel killed in either WW1 or WW2.
There is a caveat in that 60% of
the WW1 records were destroyed by fire during a German bombing
raid in WW2. On the positive side the search requirements are
relatively undemanding and it was possible to elicit responses
simply by inputting a surname. But, with very little information
to go on, the range of matches for the various names differed
widely. "David Kibblewhite Pounds" produced only one
match whereas, at the other end of the spectrum, there were 199
matches for "Alfred Lewis" Most names fell in the 30
- 70 range.
This was not as daunting a prospect
as might be imagined since, at the time of WW1, mobility in rural
areas such as East Garston was relatively low.
Would-be soldiers
tended,therefore, to migrate to the recruiting stations of their
local regiments, in our case the Royal Berkshire Regiment (nicknamed
"the Biscuit Boys" because of the close proximity, in
Reading, of Brock Barracks, their headquarters, to the Huntley
and Palmer biscuit factory) With this in mind it was possible
to identify 8 village men who had enlisted with the Royal Berks,
although some of the details required substantiating. Each of
the remaining 7 men were later traced as serving with other regiments.
David Knight
