Totteridge Road Infant School (picture from SWOP website)
Memorial to George Hobbs Pierce, High Wycombe Cemetery
George Hobbs Pierce 1889 - 1916
My name is George Hobbs Pierce. I am the son of Thomas White Pierce and Emily Pierce nee Hobbs. My parents married in 1880. We lived in Totteridge Road, High Wycombe. My father had a mixture of employment. He’d been an insurance agent, then an auxillary postman and then, later still, he became a chair maker's machinist.
I had 10 siblings altogether but two had died by 1911. By this time I was aged 22 and I was a Private in the army at Cheriton Kent. I was already a regular soldier. During the Great War I was with the 1st Battalion of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry and my service number was 9208. We were sent to Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq, and it felt a very long way from home.
Thousands of British troops were being sent to Mesopotamia at the time, following the late Ottoman Empire's entry into the war in 1914. Britain was desperate to protect its oil supplies in the region.
By November 1915, under the control of General Charles Townshend, a unit of around 10,000 British troops advanced 250 miles to the town of Kut al-Amara where they suffered one of the British Army's worst defeats in the First World War, at the battle which took place there. Our army met with fierce and continuous offensives from the Turks, under the leadership of senior commander Halil Pasha, which soon exhausted the British forces.
Food supplies dwindled by December as the Ottomans had the town under siege, causing widespread panic among our soldiers.
At the beginning of January 1916, General Sir John Nixon dispatched relief forces, one under Lieutenant-General Sir Fenton Aylmer to relieve the British troops.
In fact Britain sent a total of two Indian divisions to Kut al-Amara but the relief forces were devastated, with over 23,000 casualties, as they were met by the relentless Ottomans.
The British forces made several attempts, between January and March 1916, to lift the siege of Kut al-Amara; all of which were unsuccessful. During the six-month siege we British troops experienced starvation, a lack of ammunition and widespread disease, all of which led to our eventual surrender in April 1916.
It was the last battle that the Ottoman army ever won and I, along with many others, was taken prisoner by the Turks.
Sadly, my parents received a letter from the War Office dated May 12th 1917 (and which also enclosed their letters to me, returned from Turkey) stating that I was likely to have died as a POW but that the War Office was still awaiting confirmation. My poor parents had been aware that I had been captured some time before but now it would appear that their worst fears had been realised and that I had died whilst in captivity.
I had actually died on the 30th August 1916 - aged 27 - and I am Buried at Baghdad (North Gate) War Cemetery.
Researched by Margaret Anderton, Flackwell Local Area History Group and Sally Scagell, Lost the Plot.
