Pte 17378 Herbert Hoggarth

Herbert was baptised in St. Nicholas, Liverpool, on 4th February 1894, his parents’ residence given as City Buildings, Old Hall Street, and his father’s occupation joiner.  

 

In 1901 the family is living at 21 Old Hall Street with six children and older half sister Rachel.  His father is a porter/office keeper, working on the premises. Herbert is 7.   Bert attended Old Church Schools, in Moorfields, until he turned 14 in January 1908, when he started work.

 

In 1911 they are at 23 Old Hall Street, his father, 61, and his mother, 50, keep the office buildings, Clementina, 26, and Janet, 24, are at home, Walter is 21, an apprentice cabinet maker, Herbert is 17, an apprentice joiner, Frederick, 14, and George, 11, are at school.

 

Bert enlisted in Liverpool as Private 17378, 19th (Pals) Bn, King’s (Liverpool) Regiment.  As his service record has not survived the details are not known, but based on the amount of the War Gratuity, Bert enlisted in September 1914, soon after war was declared.  After training locally, then at Belton Park in Lincolnshire, and on Salisbury Plain for final infantry training, Bert shipped to France with his battalion on 07th November 1915.

 

At some point, probably near the end of the war (as his pension card shows 19th Bn), Bert was transferred to the 4th Bn K.L.R.  After serving for over four years, and surviving some of the most murderous fighting of the war (the Somme, Passchendaele), Bert died of disease, most likely influenza, on Armistice Day 1918, the day the guns fell silent. He was 24 years old. 

 

The 4th battalion War Diary for 11th November 1918 records:  

“News received that an armistice has been signed with Germany as from 1100 hours. The news was received very quietly in the Battn.”

 

Bert was buried in Terlincthun British Cemetery, near Boulogne at the coast, suggesting that he was to be evacuated to the U.K. The Inscription on his headstone reads:

“SAFE IN THE ARMS OF JESUS”

The first rest camps for Commonwealth forces were established near Terlincthun in August 1914 and during the whole of the First World War, Boulogne and Wimereux housed numerous hospitals and other medical establishments.

The cemetery at Terlincthun was begun in June 1918 when the space available for service burials in the civil cemeteries of Boulogne and Wimereux was exhausted. It was used chiefly for burials from the base hospitals, but Plot IV Row C contains the graves of 46 RAF personnel killed at Marquise in September 1918 in a bombing raid by German aircraft.

In July 1920, the cemetery contained more than 3,300 burials, but for many years Terlincthun remained an 'open' cemetery and graves continued to be brought into it from isolated sites and other burials grounds throughout France where maintenance could not be assured.

During the Second World War, there was heavy fighting in the area in 1940. Wimille was devastated when, from 22 - 25 May, the garrison at Boulogne fought a spirited delaying action covering the withdrawal to Dunkirk. There was some fighting in Wimille again in 1944. The cemetery suffered considerable damage both from the shelling in 1940 and during the German occupation.

The cemetery now contains 4,378 Commonwealth burials of the First World War and more than 200 war graves of other nationalities, most of them German. Second World War burials number 149.

The cemetery was designed by Sir Herbert Baker.

His parents received Bert’s effects, including a War Gratuity of £24-10s.  

His brother Frederick served in the K.L.R. and the Labour Corps.

 

His mother died in 1930 aged 70, and his father in 1934, at the age of 84.

 

Bert is remembered on his parents’ gravestone in Anfield Cemetery: