Henry Gordon Buckeridge, known as Gordon to the family, was born in 1890 in Hungerford in Berkshire, officially to Henry George and Miriam Elvina Buckeridge, however according to his birth certificate he was born 11 months after the death of his father. It may have been that due to mourning Miriam registered the birth late or it may have been that he had a different father. He was the youngest of three, with an older brother George and older sister Blanche.

He became a journalist, and by the time of the First World War the family were living at 86 Stanley Road, West Croyden, Surrey.

During the Great War Gordon enlisted as a Kitchener volunteer and was assigned to the Machine Gun Corps as Private Buckeridge, Henry Gordon; Service Number 45586, 61st Company MGC.

The 61st Company were formed at Grantham, where the Machine Gun Corps school had been established at Belton Park, in 1915 just after the foundation of the MGC, and was made up of the second wave of Kitchener volunteers, this was before conscription came in. MGC companies were attached to Infantry Battalions to form an extra company. The 61st Company was attached to the 61st Battalion (hence the name), which was part of the 20th (Light) Division. 61st Company MGC was sent to join their Battalion in France on 3rd March 1916.

Gordon's Division, the 20th, was originally commanded by a New Zealander named Major-General Richard Hutton Davies, who had fought at Mons and through 1914 and 15. He was the first Kiwi to command a British Army Division but handed over command just after they arrived in France due to mental ill health. He was appointed to command a reserve training centre at Cannock Chase but committed suicide on 9th May 1918 at the Special Neurological Hospital for Officers in Kensington. He was replaced as commander of the 20th Division by Major-General Sir William Douglas Smith.

Harry Patch - the last living Tommie to have fought in the trenches - was also part of the 61st Battalion, 20th Division, but joined after Gordon was killed. Harry Patch was with the 61st when they fought at the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres) between July and November 1917.

We know Gordon was shot at the end of September or beginning of October and evacuated to Rouen in the rear, where he died of his wounds on 13th October 1916, so I looked up what was going on at the time on the Western Front. This was the end stage of the Battle of the Somme that had begun on 1st July 1916.The Battle of the Somme wasn't a single battle but rather a series of smaller battles and offensives in the Somme valley throughout the summer and autumn of 1916. The 20th Division didn't take part in the horrifically infamous First Day, but was engaged in the Somme offensive throughout the summer, fighting in the Battle of Delville Wood (15th July - 3rd September), the Battle of Guillemont (3rd - 9th September), the Battle of Flers-Courcellette (15th - 21st September), Battle of Morval (25th - 28th September) and the Battle of Le Transloy (1st - 18th October) which was one of the last battles of the Somme campaign before it ground to a halt with the winter weather in November.

Knowing Gordon died on 13th October of his wounds, and with the information that Mom thought family lore says he survived for about a week after being shot in the side of the head and mortally wounded before dying in the hospital at Rouen, I looked into what his unit was doing during the end of September and beginning of October 1916.

Between the 15th and 21st September the 20th Division was holding the line during the Battle of Flers-Courcellette, also referred to as the Third Stage of the Battle of the Somme, which was an attempt to capture a series of villages and ridges in the Sommes valley. Flers-Courcellette is known as the battle in which for the first time tanks were used - a grand total of 49 were deployed, representing every tank then in existence on the planet. Flers-Courcellette was also the first deployment of Canadian and New Zealand troops on the Western Front during World War One. On the night of 20th/21st September the 20th Division was relieved, taking no part in the Battle of Thiepval Ridge which followed in the same offensive.

However a third attack in the same area, named the Battle of Morval, and designed to achieve the original territorial objectives of Flers-Courcellette, was launched on 25th September and during that the remains of the 20th Division, along with the remains of the 6th, went back into the line between 28th and 30th September to relieve the heavily depleted 56th Division until the French 6th Army could take over.

These three attacks were then followed by a fourth, known as the Battle of Le Transloy. The 61st Battalion joined the battle on 7th October and formed the left flank of the advance of the 20th Division, east of a village called Gueudecourt, which had been seized during the Battle of Morval. They captured a section of German defences known as Rainbow Trench and continued to advanced around 350 yards to occupy the south-east corner of another German defensive position known as Cloudy Trench. There they dug in, repulsing a German counter-attack at around 5pm which lasted for around an hour. Overnight on 7th/8th October heavy rain set in and under its cover casualties were removed to the rear. Between 8th and 11th October the 20th Division was gradually relieved in the line by units of the 4th Division. The 20th Division was heavily depleted and took no further part in the battle after 11th October.

Given the above, although he may have been hit during Fers-Courcellette or Morval, its most likely that Gordon was shot during the Battle of Le Transloy sometime between 5 and 6pm on 7th October near either Cloudy Trench or Rainbow Trench, and evacuated on the night of 7th/8th October. At this stage of the war the MGC gunners were deployed either as part of lines of riflemen or in the open, in front of the trenches and protected by nothing more than sandbags, and used predominantly as defensive weapons. Because of this they suffered casualty rates of over 30% and gained the nickname "The Suicide Club". Later in the war machine gun tactics came to mirror artillery tactics, being deployed in the rear and using trigonometry to fire on targets up to 2.5 miles away. But it seems to me from this that Gordon was probably hit whilst manning a machine gun post hastily assembled to defend the newly taken positions during the German counter-attack in the late afternoon of 7th October - which would fit in with the family story Mom heard that he survived for about a week before dying of his wounds on 13th October having been evacuated.

 

 

^ Map of the Battle of Le Transloy during during 7th October 1916. The starting position of the 61st Brigade, including Gordon, can be seen on the left-hand side of the advance, to the right of the village of Gueudecourt. Rainbow Trench is marked with the yellow dots, and Cloudy Trench is marked with red dots. The lines of dots and dashes mark the area of the assault and the white dots/circles show the amount of land taken in the first attack (Rainbow Trench) and the second attack (taking in a short stretch of Cloudy Trench). Gordon was most likely shot and mortally wounded somewhere in the area marked out between the two rows of white dots.

 

What we do know is that after he was shot Gordon was evacuated back to the main 4th Army base at Rouen to one of the several military hospitals there, where he succumbed to his wounds - Mom thinks she remembers being told that his mother Miriam and sister Blanche had been notified and rushed to France but were too late to see him in his final moments, although they were there when he was buried at St Severs cemetery in Rouen, alongside 8,347 other British and Commonwealth soldiers. The exact plot is included on the certificate I sent round earlier.

The four battles together (Flers-Courcellette, Morval, Thiepval Ridge and Le Transloy) advanced the allied lines by about 4,000 yards, with British and Commonwealth casualties at an estimated figure of 104,598. Le Transloy was the bloodiest and most pointless – almost no ground was gained and British and Commonwealth casualties were 57,722.

In these four battles, for each man killed, the British lines advanced 1.38 inches - about the length of a little finger. The level of German casualties during the same battles is unknown, but German casualties for the Somme region in September and October of 1916 were approximately 213,500 and many of those will have been during those battles.

Luke Davies