Charles Edwin Bostwick
Lance Corporal 46143
2nd Battalion Essex Regiment.
Charles Edwin Bostwick was the eldest son of Mr. Charles Henry and Mrs. Lucy Bostwick of 64 Amity Rd. Reading. The 1911 census has filled in the details of his life. Charles Bostwick’s occupation is given as a sewing machine canvasser, his two children were in school. Information relating to his death has come from the CWGC record. His name is to be found on Panel 7 of the Vis-en-Artois Memorial.
The Vis-en-Artois Memorial commemorates 9,832 names of those who fell in the 1918 advance in Picardy and Artois, between the Somme and Loos. In the cemetery lie over 1,700 British and 582 Canadians who died in the capture of the sector on August 27th 1918. It was 3km along the road that the Canadian Corps broke and turned the German position on September 2nd 1918, the day Charles Bostwick lost his life. He was aged 19.
Charles Edwin Bostwick is also commemorated on the Trinity Congregational Church war memorial which is to be rededicated in the Reading Minster church of St. Mary the Virgin in time for the centenary of the Great War.