Pte 57817 Thomas Moore

In 1901 his parents are living at 63 Greenhow Place, Elswick, Newcastle, with eight children. His father is a tailor, Thomas is 8.

 

In 1911 his family is at 17 Elliott Terrace, Elswick. His father is 53, a tailor, his mother is 48, Mary (Minnie) is 23, a domestic housemaid, Blaney, 21, is an ironmonger’s assistant, Susannah, 20, is a restaurant waitress, Constance, 13, and Hamilton, 10, are at school.  

 

Thomas is not in the family home, but there is a Thomas Moore, age 18, born Newcastle, who is an inmate in the Reformatory Training School in Stannington (Netherton Training School), 13 miles north of Elswick. No records or newspaper reports have been found to explain his presence in the Reformatory.  The boys stayed at the school until the age of 19.  

 

He enlisted in Sunderland and was formerly 383, Army Cyclist Corps but was transferred to the 19^th Battalion, The King’s Liverpool Regiment as Private No 57817. The amount of the War Gratuity suggests that he served for 28 months, enlisting in late 1915.

 

Thomas’ name was published in the list of K.L.R. Wounded in the Weekly Casualty List on 6th November 1917.  The battalion were then in the Ypres Salient, and this was near the end of the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele).

He was initially reported as Missing and later his death was assumed for official purposes as having occurred on 30th March 1918. He was aged 25.

As Graham Maddocks points out in his book The Liverpool Pals, the CWGC records 38 men of the 19^th Bn of The King’s Liverpool Regiment as killed in action on 30^th March 1918 when as the Battalion diary below, shown in bold type, records that the men were actually out of the line and safely on the way to St Valery- sur- Somme.

The composite battalion moved off from ROUVREL at 8.30 am at 50 yards interval between companies, arriving at SALEUX at 3.20 pm where they entrained, detraining at ST. VALERY-SUR-SOMME the same night. The night was spent at ST. VALERY-SUR-SOMME.

Apart from those whose bodies were not found and are commemorated on the Pozieres Memorial all but two have burial sites at Savy British Cemetery, which itself is within a couple of miles of Roupy and contains most of the identified men killed on 22^nd March 1918. Therefore, it would appear that the date of death for these men shown as 30^th March 1918 is purely an arbitrary one and that they were in fact killed on 22^nd March.

Thomas is commemorated in Savy British Cemetery, where a Special Kipling Memorial reads:

“To the Memory of these 68 British Soldiers who were killed in action in March 1918 and buried at the time in the German Cemetery on the St. Quentin - Roupy Road, whose graves are now lost.”

Savy was taken by the 32nd Division on the 1st April 1917, after hard fighting, and Savy Wood on the 2nd. On the 21st March 1918 Savy and Roupy were successfully defended by the 30th Division, but the line was withdrawn after nightfall. The village and the wood were retaken on the 17th September 1918 by the 34th French Division, fighting on the right of the British IX Corps.

Savy British Cemetery was made in 1919, and the graves from the battlefields and from the following small cemeteries in the neighbourhood were concentrated into it.

There are now over 850, 1914-18 war casualties commemorated in this site. Of these, more than half are unidentified. Memorials are erected in the cemetery to 68 soldiers (chiefly of the 19th King's Liverpools and the 17th Manchesters), buried by the Germans in their cemetery on the St. Quentin-Roupy road, whose graves were destroyed by shell fire.

The Cemetery covers an area of 2,555 square metres and is enclosed by a low rubble wall.

His mother Mary received his Army effects, including a War Gratuity of £14. 

 

Tragically, Thomas was the third son lost in the war.

 

His brother John served as Pte. 9265 Durham Light Infantry, and was killed in action on 21st September 1914, during the retreat from Mons. He was 29 years old. He has no known grave, and is commemorated on La Ferté sous Jouarre Memorial to the Missing of the Marne.

 

His brother Blaney served as Pte. 315 Northumberland Fusiliers, and was killed in action on 18th August 1916, age 27.  He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.