Category Archives: Regiments

George Murley

Berkshire Yeomanry, Registered War Grave

George Murley
Lance Sergeant 70165 
Depot Berkshire Yeomanry

Division  35

Murley, G photo  CIMG2113

George Murley was educated at Kendrick School, and later at Ardingley College, Sussex. The good news that his wife, had delivered a daughter, Katie, was announced on  February 16th 1917. The family lived at The Gables, Upper Redlands Rd. He was the youngest son of Mr and Mrs William James Murley of 87, London St., Reading.

George joined the Yeomanry some time before the war, and on the outbreak of hostilities volunteered for foreign service.

He was sent to Egypt, and was stationed for some time in Cairo, where he met with an accident, his horse throwing him and he broke his ankle which necessitated his return to England.  He was thus unable to go to Gallipoli with his regiment.  On regaining some fitness he was given clerical employment at Yeomanry House, and afterwards was transferred to Canterbury. Ordered in October 1918 to take a draft of men to Ireland he got wet through and caught a severe chill, and on returning to Reading, where his young wife was living, he found he was too ill to proceed back to Canterbury.  He was taken  to Wilson Hospital on the Saturday, suffering form pneumonia, and died on the Tuesday. At the time his father was also lying seriously ill.  He was given a military funeral.

He was 30 and prior to the war worked in his fathers business.  His papers were through for a  commission and he would have been gazetted on the 26th November 1918, he died on 5th November 1918. His is aregistered war grave but with a headstone chosen by the family rather than the portland stone war pattern headstone.

Lieutenant Kenneth Bickersteth Murchison

Army, Commemorated name/s, Other Regiments

Lieutenant Kenneth Bickersteth Murchison
2nd Battalion (attached to 8th)
Seaforth Highlanders

Division 47/48

Kenneth Bickersteth Murchison   is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial Panel 38.  He was aged 19 when killed in action on 26th August 1917.  He was killed during the Third Battle of Ypres, exact details of the incident in which he was killed are not yet known.
His name is commemorated on the family grave.

William James Mundy

Army, Commemorated name/s, Other Regiments, Passchendaele, Ypres

William James Mundy
Private G/9171
11th Battalion Queen’s Own (Royal West Surrey Regiment)

  Division 35

Mundy WJ photo

 

William James Mundy was the son of Mrs E. E. Mundy, of 28, Henry Street, Reading. His father H. Mundy was already dead at the time of his son’s death.  He was commemorated on a his family’s grave.  The 1911 census indicates that William was working as a barman at a hotel in Aldershot. William died on the 31st July 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres.

The Third Battle of Ypres began on 31st July 1917.  A bombardment had begun fifteen days earlier and over four million shells had been fired.  (One million had been fired prior to the Battle of the Somme).  At 3.50a.m. the assaulting troops of the Second and Fifth Armies, with a portion of the French First Army lending support on the left, moved forward, accompanied by 136 tanks.  The Tank Corps was only four days old.  Previously it had been known as the Heavy Branch, Machine Gun Corps, a name adopted for purposes of secrecy at their formation.  Preparations for the battle had taken place in dry weather but on the first day the weather broke and three-quarters of an inch (21.7mm) of rain soaked the battlefield.  Men and tanks moved forward behind the creeping barrage over ground churned and cratered by years of shelling.  The surface was softened by the rain but, for all that only two tanks bogged down at the commencement of battle although many ditched later.  A map was prepared by Major Fuller, Staff Intelligence Officer of the Tanks, of the ground over which the tanks were expected to attack.   Where he expected the ground to be marshy, he coloured the area blue.  What he saw appalled him, it was three-quarters of the battlefield.  He sent the maps to Haig’s GHQ so that the Commander in Chief could judge conditions for himself.  However, the map was intercepted by Charteris who refused to show it to the Commander in Chief on the grounds that it would depress him.  Only 48% of the tanks reached their first objective.  Although there was some progress in the early part of the day by late morning the familiar breakdown in communications between infantry and guns occurred.  At two in the afternoon the Germans began to counter attack with a heavy shelling and this together with the heavy rain turned the battle field into soupy mud.  A halt to the offensive was called until the 4th August.  However, Haig insisted that the attack had been “highly satisfactory and the losses slight”.  By comparison with the Somme, when 20,000 men had died on the opening day, only about 8,800 men were reported dead or missing.  The total wounded, including those of the French Army, numbered 35,000, the Germans suffered a similar number.  However, the Germans remained in command of the vital ground and committed none of their counter attack divisions.  Prince Rupprecht , in his diary recorded that he was “very satisfied with the results”.

It is not known exactly when and where William Mundy  was killed, he has no known grave and his name is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial, Panels 45 & 47.  He was aged 25.