Pte 23814 Gwilym Roberts

At the time of the 1901 Census Gwilym and his mother are living in Llandynan Cottages, Llantysilio, with his widowed grandfather, Henry Roberts, 60, a slate quarryman, and his aunt Annie Roberts, 15, no occupation listed. His mother is 30, occupation house keeper, and Gwilym is 6 (birthplace Llantysilio).

 

By the time of the 1911 Census they have moved to Berwyn View, Llantysilio.  His mother Hannah, 40, is head of household, working as a school cleaner, his aunt Annie Roberts, 25, is a teacher. Gwilym is 16, a draper’s shop assistant.  They all give their birthplace as Llandynan and speak both English and Welsh.

 

He enlisted in Liverpool joining the 20th Battalion of The King's Liverpool Regiment as Private 23814. The amount of the War Gratuity and his regimental number suggest that he enlisted in November 1914.
He was killed in action on Easter Monday the 09th April 1917, aged 23. This was the opening day of the Battle of Arras.

17^th,  19^th & 20th  Battalion at the  Battle of Arras 09^th April 1917

Everard Wyrall records the events of the day  in Volume 2 of his History of the King's Regiment (Liverpool).

The 89^th Brigade formed up for the attack with the 19^th King's on the right and the 20^th King’s on the left. The 17^th King’s supplied the “mopping up" parties and he 2nd Bedfords were in close support.

It was just after 3pm when the advance began “According to scheduled time the waves advanced in good style and with determination; everyone was cheerful and in the best of spirits”

That advance is described by others as magnificent. From the OP’s the observing officers saw a wonderful sight – long lines of men advancing steadily up a long and gradual slope towards the enemy’ front line. Then suddenly they disappeared. The observers quite pardonably, imagined that the German front line had fallen into the hands of the assaulting troops and that the latter were on the way to the enemy’s support line. Alas something very different had happened. When the advancing troops had reached the summit of the long slope up which they advanced the ground suddenly dipped before the German front line , and when the observing officers thought they  were already in the Bosche lines they had not, as a matter of fact, even reached the wire. What the observers took to be the front line was really the support line; the front line could not be seen  - it lay just behind the crest of that slight rise in the ground.

The attacking waves of the 19^th King’s got within 100 yards of the German wire but were then held up. They were faced by three belts of entanglements, practically untouched by our artillery, and nothing could be done but to dig in or else take shelter in the many shell- shell-with which “No Man’s Land" was pitted. By this time the battalion’s losses were very heavy, and when darkness fell “A" and “B" Companies (about 140 in all) lay in shell-holes, two or three hundred yards north east of St. Martin, but just south of the Cojeul River, and “C" and “D" Companies (140 all ranks) were along the river bank, but on the northern side about 150 yards north east of St. Martin.

The first waves of the 20^th King’ advanced at 3.7pm. At 4pm Lieut Beaumont, commanding “A" Company, reported that he had had some forty casualties in passing through the enemy’s barrage. The next message, timed 4.40pm, stated that the position of the battalion at that period was on a crest in front of the enemy’s wire and about 100 yards from it. On the right the 21^st Division was observed to have penetrated the enemy’s front line, but in the left the right Battalion of the 21^st Brigade (the Wilts) was on the St. Martin- Neuville Vitasse road; the left flank of the 20^th King's was, therefore, “ in the air”.

Urgent messages were sent up from Battalion Headquarters to “push on, keeping in touch with right” But little else could be accomplished until those formidable belts of wire had been cut sufficiently to allow the rapid passage of the attacking troops, headed by their bombers.

At 9:30 that night 89^th Brigade Headquarters ordered both the 19^th and 20^th Battalions to withdraw, the former to the two sunken roads running south east from St. Martin, the latter to north west of St. Martin; the guns had been ordered to cut the enemy’s wire during the night in preparation for another attack during the 10^th April.

Of the 17^th King’s  - the “moppers up" – there is little to relate. There was nothing to “mop up" so that they did not function. Yet they had shared all the perils of the advance, and when  after they had fallen back and at midnight held the following positions, “B", “C", and “D" Companies in and around the sunken road north of Boiry-Becquerelle and “A" Company in trenches west of Henin, they lost 2 officers and 16 other ranks killed, and 3 officers and 48 other ranks wounded.

Gwilym now rests at Henin Crucifix Cemetery in France at plot A.51 where his headstone bears the epitaph:

"BERWYN VIEW LLANTYSILIO, LLANGOLLEN"

This is the address that he was living at with his mother. There were various spellings of his name but we have used Gwilym as this is the name with which he is commemorated on the War Memorial at Llanysilio.

Henin-sur-Cojeul was captured on 02nd April 1917, lost in March 1918 after an obstinate resistance by the 40th Division, and retaken on 24 August 1918 by the 52nd (Lowland) Division.

Henin Crucifix Cemetery is named from a calvary standing on the opposite side of the road. It was made by units of the 30th Division after the capture of the village in 1917.

Henin Crucifix Cemetery contains 61 burials and commemorations of the First World War. Two of the burials are unidentified and eight graves, destroyed in later fighting, are now represented by special memorials.

The cemetery was designed by G H Goldsmith.

This cemetery, five miles southeast of Arras, contains 61 WW1 burials and commemorations.  Of the 59 identified burials, over half, 33, are from the King’s Liverpool Regiment, all but one of whom are Liverpool Pals.

 

CWGC gives his age as 23, but the birth record and census ages suggest he was 22 (i.e., in his 23rd year).

 

 

Gwilym earned his three medals.

 

His Army effects and a War Gratuity of £11 went to his mother, who was awarded a pension of 5/- a week from July 1920.  The reason for the long delay in awarding the pension is not known.  (There was no delay is establishing his death, as Gwilym’s name appeared in the list of K.L.R. Killed published in the Liverpool Daily Post & Mercury on 16th May 1917.)

 

A family tree on Ancestry confirms Gwilym was the illegitimate son of Hannah Roberts who was born in Llandysan, Llangollen on the the 07th August 1870. She married widower David Roberts in 1913 and they had a daughter Annie Ethelwyn the following year. Hannah died aged 96 in the March quarter of 1967 in Wrexham.

Hannah, dob 7th Aug 1870, appears on the 1939 register still at Berwyn View, she is widowed and living with step-son William Roberts, dob 28th Aug 1892.

 

Gwilym is commemorated on the following memorials:

Llantysilio School Memorial 

Llantysilio Church Plaque

Llangollen War Memorial