Name
Sidney Arthur Lake
Conflict
First World War
Date of Death / Age
28/11/1918
27
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Gunner
60473
Royal Garrison Artillery
138th Heavy Battery
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
British War and Victory medals
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
LE CATEAU COMMUNAL CEMETERY
I. 24.
France
Headstone Inscription
Not Researched
UK & Other Memorials
Pirton Village War Memorial, St Mary’s Shrine, Pirton, Methodist Chapel Plaque, Pirton, Pirton School Memorial
Biography
He was baptised and enlisted as Sidney Arthur, but he appears as Arthur S on the Village Memorial and, as that is how they wished him to be remembered, that is how he appears here.
Arthur’s parents were Arthur and Julina Lake (née Bunker) and he was born on August 28th 1891. Establishing his brothers and sisters was more complicated than usual because, although Julina appears in all the relevant censuses, her name appears differently in other records. The five children, who are believed to be hers, are detailed below(*1) and they include Sidney Arthur, but another child, currently unnamed, is confirmed by the 1911 census, which records six children and also records that three had died.
Like most of the men on the memorial Arthur went to the Pirton school and then left to work on local farms. However he is listed as cowman on a farm rather than just the more common description of farm or agricultural labourer.
By 1915 he had moved away from Pirton and was living at 7 Queens Cottages, Squires Lane, Church End, Finchley. He had married Dorothy Kate Disbray in Finchley on June 15th and was working as a groundsman. Perhaps he decided to marry before enlisting, which he did on October 18th 1915, four months later.
Many World War One service records were destroyed by bombing during the Second World War; however in Arthur’s case, his records survived, but they are badly faded and sometimes impossible to read. Frustratingly, this includes the dates of his movements and the details of his postings, so to try to make too much of them would be guess work. He reported for training at Dover with the Royal Garrison Artillery on October 25th 1915. He qualified as a cold shoer of horses on August 18th 1916 and appears to have finished his training in late November or early December 1916. Presumably his farrier training was to help make the gun team more self-sufficient, but he would also have had other duties as part of the gun team. The other information that can be read in his records appears below, but many of the details of his service are not yet known. For instance, we know that Arthur joined the 138th Heavy Battery, but we do not know when. This Battery was also known as the ‘Hampstead Heavies’ due to the number of men from the London Borough of Hampstead who volunteered in late 1915. To add to the frustration, the war diary for the Battery held in the National Archives stops abruptly on January 23rd 1918, ten months before his death, and so even the movements of the 138th in the weeks before Arthur’s death have to be sought elsewhere. As is it has not been possible to properly detail Arthur’s movements, it seems appropriate to try give an overview of the operations of a Heavy Battery and, in particular and where possible, the movements of the 138th.
The heavy batteries fired the ‘big guns’, the 60 pounders. These were large guns, weighing four tons, had a six mile range and required a team of twelve horses to move them. Because of their long range they were usually remote from the battlefield. Their immense destructive power was usually employed against strategic targets; key enemy strongholds, stores, ammunition dumps, railways and their opposite enemy’s batteries, but they also played a supporting role, targeting trenches prior to attacks or providing covering fire during an attack. They fired with the simple purpose of obliterating their targets. Some historians estimate that fifty-nine percent of all casualties during the war were caused by artillery and three times as many men were killed by shells than bullets.
Supplying the guns could be a logistical nightmare and firing them was hard work – the term 60 pounder refers to the weight of each shell. They were difficult to move because of their weight and often remained reasonably static for long periods; for instance the war diary for the 138th records that they were in the area around Bully in France from April 1916 to February 19th 1917 and then at Aix Noulette until April 16th. The 138th served predominantly in France, except for a period between May 18th 1917 and late 1917 when they served in Belgium, with some weeks spent in the area around Ypres. By the time the diary ends, however, in January 1918 they had moved back into France.
Work with a Battery was physically demanding with each shell having to be manhandled to the guns and loaded by hand and they could be required to keep up a steady rate of fire of up to two rounds per minute. Life was hard work, tiring, deafening, often monotonous and not without danger, although it would be fair to say that life in the trenches was much more dangerous and the big guns were usually a long way behind those. Duels between opposing batteries over great distances were not uncommon and they were also the target of bombing by enemy aircraft - although the latter was a very crude method of delivering death and the shells were usually far more dangerous.
The following is a fairly typical extract from the war diary and describes a period in May 1916:
May 1st - Right section fired 10 rounds Lyddite(*2). Left section fired 10 rounds Lyddite, both counter battery attack.
May 2nd - Right section fired 10 rounds Lyddite, counter battery attack. Left section fired 6 rounds Shrapnel(*3), working parties.
May 3rd - Right section fired 14 rounds Lyddite on hostile battery and 16 rounds Lyddite in evening, counter battery work. Left section 4 rounds Lyddite in evening, counter battery work.
May 4th - Right section fired 26 rounds Lyddite and Shrapnel, counter battery attack and working parties. Left section fired 45 rounds Lyddite, hostile batteries.
May 5th - Right section fired 35 rounds Lyddite and Shrapnel, counter battery attack. Left section fired 6 rounds Shrapnel, counter battery attack.
May 6th - Right section fired 34 rounds Lyddite and Shrapnel, hostile battery and working parties (the latter dispersed by our fire). Left section fired 11 rounds Lyddite.
May 7th - Right section fired 12 rounds Lyddite. Left section fired 6 rounds Lyddite.
May 8th - Right section fired 19 rounds Shrapnel and Lyddite, hostile battery and working parties. Left section fired 4 rounds Shrapnel. Party of enemy dispersed on 2nd round.
May 9th - Right section fired 8 rounds Lyddite against hostile battery – 3 rounds OK. Left section fired 4 rounds Shrapnel. Working Party dispersed.
May 10th - Right section quiet day – no firing. Dismantling Battery and transporting baggage etc to new position at Bully. Left section fired 2 rounds Lyddite – estimate party of 50 men dispersed.
May 11th - Right section. Very busy day firing - Battery and Counter battery attack from 4:45am until 4:40pm – 66 rounds. 10.5. Silenced enemy battery & 2:50pm 8” Gun on Armoured tram driven away. 4:40pm until 1:55pm (sic) 117 rounds Lyddite & Shrapnel fired against enemy attack line.
The summary of the action for May 1916 was, rounds fired 1703, casualties: killed 3, wounded 1.
Before the infantry attacked, it was commonplace for all the artillery to work together, targeting the enemy trenches and strongholds for prolonged periods. These could be anything from a few hours to days. Someone came up with a grading system for defining barrages; fewer than ten shells in ten minutes would be ‘light’, thirty per minute ‘moderate’ and fifty per minute and above, 'heavy'.
Another form of barrage, invented in the Great War, and which also became commonplace, was the creeping barrage. The artillery would lay down a curtain of fire, which in theory moved forward just ahead of the advancing troops and was intended to keep the enemy from firing. When the advance was over good ground, and particularly later in the war when lessons had been learnt, it was successful, but early on there were many problems. If it moved too quickly, it passed over the enemy while the troops were advancing, and had little effect. If it moved to slowly the advancing troops caught up with the barrage and could be hit by their own shells. It seems likely that Arthur experienced action in all types of artillery fire at some point in his service.
During the German Spring Offensive of late March 1918 the 138th was positioned near Remigny. The German’s success drove back the front line and the Heavy Batteries were also forced to withdraw to positions which were less at risk. For eight days from the 21st they were more or less in constant retreat. The movements were forced, arduous and rations for men and horses short. In one thirty hour period between the 26th and 27th the men and horses marched twenty-five miles, dragging the guns behind them. The 60 pounders were heavy guns and at one point the hill was so steep that it required the combined efforts of three teams of horses to move each gun to the top and, when they had succeeded, they were ordered back down. In the previous months the guns had worked hard and they were badly in need of maintenance work, so at the end of March they were ordered to refit in the Poix area of France. To get there they had to march eighty miles, which they did over six days. After a two day refit they began their move to Amiens, which took until April 13th.
On the 14th they were ready once again to join the battle. First the centre section took up position in Gentilles Wood, where they stayed for two weeks. They were shelled and suffered a number of casualties before being withdrawn. Then the remainder of the Battery took up position about 1 ½ miles to the north-west and were also heavily shelled. After about six weeks of heavy activity they were given an opportunity to rest and to re-equip before returning to take up position. On July 13th they moved forward to Bonnay-sur-Ancre and then moved again on August 4th to Vaux-on-Somme in preparation for the imminent Allied attack.
The Allied Offensive of August 1918 was the start of the final push to win the war and it began on the 8th. The 138th were still at Vaux-on-Somme, but by the end of the first day they had moved forward almost two miles and apparently had seen hundreds of German prisoners. Over the next four weeks they continued to move forward, following the success of the front line troops. Periodically they would stop, set up position for a period of firing, before moving on again. The fighting was fierce and they again saw large numbers of German prisoners. By September 2nd they had reached Clery, just north-west of Peronne. They moved to Courcelles where they were given a few days rest, but were back in action again by the 12th, firing from Hamelot and then Hesbecourt about sixteen miles north-west of Peronne.
Following the ultimate failure of the German Spring Offensive, the Germans retreated once again to the Hindenburg Line, their ‘impenetrable’ last line of defence. The Allies were gaining momentum and by the end of September they had breeched it. The German Army was beginning to crumble, but that was not helping the Heavy Batteries, because the Germans artillery’s resistance became more and more desperate and caused a significant number of casualties amongst the Batteries.
On October 4th the Germans asked for an armistice based on the American President Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points, which he had previously proposed in January 1918, but the Allies were not prepared to consider that. The fighting continued and the Germans were forced back and back, with the 138th Battery continuing to advance to the north-west.
The Germans were handed the Allies’ terms for an armistice on November 8th and, given no choice, they finally signed it on the 11th. By then the 138th had reached St. Soupel, which was two miles south of Le Cateau and sixteen miles north-west of St Quentin. The war was over, but Arthur died seventeen days later. His service records have been carefully inspected and one can almost imagine that the words next to his date of death read ‘trenches’, ‘France’, and ‘gas’, but in truth they are not clear enough to read. It was known that the 138th were billeted in mid-November and that the influenza epidemic hit them. About forty men were sent to hospital and a number of those died, but the cause of Sidney’s death was uncertain until the family discovered the Pirton WW1 Project and confirmed it to be influenza. They were also able to provide his photograph.
Arthur was taken to a hospital in or around the town of Le Cateau, where he hung on, fighting his personal battle for life, but on November 28th he lost and died.
He is buried in the communal cemetery in Le Cateau. It is surrounded by a 15 foot wall and to find Arthur’s grave you must walk through a typical French cemetery – rather gothic and macabre for British tastes. His grave is typical of the style adopted by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and a stark contrast to the rest of the cemetery - a formal straight line of headstones for Arthur and his comrades stands at the back of a long thin almost perfect rectangle of grass. A very striking piece of nature among the hard landscape of the town’s graves.
Some time after the war his widow moved, not far, just to 119 Squires Lane, Church End, Finchley and that is where, on June 1919, she received a letter asking her to confirm her relationship to Arthur, so that his plaque, commonly known as the death penny, and scroll could be sent to her. Not long after this she married Arthur James Lovelock and moved to 29 North Road, Lower Edmonton, London.
(*1) Augusta Nellie (b 1879), Lizzie Florence (often called Florence, bapt 1884, d 1911 aged twenty-seven), Larry (b 1886, d 1888 aged two), Frank Lindsey (b 1889, d 1889 aged seven months) and Sidney Arthur (b 1891). The 1911 census records six children and that three had died. As Lizzie Florence is named the census must have been taken before her death and a sixth child, who is unnamed, must also have died.
(*2) Lyddite was a form of high explosive.
(*3) A shrapnel shell contained many pellets the size of bullets which were distributed at high velocity by the explosion.
Additional Information
Text from the book: The Pride of Pirton
Acknowledgments
The Pride of Pirton book – www.pirton.org.uk/prideofpirton Chris Ryan / Tony French / Jonty Wild
