8355 Company Sergeant Major John William Beeby Gale (known as Bill Gale) was a patient at Beechland House in August 1916 after being wounded at Trones Wood during the Somme battles.  His entry in Nurse Oliver’s album is a combination of factual detail and popular verse of the time:

 

No 8355 Company Sergt Major

W. Gale 2nd Bedf Regt

Late of the fighting 7th Division

 

wounded 1914 & again 11th July 1916

right of the British lines Thrones [sic] Wood

 

Leaves may wither and

Flowers may die

Friends may forget you

But never will I

                                                           

Love is like a mutton chop

Sometimes cold & sometimes Hot

But when it is left a bit to long

Sometimes gets a bit too strong

                                                           

Excuse the writing

Blame the Pen

And spell the words

ye Dinna ken

                                                           

1st August 1916

 

He is probably the John William B Gale who was born at Nutfield, Surrey and whose birth was registered at Reigate district in the September quarter of 1891.  He appears on the 1901 census living at The Cedars, Nutfield.  The household comprised: Percy Gale (head, married, aged 50, working as a wholesale druggist), his wife Margaret A Gale (aged 46) and their five children: Percy Aubrey P Gale (aged 21, assisting his father as a druggist), Alfred D A Gale (aged 20, also assisting his father), Barbara Gladys Gale and Madge Gwendoline Gale (fourteen year old twins) and John (aged nine).  The family was obviously quite well-to-do and Percy Gale also employed three servants: a cook, a nursemaid and a stable lad.

 

Bill Gale was certainly a regular soldier.  In 1912, at that stage a Lance-Corporal and serving with A Company, he is listed in the regimental magazine, The Wasp, as a contributor to the 2nd Battalion benevolent fund.  His number, 8355, indicates an enlistment date of late October 1905.

 

When war was declared, the 2nd Bedfordshire Regiment was stationed in Pretoria, South Africa but by September 19th the battalion was docking at Southampton after a three week sea voyage and preparing to move off to camp at Lyndhurst.  Assigned to the 21st Brigade, 7th Division, the men were almost immediately sent out to France.

 

Bill Gale’s 1914 Star medal entry shows that at this stage he was a lance-sergeant.  The date and circumstances of this wound are unclear but by the time he was back with the battalion and fighting on the Somme, there had been some changes in the composition of the 7th Division.

 

Learning the lesson of the Battle of Loos, when poor leadership and inexperience had caused the 21st and 24th Divisions to be held too far back before being rushed unprepared into an attack, the Army had decided that radical changes needed to be made to the composition of the newly forming divisions.  Wherever possible, brigades of inexperienced troops would be swapped with brigades of regular troops already serving in France.  The latter would provide the new divisions with support, encouragement and above all, solid experience of soldiering.  As part of this exchange process, in December 1915 the 7th Division’s 21st Brigade was assigned to the 30th Division, its four battalions of regular soldiers being mixed in with the Pals battalions.  The Bedfordshire’s new brigade was the 89th and they shared it with Kitchener volunteers from the 17th, 19th and 20th King’s Liverpool Regiment.

 

The 2nd Bedfords played a supporting role on 1st July 1916, following the 17th and 20th King’s as they moved through cut barbed wire to take their objectives as planned.  The other brigades had also enjoyed similar successes and by the end of the day the division had taken all of its objectives and could claim the distinction of having captured the first three field guns of the battle as well as Montauban, the first village to fall. 

 

On 10th July, orders were received that the 2nd Bedfords would attack Trones Wood the following day.  Having taken Bernafay Wood almost without a struggle, Trones Wood was proving a much tougher nut to crack.  Initial attacks on 8th July by battalions from the 21st Brigade had successfully established a foothold on the south eastern edge of the wood, but subsequent attacks had either failed or been met by stubborn resistance in a see-saw series of engagements which saw portions of Trones Wood switch from German to English control and then back to German. By the time William Gale and The Bedfords moved up to play their part in the action, the wood was still largely in German hands.

 

Despite the intensity of artillery and machine gun fire concentrated in the area over the previous three days, Trones Wood was still thick with undergrowth that made it difficult to see more than four yards in front.  Into this tangle, the Bedfords had advanced at 3:10am, getting to within 400 yards of the south eastern edge of the wood before being spotted by German machine gunners.  Thirty five minutes later they had managed to reach the southern end but not without sustaining many casualties on the way in.  Two decades later, in a letter published in The Great War I Was There, Private E G Robinson, also of A Company, wrote:

 

“The first thing that greeted me was a pair of legs, but no body, cut off as clean as with a knife. Farther in, the dead lay in heaps, you couldn’t move without stepping on them… The wood was very dense so we could not see far ahead.  We struck off towards the edge of the wood and we came to a clearing where we could see a trench and it was lousy with Germans.  At this point we lost touch with the officer and never found what happened to him so we returned to the main body and reported… The branches of trees were flying about as bad as shells and bullets.  We were troubled quite a lot by snipers who were up in the trees at the far end of the wood.  Captain Tyler said we had better try to drive them out, so he took our platoon forward with that idea.  But Jerry had other ideas, and promptly let loose hell: we dived from one tree to another, and the bullets were cutting the leaves and bark round our ears… Eventually we got back to our funk holes with the remainder of the Company.  There was no rest of any sort, what with bombing, sniping, machine guns, shells, wounded and dying screaming, the stink of dead bodies, it was Bedlam.”

 

The remainder of the day followed the now familiar pattern of attack and counter attack, the Bedfords, supported by two companies of the 17th King’s managing to hold on to the southern portion of Trones Wood until relieved on the morning of the 13th by a battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment.  The operation cost the Bedfords 244 casualties including Bill Gale who had been hit before even getting as far as the wood.  Trones Wood was finally captured by the 18th Division on 14th July.

 

CSM Gale returned to the 2nd Battalion after recovering from his wound and saw out the war with it, his number changing to 5942061. He obtained his Long Service Good Conduct medal in 1924 and remained  as CSM until 1925 at which point he was posted to the Depot in Kempston, Beds as Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant. He remained at the Depot until leaving for civilian life in mid-1927. Apart from the fact that he was married by the time he left the army, nothing else is currently known about this man. 

 

Sources and Acknowledgements

 

·       Civil Registration Index of England and Wales 1837-1983

·       1901 Census of England and Wales

·       The National Archives: Medal Index Card

·       The National Archives: British War and Victory Medal Roll: K/2/104 B/2 Page 200: WO 329/927

·       The National Archives: 1914 Star Medal Roll: K/2/2 Page 53: WO 329/2437

·       The National Archives: War Diary 2nd Bedfordshire Regiment:  WO 95/1658

·       The Wasp, 1912

·       The Great War I Was There, Amalgamated Press, 1939

·       John Wainwright and Steve Fuller of the Great War Forum

·       David Doorne for the information about Bill Gale subsequent to his wounding at Trones Wood.