L/Cpl 16994 Edgar Roberts

• Age: 23
• From: Liverpool
• Regiment: The King's (Liverpool Regiment) 18th Btn
• D.O.W Sunday 15th April 1917
• Commemorated at: Warlincourt Halte Brit Cem
  Panel Ref: VIII.G.1

Edgar was born on 26th July 1894 in Everton, the youngest son of  George Roberts and his wife Eliza (née Law), transcribed as Saw on multiple records), who married on the 15th April 1873 at St Mary's Church, Walton. His father was born in Liverpool and his mother in London. They had 11 children;  Jane, Margaret, Elizabeth, George, Henrietta, William, Charles, David, and Henry. Edgar had a younger sister Grace. 

Prior to the war Edgar was a junior clerk in a shipping office. 

Edgar enlisted at St George's Hall in Liverpool joining the 18^th Battalion of The King's Liverpool Regiment as Private 16994 on 03^rd September 1914, giving his age as 20 years and 31 days, and his occupation as clerk.  He is described as 5’ 8 and three quarter inches, weighing 129 lbs, with a 35” chest, with a fresh complexion, grey eyes and brown hair. He gives his mother, Mrs. Eliza Roberts, of 45 Grey Road, Walton, as his next of kin.

From the 23^rd September 1914 he was billeted at Hooton Park Race Course and remained there until 03^rd December 1914 when they moved into the hutted accommodation at Lord Derby’s estate at Knowsley Hall. On 30th April 1915 the 18th Battalion alongside the other three Pals battalions left Liverpool via Prescot Station for further training at Belton Park, Grantham. They remained here until September 1915 when they reached Larkhill Camp on Salisbury Plain. He arrived in France on 7^th November 1915.

He was awarded a Good Conduct Badge on 03rd September 1916 marking two years service and granted Professional Pay Class I.

He was appointed unpaid Lance Corporal on 20th January 1917.

Edgar was wounded in action on 09^th April 1917, with gunshot wounds to the abdomen.

Everard Wyrall records the events of the day in Volume 2 of his History of the King's Regiment (Liverpool).

The 89^th Brigade formed up for the attack with the 19^th King's on the right and the 20^th King’s on the left. The 17^th King’s supplied the “mopping up" parties and he and the 2nd Bedfords were in close support.

It was just after 3pm when the advance began “According to scheduled time the waves advanced in good style and with determination; everyone was cheerful and in the best of spirits”

That advance is described by others as magnificent. From the OP’s the observing officers saw a wonderful sight – long lines of men advancing steadily up a long and gradual slope towards the enemy’ front line. Then suddenly they disappeared. The observers quite pardonably, imagined that the German front line had fallen into the hands of the assaulting troops and that the latter were on the way to the enemy’s support line. Alas something very different had happened. When the advancing troops had reached the summit of the long slope up which they advanced the ground suddenly dipped before the German front line , and when the observing officers thought they  were already in the Bosche lines they had not, as a matter of fact, even reached the wire. What the observers took to be the front line was really the support line; the front line could not be seen  - it lay just behind the crest of that slight rise in the ground.

The attacking waves of the 19^th King’s got within 100 yards of the German wire but were then held up. They were faced by three belts of entanglements, practically untouched by our artillery, and nothing could be done but to dig in or else take shelter in the many shell- shell-with which “No Man’s Land" was pitted. By this time the battalion’s losses were very heavy, and when darkness fell “A" and “B" Companies (about 140 in all) lay in shell-holes, two or three hundred yards north east of St. Martin, but just south of the Cojeul River, and “C" and “D" Companies (140 all ranks) were along the river bank, but on the northern side about 150 yards north east of St. Martin.

The first waves of the 20^th King’ advanced at 3.7pm. At 4pm Lieut Beaumont, commanding “A" Company, reported that he had had some forty casualties in passing through the enemy’s barrage. The next message, timed 4.40pm, stated that the position of the battalion at that period was on a crest in front of the enemy’s wire and about 100 yards from it. On the right the 21^st Division was observed to have penetrated the enemy’s front line, but in the left the right Battalion of the 21^st Brigade (the Wilts) was on the St. Martin- Neuville Vitasse road; the left flank of the 20^th King's was, therefore, “ in the air”.

Urgent messages were sent up from Battalion Headquarters to “push on, keeping in touch with right” But little else could be accomplished until those formidable belts of wire had been cut sufficiently to allow the rapid passage of the attacking troops, headed by their bombers.

At 9:30 that night 89^th Brigade Headquarters ordered both the 19^th and 20^th Battalions to withdraw, the former to the two sunken roads running south east from St. Martin, the latter to north west of St. Martin; the guns had been ordered to cut the enemy’s wire during the night in preparation for another attack during the 10^th April.

Of the 17^th King’s  - the “moppers up" – there is little to relate. There was nothing to “mop up" so that they did not function. Yet they had shared all the perils of the advance, and when  after they had fallen back and at midnight held the following positions, “B", “C", and “D" Companies in and around the sunken road north of Boiry-Becquerelle and “A" Company in trenches west of Henin, they lost 2 officers and 16 other ranks killed, and 3 officers and 48 other ranks wounded.

Edgar died of his wounds at 20th Casualty Clearing Station on 15^th April 1917, aged 23.

He now rests at Warlincourt Halte British Cemetery where his CWGC headstone gives his age as 23;  based on his date of birth, Edgar would have been 22, or in his 23rd year.

The site of the cemetery was chosen in May 1916. It was used from June 1916 to May 1917 by the 20th and 43rd Casualty Clearing Stations, in February 1917 by the 1/1st South Midland, and from April to June 1917 by the 32nd. The whole of plots VII, VIII, IX and X were filled in April and May 1917, the months of the Battles of Arras. From June 1917, the cemetery was practically unused until the fighting of May and June 1918, when field ambulances buried in it. After the Armistice the cemetery was increased by graves brought in from other smaller cemeteries.

The cemetery now contains 1,266 Commonwealth burials of the First World War. There are also 29 German and two French war graves.

The cemetery was designed by Charles Holden.

He earned his three medals. 

His mother Eliza received his personal effects, such as a wallet, pipe, a packet of letters, on the 23rd August 1917. 

His mother Eliza received his personal effects on 23^rd August 1917. His Army effects, including a War Gratuity of £12 also went to his mother. A pension card has not been found.

After the war, correspondence sent to his next of kin was returned, marked ‘Unknown’.  On 24^th December 1920 Liverpool City Police, having made enquiries in the Grey Road area to ascertain the whereabouts of Edgar’s mother, informed Infantry Records that his next of kin’s whereabouts was unknown.

On 25^th July 1921 his mother, by then living at 16 Olney Street, Walton, contacted Infantry Records, stating that she was indeed the mother and next of kin of L/Cpl E. Roberts, and “shall be very pleased to receive the Memorial Plaque and Scroll in memory of him”. 

On the 1921 Census at Olney Street, his widowed mother, Eliza, is aged 65, born in Notting Hill, and is living with her married son Henry, aged 31, a cable clerk for Lever Bros.