James Rupert Butler





Totteridge Common (picture from SWOP website)

Memorial to James Rupert Butler in High Wycombe Cemetery





James Rupert Butler 1882 - 1918

Compared to some of the boys I served with, I was quite old when I died; thirty-six years of age. Most of those thirty-six years were spent in High Wycombe, or Totteridge to be precise, where I was born in 1882. I lived with my father, Richard, my mother, Fanny and six brothers and sisters. We all lived at 1 Milton Terrace. It was certainly a bit of a squeeze! The address still exists, but the house is long gone.

My father Richard worked with chairs, just as many others did. He was a chair polisher, and good at it too. I followed him into the chair factories; by the time I was nineteen I was a cabinet and chair framer, and ten years later I was working as a machinist. Shortly before the war, however, I left to become a ‘turf accountant’. It sounds exotic, but just means that I was a bookie, working the horse races and the football; I had a head for numbers.

When the war started I, like many others, joined up. Where many ended up as infantrymen in the Ox and Bucks, being good at arithmetic led to me being a gunner with the artillery. More specifically, I was a gunner in the 139th Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. We were a bit further back from the frontline than the Royal Field and Royal Horse Artillery, and much further back than the infantrymen, something they liked to remind us of. However, my death shows that we were not necessarily any safer.

In the RGA we were responsible for the big guns; our battery had six of the huge 60lbers, so big that they had to be moved by a team of eight horses. We would set up around six or seven miles behind the frontlines and fire. Sometimes we would pummel the German trenches, killing whoever we could and destroying their wire; at other times we would try to take out their artillery. We might not have been in the trenches, but we certainly played a war-winning role.

In August 1918 we were fighting over the same ground that we had been two years earlier; the Germans had carried out a huge attack in the Spring, pushing us back almost to where we started. They wore themselves out in the process, and we managed to regain lost ground in battle after vicious battle. By August, we were preparing to launch the Second Battle of the Somme. The 139th Battery was attached to the III Corps of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army. During the battle we were to help the 47th London Division and the Australians off to their side as they pushed east. Our guns were set up just off the road to Henencourt, just outside the town of Warloy-Baillon. The place had been levelled, but I think that we were based in the old cemetery.

The Third Battle of Albert began on 21st August 1918. Whereas other guns laid down the ‘creeping barrage’, behind which the 47th followed, our task was to take out the railway at Fricourt, to stop German reinforcements and supplies from being brought up. After that, we were to engage in counter-battery fire, taking out the German big guns. We did not know it at the time, but the enemy was expecting the attack, and their artillery had zeroed in on Warloy-Baillon. As with any artillery death, I did not hear the shell that got me. I imagine it started its journey many miles away, and that the person who loaded it did not know that they had scored a hit, but they got me all the same. I was buried in Warloy-Baillon with lots of the Australians whose attack we had helped to make possible.

In the end, Albert was captured, and the Germans broke, falling back further and further until in November they capitulated. My war ended, however, on 23rd August 1918. I was thirty-six years old.



Researched by Neill George, Gill Evans, and the girls of Wycombe Abbey School

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