Category Archives: Other Regiments

William Walter Love & Leonard Noble Love

Army, Commemorated name/s, Dardanelles, Graves, Other Regiments, St. Batholomew's Church, Ypres

William Walter Love M.M.
Sergeant -Major Royal Marine Light Infantry
Royal Naval Division

Leonard Noble Love
Corporal 52805
“B” Battery Royal Horse Artillery

Division 52

Love WW photo Love LN photo

William Walter Love and Leonard Noble Love are commemorated on the grave of their parents, Mary and William Robert Love and also on the St. Bartholomew’s Church memorial.   At the time of their deaths the Love family were living at 49, St. Bartholomew’s Rd. Reading.   The 1901 census indicates that Mr William R. Love, aged 39, was already a widower. William Love’s  widowed mother and sister were living with the family which comprised five children, four boys and one girl at 12, Mancherst Road. WilliamR Love was a carpenter and joiner by trade.

William Walter Love  was described in the 1911 census as a bicycle engineer. He was killed in action on Oct. 26th 1917 aged 23.  He was the third son of Mr. W.R. Love. He had served with the Royal Naval Division throughout the Gallipoli campaign. His death was reported in the Standard November 17th 1917.

The 26th October 1917 marked the beginning of the Second Battle of Passchendaele.  The German front line was hit with shell fire along its length for four days preceding the start of the battle.  Due to the naturally high water table and broken dykes the battlefield was largely a sea of mud.  The Royal Naval Division attacked on the left hand side of the Canadians who were attacking Bellevue Ridge, they gained some ground but with heavy losses.  It is probable that William Walter Love was amongst them.  Serjeant Major Love has no known grave and is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial Panel 1 and 162A.

It has not been possible to find the citation for his Military Medal.

Leonard Noble Love was the second son of Mr. Love.  Leonard served 6 years (8 years in one report) in the regular army. The 1911 census indicates that Leonard Noble Love was born in 1891 and was then aged 20. He was in Z Battery RHA. He was serving in Egypt,Sierra Leone, South Africa and Sudan.

Leonard Noble Love was mentioned in dispatches in Sir Charles Monroe’s Gallipoli dispatch.  A report in the Chronicle 2nd July 1915 was an extract from a letter sent to his father on 11th May 1915.

“I am writing this in a trench with the rain pouring down, hoping that it will soon cease, as it is not very comfortable.  We have been in action since 27th April.  Our troops are making progress in the right direction.  We had rather a big night attack on the 1st May, but things ended up alright in the finish.  Since then we have advanced.  We get very good rations, and plenty of them, which is a great thing, as one always feels better after a good meal.  I am glad to say that the rain did not last long this morning; the weather is perfect.  Things are rather quiet this morning , and have been so for the last two or three days.  There is the usual spasmodic burst of shrapnel and rifle fire.

“I have seen one of the most thrilling sights of my life -that was the bombardment of the forts by the Navy.  For about three days it was like a tremendous thunderstorm.  Buildings were changed into heaps of dust, big guns were dislodged from their mountings, and, to sum up the whole thing, the Turks were ‘none too happy.’   It is a great thing to see the way our infantry behave, and to see them charge is a great sight.

“ I got in rather a tight corner on the night of the 1st May but managed to scrape through all right.  While I am writing there is a howitzer battery engaging a turkish battery, and what I can see they are smashing it up.”

Unfortunately he was killed in action on January  6th 1916,  the day before the last of the army was finally evacuated from Gallipoli. (Chronicle July 21st 1916)  He also has no known grave and is commemorated on the Helles Memorial Panel 21 and 22.

Mr. Love’s youngest son Lance Corporal Fred Love enlisted  with the Royal Berkshire Regiment served in France from March 1915.

 

Robert Ernest Ling

Army, Commemorated name/s, Other Regiments, Ypres

Robert Ernest  Ling
Driver 79361
103rd Battery Royal Field Artillery

Division 14

Ling RE photo

Robert Ernest Ling  was the son of Mrs L. Ling, (later Mrs Brown) of 18 Gower Street, Reading.  He is remembered on her grave.

Before the war he was employed by Mr. H. J. Blundell, grocer and confectioner of Oxford Road.  He was a member of the St. James Catholic Church and the Reading Catholic Club connected with it. He was 19 years old and the first member of the club to fall in battle.   The Rev. Father Kernan referred to his death in a Sunday service and while sympathising with his mother “in the great loss she had sustained, also congratulated her upon the fact that her son had died fighting for his country”. 

Robert Ling was killed on February 24th 1915.  When initially reported in the papers it was stated “somewhere in France”, but his commemoration on the family grave states killed at Ypres. He is buried in Ypres Town Cemetery Extension, Menin Gate. Grave I. F. 1.

Leslie Ernest Lindsay

Alfred Sutton School War Memorial, Army, Loos, Other Regiments

Leslie Ernest Lindsay
Private 2488
9th Battalion East Surrey Regiment

Lindsay LE photo

Leslie Ernest Lindsay was the son of George and Mary A. Lindsay, of, 14 Palmer Park Avenue.  He died on the 26th September 1915, the second day of the battle of Loos, aged 19.  Prior to the war, according to the 1911 census, he had worked for the Co-op.  He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Loos Memorial Panels 65 -67.  Specific details about the death of Leslie Lindsay are not known but a general account of the battle, particularly the second day, is set out below.

The 1915 BEF offensive in Artois was centred around Loos.  The Germans held the high ground and their second line of defence was well protected on the reverse slope.   They were well aware of the impending attack and their line was strengthened with well constructed concrete machine gun posts.  The German artillery tactic was to bombard the assembling British troops and to lay a barrier of fire across no man’s land once the attack had started.  Those men of the BEF who penetrated the barrier would be stopped by machine guns.  It was at Loos that the British first used chlorine gas in retaliation for the gas attack by the Germans outside Ypres in April 1915.  The discharge of gas hung around the battle field and even  drifted back into the British trenches, hindering rather than helping the advance.

Loos was to be the first testing ground of the “New Army”.  John Keegan in his book “The First World War” (page 218) describes the scene as the New Army 21st and 24th Divisions went into line on the morning of the 26th September and started their attack in early afternoon.

“….they moved forward in ten columns ‘each [of] about a thousand men, all advancing as if carrying out a parade-ground drill’.  The German defenders were astounded by the sight of an ‘entire front covered with the enemy’s infantry’.  They stood up, some even on the parapet of the trench, and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across the open grassland.  The machine gunners had opened fire at 1,500 yards range.  Never had machine guns had such straight forward work to do …with barrels becoming hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks; one machine gun alone fired 12,5000 rounds that afternoon.  The effect was devastating.  The enemy could be seen falling literally in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption’ until they reached the unbroken wire of the Germans’ second position: Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle the survivors turned and began to retire.’

The survivors were a bare majority of those who had come forward.  Of the 15,000 infantry in the 21st and 24th Divisions, over 8,000 had been killed or wounded.  Their German enemies, nauseated by the spectacle of the ‘corpse field of Loos’, held their fire as the British turned in retreat, ‘so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy after such a victory’.”