1530 PRIVATE WILLIAM GEORGE SHEPPARD
‘C’ COMPANY 4TH BATTALION SUFFOLK REGIMENT T.F.
KILLED IN ACTION
20TH JULY 1916
AGE 27 YEARS
William George Shepherd’s birth certificate shows that he was born on 16th June 1890 to his then unmarried mother Florence Sheppard aged eighteen years. At the time of his birth, Florence was registered as an inmate of the Blything Union Workhouse, Bulcamp. Two years after her son’s birth, in the fourth quarter of 1892 Florence married Robert Allen who lived in the nearby village of Blyford. On their marriage, young William, was renamed with his stepfather’s surname, which some time later he reverted to using his mother’s maiden name, for at the time of the 1911 Census, William was to be found with his new wife Isabel (née Driver) who he had married in the fourth quarter of 1910. They were living with Isabel’s widowed father, John, in their small cottage at 78 Chediston Street. William’s occupation was listed as farm labourer. It would have been around this time that he also enlisted to serve in the Halesworth Territorials of ‘F’ Company, 4th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment with the regimental number of 1530 and the rank of a Private soldier. As previously recorded in other stories of the town’s Great War dead, on 31st July 1914 men from all of the companies that made up the 4th Suffolks gathered at Great Yarmouth preparing to carry out their annual two weeks of military training. At that time rumours were rife regarding a possible war against the Kaiser’s Germany and her allies. Within hours of their arrival the political situation became so fraught that all the men of the battalion were ordered to return to their Drill Halls to await further developments. On their arrival, the men were told to go back to their homes with instructions to prepare for a general mobilisation. The order was received at the Company’s Headquarters in the Rifle Hall at midnight on the night of 4th August 1914 when Great Britain declared war against Germany, after they had invaded Belgium. Within hours William, with his Territorial friends, were marching off to war. The first stage of their journey involved them marching to the railway station, led by the town’s band. The residents of the town turned out in force to cheer them on their way, with much back slapping and happy banter. Little could anybody know at that time that this would be the start of four long years of war, in which many of the menfolk of the town, including both those marching and those wishing them well, would lose their lives, in the most costly war in terms of loss of life that the people of Britain would ever fight in. After arriving at Ipswich, the men marched to their Battalion’s headquarters located at Portman Road, where they were briefed that they would shortly be transported to their war station at Felixstowe to prepare defences against possible invasion, this having been the original task of the Territorials on their formation in 1908. However, prior to the declaration of hostilities in 1914 four years earlier, in 1910, it had been decided that if any members of the part-time force wished to do so they could sign what became known as the Imperial Service Commitment, in which they pledged to serve overseas at the time of a national emergency. During the early weeks of the war the Regular Army troops, who had been rushed to the Continent to form the British Expeditionary Force with their Belgium and French allies, had suffered several defeats that became known as the retreat from Mons. It was during these fast-moving actions that the Regular Army suffered massive losses in both men and equipment. It was now that the previously much maligned troops of the Territorial Force were asked to step forward to help in the task of bringing the German’s advance to a halt. This they did in their hundreds. By the end of 1914 no less than twenty-three Territorial Battalions of infantry, including the 4th Suffolks, with numerous batteries of artillery etc., were helping to defend the allie’s front line, while other part-time battalions were being sent to the four corners of the Empire to release regular troops to return to Britain before they crossed to France. Through all of this excitement, William, who had volunteered to cross with his battalion, had been held back due to an unknown medical condition. This may have been seen as a blessing by his wife Isabel as, in the four years since their marriage and her husband’s enlisting in the Territorials, she had given birth to three children. In August 1914 they were all under the age of three years. After his chums of the now titled 1st/4th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment crossed to France in November 1914, William remained with the second-line troops of the 2nd/4th Suffolks, where he received further training and possibly assisted in training new recruits at both Colchester, Essex, and Tring in Hertfordshire. William’s medical condition must have improved or been resolved by the early months of 1916. His original battalion were now in desperate need of casualty replacements and his individual soldier’s service records show that he had joined a draft of Suffolk soldiers who landed at the French port of Rouen on 23rd January 1916. After a few days of administration he, with another two hundred and thirteen other ranks and two commissioned officers, travelled to join the 4th Suffolks in early February, William then being posted to serve with some of his Halesworth chums in ‘C’ Company. At the time the battalion was reinforced they were under the command of the 46th Brigade of the 15th Division. Just a few days later they were transferred to the 33rd Division with whom the 4th Suffolks would stay for the following two years. Over the months that followed William must have settled down to a life at the front, with all of its hours of boredom and a few of excitement. One occasion recorded in the Regiment’s History of the Great War, published in 1928, relates to a trench raid carried out by his own ‘C’ Company in mid-May 1916 during which men of his company, possibly including William, attacked a section of the German front line. After breaching the enemy’s defensive barbed wire obstacles they then became involved in bloody hand- to-hand fighting on the Germans’ trench parapet. It is believed that, after the recall had been given, the majority of the ‘C’ Company men made it safely back to their own line. On the day of William’s death on 20th July 1916, the 4th Suffolks had recently become involved in the tragedy that would become the Battle of the Somme, where on the first day of the battle, 1st July 1916, British regiments suffered losses of almost twenty thousand men killed on that one day. In the early morning of the 20th William, with his battalion, were in the front-line trenches in the area of Bazentin-le-Petit, when at 7am they had received orders to support an attack on the German positions located in High Wood. It would have been during the ensuing battle that William, with another thirty-three men of the 4th Suffolks, lost their lives. Included in that number was another local man, Bertie Clarke, who had hailed from the village of Rumburgh, though by 1916 his father Walter was living in Holton Road, Halesworth. Sadly, as with many thousands of men who lost their lives during the Somme battles, neither William’s nor Bertie’s remains were ever identified. Both are remembered today, with another seventy-two thousand, one hundred and seventy-five men, on the Thiepval Memorial to the missing (see below).
On hearing of her loss, Isabel, who had remained living in the small cottage in Chediston Street, applied for a widow’s pension for herself and three children which she received from 1st February 1917 in the sum of £1.0s.6d (£1.02p) per week. In August 1919 she also received the second of two gratuity payments totalling £9.17s.9d (£9.89p). As with all the others, she would have been able to claim William’s medal entitlement of the British War and Victory medal pair with his named memorial plaque and scroll.
The location of his medals and scroll is unknown but William’s plaque has been placed by his family in the safe keeping of the Halesworth and District Museum.
William’s name on the Thiepval Memorial