Cemetery Lodge, Wycombe Cemetery (picture from SWOP website)
Eric George Kempster's inscription, High Wycombe Cemetery
Eric George Kempster 1898 - 1916
Hello, my name is Eric George Kempster and I was born in 1898. We lived in the Weston Turville area so I wasn't a Wycombe lad but my grandparents lived in Easton Street, High Wycombe, at one time. My father George Kempster married Gertrude Martha Rootham in 1893 - but in the district of Bedford. My father kept a baker's shop in Chiswick, and was following in the footsteps of his own father who was also a baker and confectioner. Later, my parents set up home at 80 Lonsdale Road, Barnes, Surrey and my father became a malt extractor manufacturer's manager. By now my parents had five children, three sons and two daughters, and so they had a busy home.
When the Great War began I was too young to fight but I couldn't wait and eventually I enlisted in Shepherds Bush and joined the 16th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. I became Private PS/2329 and after my training I was sent to France. I was still only 18 when I met my death. My battalion had been sent to the Front to take part in the Battle of the Somme and I was killed in action on the very first day - 1st July 1916.
The Battle of the Somme, also known as the Somme Offensive, took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 on both sides of the upper reaches of the River Somme in France. The battle was intended to hasten a victory for the Allies and was the largest battle of the First World War on the Western Front. More than three million men fought in the battle and one million men were wounded or killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles in human history. Trench warfare gave the Germans an advantage because they dug their trenches deeper than the Allied forces which gave them a better line of sight for warfare.
The Somme offensive had been planned as a Franco-British campagn against the Germans and initial plans had called for the French army to undertake the main part of the Somme offensive with the British in a supporting role but when the Imperial German Army began the Battle of Verdun on the Meuse on 21 February 1916, French commanders diverted many of the divisions intended for the Somme and the "supporting" attack by the British became the principal effort. The British troops on the Somme comprised a mixture of the remains of the pre-war regular army; the Territorial Force; and Kitchener's Army, a force of volunteer recruits including many Pals' Battalions, recruited from the same places and occupations.
Although the first day on the Somme saw a serious defeat for the German Second Army, it was, in terms of casualties, also the worst day in the history of the British army, which suffered 57,470 casualties. These occurred mainly on the front between the Albert–Bapaume road and Gommecourt, where the attack was defeated and few British troops reached the German front line. Debate continues over the necessity, significance and effect of the battle.
Sadly I was not around to hear the concerns and later criticisms of the Battle of the Somme. I became one of the dead. I am remembered on the Thriepval Memorial, Somme, on the Weston Turville Memorial, and on my grandparents' grave here in Wycombe Cemetery.
Researched by Margaret Anderton, Flackwell Local Area History Group and Sally Scagell, Lost the Plot
