E V Bates and brothers
The Bates Brothers
My name is Edward Victor Bates and this here is my resting place. Under my name is not a cross, like you see on most of the other Commonwealth war graves, but
the names of my two brothers who also died in the war but in different places and were unable to be buried here.
So let me tell you my story: My father was called William George Bates and my mother Emma. I had five other brothers and sisters so you can imagine our house
was very full! We lived on West Wycombe Road; the house is still there, just beyond the White Horse pub. There was my oldest brother Reuben, then my sister Rose,
then Arthur William who we all just called William, Annie, then my brother Gilbert, and finally me the baby of the family. We weren’t much different to others in
High Wycombe in the early 1900s.
By 1911 it was just Gilbert and me living at home with my mother and father. Reuben had got married and was living just round the corner with his wife Kate and
his young son, Clifford. My two sisters were earning a living in domestic service and finally my brother William had joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire
Light Infantry in 1905. My Father was a chair maker which was a very common occupation in High Wycombe, my mother was the unsung hero of the household doing all
the jobs us boys didn’t want to do. Both Gilbert and I also went into the local chair trade when we left school; in 1911 when I was only 13 I was already an
errand boy at the factory and Gilbert was a machinist in the same factory.
When the war broke out William was already in the army, in fact he was a sergeant, and he was deployed in Mesopotamia, or Iraq as it’s called today, with the 1st
Battalion of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry to fight the Turks. He was told he was there to protect India. At first we heard they were successful and had taken
Basra and were heading for Baghdad. This is when it went wrong and the army retreated to a place called Kut and were then besieged by the Turks. The siege is now
largely forgotten but should, even by the grim standards of the First World War, be a byword for the terrible suffering inflicted on British soldiers by the incompetence,
arrogance and ignorance of their commanders. The officer in charge, General Townshend, forbade his troops from sending messages to their families so we didn’t hear much
more from William. The army finally surrendered at the end of April 1916. The tragedy did not end with Townshend’s surrender. He went off to comfortable captivity
on an island, showing more concern for the fate of his dog Spot than for the soldiers he left behind. Few officers stayed with their men, whom the Turks sent
on a 1,300-mile forced march from Kut to Turkey. The soldiers died in their thousands of starvation, thirst, mistreatment and execution as well as diseases
like typhus and cholera. My brother was amongst them as he died on September 24th 1916. He is buried at Baghdad North Gate war cemetery. This cemetery was
well maintained until Britain joined the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it became too dangerous to water the grass between the tombstones which became burned
brown by the scorching sun. In Iraq are buried the remains of some 40,000 British and Indian soldiers killed in 1914-18.
Reuben, my oldest brother, was the only survivor of the war out of the four of us. He fought in France to start with, but he had club feet and could not walk very far.
He was then put into the HSLC or the Home Service Labour Corps in England but he really struggled with his feet and before long he was completely discharged as unfit
for service.
Gilbert joined the same regiment as William: the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and was put into the fifth battalion and was sent to France in 1915.
He first saw action in the Battle of Hooge, which is near Ieper, where the battalion had the misfortune to be the first to be attacked by flamethrower. They then
moved to the Somme ready for the big push. The battalion were involved in the battle for Delville Wood along with many South Africa units. He died during the main
attack on Delville Wood on the 24th August 1916. His body was never identified and his name is on the Thiepval Memorial (170 men from the Battalion became casualties
that day).
So what about me? When war broke out in 1914 I was only 16, I was not yet needed to fight. When I left school I got a job with the local railway company, Grand
Central Railways, who had fairly recently opened a line from Wycombe into London. Although I was working I’d suffered with my health for a number of years; in
particular it seemed like I always had a cough. This didn’t stop me signing up in 1916; I’d moved to Willesden by this point and I signed up into the Royal Sussex
Regiment. I spent almost a year in England before being allocated to the 16th Battalion which was being sent to Egypt. I arrived in Alexandria in August 1918 and
joined the battalion who had been there since January. We were based near Gaza and things had reached stalemate with the Turks; we were in and out of trenches
most of the time. Many people did not understand why we were there. Most people were either interested in the Western Front as it was closer to home, or the
Mesopotamian campaign which my brother William was involved in, as that was trying to protect India. Interestingly the effects of this campaign have been long-lasting
as it resulted in the creation of countries such as Syria, Lebanon and Iraq and even ultimately Israel.
I didn’t spend long in Egypt as my cough got worse; I was coughing up blood and had lost a lot of weight, so after not much more than a month abroad I was sent
back to England. I was evacuated to a hospital in Birmingham where they found tuberculosis in my phlegm. Although I was sent home to my mother in West Wycombe Road
I never really recovered and died from the disease on August 14th 1920. As it was considered that my condition had been made worse by the war I was given a military
burial and that is why you see me here.
So that’s our story and how I hope this explains why my headstone here in High Wycombe contains not only my name but also the name of two of my brothers.
Researched and performed by Josh Matovu
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