My name is Charles Henry Jefferson. I was born in 1899 to Charles and Emily E Jefferson in Hollinwell, Oxfordshire, but I lived at Alexandra Road, Pinions, High Wycombe for most of my life. I did not have a job before the war, but my parents were carpenters and joiners.
I was a member of the Wycombe Church Lads Brigade at St. John's Church on Desborough Road. They encouraged teamwork and leadership qualities, and many boys from the Wycombe CLB enlisted into the army.
I joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in 1915 at the age of 16, and my number was 1398. We landed at Le Havre, in France, as part of the 100th Brigade in the 33rd Division on November 1915 for service on the Western Front, and joined the fighting in January 1916 as part of the 16th Battalion. We moved all over the area between Saleux, Morlancourt and Becordel-Becourt but I was injured in the Somme in late July of that year, after we arrived on the 9th of July. I was sent home on injury leave, but I was back to the fighting by the end of August and continued to fight on the Western Front all the way into 1917.
In September 1917 I was killed in action, fighting on the Western Front in Belgium on the last day of the battle of the Menin Road Ridge. I was 19. In the end it was a British victory, but many lives, including my own, were lost. I am commemorated at Tyne Cot Memorial in Belgium along with another 12,000 casualties of WW1.
Researched by James Box, John Hampden Grammar School
