My name is Gilbert Frank Youers. I was born in 1892 and we lived at Abercromby Avenue – at number 22 to be precise. My parents Thomas and Clara had already had their share of misfortune as two of my siblings had already died before they lost me.
We were a furniture family. I was a chair maker and my father and my older brother Percy were French Polishers.
Several of us Youers joined up and my cousin Willie was also killed. My brother William was fighting out in Salonika and my brother Percy had been sent to France, like me. It must have been a very hard time for my parents and my aunts and uncles whilst they waited for news of their boys at the Front.
I had worked for Messrs Large and Son of Jubilee Road before I joined the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry and enlisted in Aylesbury. I was to become Private 4292 and 266659 Ox and Bucks Light Infantry 2/1st Bucks Battalion. I had been serving in France for 16 months before my death and had been looking forward to some well-earned leave as we’d been in the thick of it.
Early in 1916, the 2nd Battalion was moved to the area of Vimy Ridge and Notre de Lorette, in relief of the French troops required for the defence of Verdun. It then moved south to the Somme battle of July 1916 attacking from Delville Wood on 30th July. We then took part in the battle on the Ancre heights where we attacked the enemy trenches north of Beaumont Hamel on 13th November. On each occasion our losses were heavy in both officers and men.
We then had a period of rest and training near the historic forest of Crecy and the Christmas of 1916 was spent under something approaching peacetime conditions. However, in January 1917 the Battalion returned to the scene of the earlier Somme fighting the previous July, and for many weeks held a line of posts on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road in every kind of discomfort. We suffered very severe winter weather with little protection from shell-fire and none from the wet and cold, and with only such cooking in the forward posts as was possible with a short allowance of solidified alcohol. As a result the health of the Battalion, usually excellent, became impaired and, owing to the difficulty of carrying out the prescribed treatment of the feet with oil, many men were compelled to go sick from frostbite and ‘trench feet’.
In March 1917, when the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line, the Battalion was engaged in the pursuit and was present at the capture of Bapaume on the 17th March before being withdrawn to take part in the Battle of Arras. Here it was in support for the fighting about Vimy, on 13th April, and at Gavrelle or the Scarpe on 28th April. After this, we were re-organised as a provisional battalion to hold the captured ground after the Battalion had been relieved.
The summer of 1917 was spent in the neighbourhood of Bethune and the trenches south of the Bethune-La Bassee road and it was probably here that I was killed on 11th September 1917. I was hit by a shell whilst serving on the front line and killed instantly. I was 25. I was buried near where I fell and a cross was placed on my grave. My family placed this plaque here, on the family grave in Wycombe Cemetery, so that my sacrifice would not be forgotten.
