(Frank Burgess is the brother of Harry
Burgess, who is featured in “Harry Burgess & Mary Eliz Hollick” under Chrons
– South Aust)
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Pte Frank Burgess
# 16132 Somerset Light Infantry
[No personal photo available]
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Frank Burgess was born in Shepton Mallet in Somerset in 1885, to John
Henry Burgess, a local bill poster, and his wife Mary Ann. At the time Frank
had an elder step-sister, and later a younger sister and two younger brothers.
Frank did
his schooling in Shepton, probably only until he was about age 12, and worked
in the town for some years, being shown in the 1911 Census as an “assistant
bill poster”, working for his father, and still living at home.
The Burgess
boys’ favourite watering hole was “The Kings Arms” at the end of their street,
but Frank and the next eldest brother Harry apparently didn’t get on, and once
had a punchup in the street outside their pub, and both were arrested and put
in the local cells overnight to sober up, but no charges were laid for either
of them.
Family history has it that Frank’s youngest brother Willie “went out to buy a pound of salt one day in about 1910 (when he was 17) and never came home”, and joined The Duke of Cornwalls Light Infantry, then in Dec 1913 brother Harry joined the Somerset Light Infantry (1st Battalion), and with war on the horizon, in 1914 Frank also joined the S.L.I. He was assigned to their 8th Battalion, but in the meantime his brother Harry’s 1st Battalion became part of the British Expeditionary Force, and Harry was wounded and taken prisoner in the first week of the war.
Somerset Light Infantry recruits
marching in - Somerset 1914
The SLI’s 8th
was a “Service” Battalion, raised in Taunton in October 1914 as part of
Kitchener's Third Army, but then spent some time in a series of UK camps
(Tring, Halton Pk, Witley), until in Sept 1915 the Battalion was shipped to Le
Havre.
Oral history has it that Frank was arrested for drunkenness when he was
supposed to be getting ready for this embarkation, but somehow managed to get
off the charge. But on release, instead of heading for the train station, he
decided he just had to go back into Shepton Mallet, for some whisky, and
finished up getting charged in his absence with desertion, something that by
then was causing the authorities some angst. Fairly understandably.
It was then that his younger brother Willie heard that Frank was actually
going to be shot at dawn, as rumours of executions were already doing the
rounds. (On 8 Sept 1914 a Private Thomas Highgate - just 17 – had become the
first British soldier to be executed for desertion, on the Western Front.
Another 300 would follow him in the course of the war).
Willie fully expecting to never see his brother again, but apparently
there was some kind of confusion on the charge, and once more Frank was let go,
and he duly headed for the hell that was the Western Front. And as fate would
have it, one day soon after Willie was out on the battlefield and who comes
marching towards him through the smoke and haze but his `dead’ brother Frank!
Willie always swore he thought he was seeing a ghost.
Frank and
his battalion were finally thrust into the fighting on Sept 26th 1915,
at Chalk Pit Wood near Loos, and it was about this time that Frank became
wounded, their whole Division having taken a beating, incurring over 3,800
casualties, and took the rest of the year to rebuild.
They saw
more fighting on The Somme through 1916, but Frank had home leave early in
1917, but showed some reluctance to return, as his home paper The Shepton
Mallet Journal reported on the 9th of February...
“ABSENTEES
– On Monday and Tuesday Mr J. R. Allen sat at the Police Court to deal with
absentees who had overstayed leave, detained by the police. One was a
Sheptonian, who served at the front from the start of the war, Pte Frank
Burgess, and the other Thomas Theodore Gould, 97th Training Reserve
Battalion. They were handed over to escorts.”
But Frank
was back in the thick of it by April 1917, surviving action in many of the
major fronts through France and Belgium during that year, until apparently
wounded again in August 1917. There’s no record of his next year’s service –
his battalion saw fighting in the Ypres and Somme offensives – but by Sept 1918
Frank – now 34 - was permanently back home in Somerset, where he married 28
year old Amy Willcox, the daughter of a farm worker from Doulting.
By the June
1921 UK Census, Frank and Amy were living in Batcombe Somerset, where Frank
worked as a “Roadman” for the Shepton Mallet Council, and they went on to have
two kids – Gladys in 1922 and Ivor in 1928, but as Frank seemed to have kept himself
a little separated from the rest of his Burgess siblings, that’s about all we have
on them concerning the rest of their married life, other than they never seemed
to have ever left Somerset.
Frank died in Dec 1966, aged 81, and is buried in Ilchester (about 20kms southwest of his old home town of Shepton Mallet) but Amy went on for 12 more years, before joining him in 1978 aged 88.
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