Geoff Brookes travels to the battlefields of Ypres to find William Jones
We went to the battlefields of the Ypres Salient to find William Jones, one man amongst thousands. You can go there and be overwhelmed by the number of casualties of World War One. There are graves everywhere around Ypres and every white gravestone that shines in the sun represents a life not fully lived. It is a vast sea of unfulfilled potential and hopes, every stone a story. There are huge cemeteries like Tyne Cot for example, with over 11,800 graves, some of which contain two or three unidentified comrades. The Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres itself remembers 54,900 soldiers whose bodies disappeared completely, atomised by the guns. There wasn’t enough space for the rest, so the wall at the rear of Tyne Cot has another 34,800 names engraved upon it. The scale is staggering. So why should I look for one particular grave amongst so many? William is no relative of mine, he won no medals, he was, as far as I know, no one’s father. He was just another young soldier, still a boy, a casualty of war.
![Private William Jones[Source]](https://www.welshcountry.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/William-Jones-1-435x477.webp "The Battlefields of Ypres")
Private William Jones
[Source]Private William Jones, a seventeen year old Welsh-speaking boy from Glynneath, with probably a tenuous grasp of English, a volunteer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, was condemned to death for desertion and executed by his comrades on 25th October 1917. William Jones was shot at dawn.
There are only 238 graves in Locre Hospice Cemetery where William lies, on the border between Belgium and France. You can find it in the village, which is called either Locre or Loker, depending on which side of the border you are on. We had to park some distance away and walk down between houses to a small corner of a field. Finding William was easy. He is in the middle of a neat row against the wall, behind which the neighbouring field was, appropriately, muddy and lifeless. It was finding out about him that was more difficult.
The restricted range of surnames in Wales is not always a help during research. William Jones is not a unique name in Wales – perhaps you reading this now, or your father, are called William Jones – and so it is hard to establish the facts about him. He was probably about seventeen when he deserted and since he was said to have been in the army for two years it indicates that he enlisted when he was still fifteen. The newspapers report that thirty young men enlisted in Glynneath in January 1915. Was he one of them? He could have visited Mr P Sheppard who was appointed the village recruiting agent in April that year, or he might have strolled along to see Mr Phillips in the Lamb and Flag who was on the committee. The Recruiting Officer in Neath turned a circus wagon into a recruiting office adorned with posters proclaiming “Come inside and join the Army. The cheapest show in the Fair.” Perhaps he went there. But wherever he did it, William became a private in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and served as a stretcher bearer. You ask yourself, was he really old enough to do such an awful job? There could be no hiding from the terrible reality of death and dismemberment. It would be no surprise at all if he found his duties profoundly disturbing. Any one of us could have cracked under that sort of strain.
“..he was one of only eight soldiers who managed to desert and successfully cross the channel..”
Welsh Fusiliers and served as a stretcher bearer. You ask yourself, was he really old enough to do such an awful job? There could be no hiding from the terrible reality of death and dismemberment. It would be no surprise at all if he found his duties profoundly disturbing. Any one of us could have cracked under that sort of strain.
His commanding officer said he was a good soldier, but War Office records suggest that by 1917 he was serving under a suspended sentence of death following desertion. In such circumstances going missing for a second time was a very dangerous thing to do.
William disappeared on 15th June 1917 after taking a wounded soldier to a dressing station and the army lost track of him completely. In fact he showed remarkable resourcefulness, he was one of only eight soldiers who managed to desert and successfully cross the Channel and made his way home to Glynneath. His name could have offered him anonymity in Wales. How could the army ever distinguish one William Jones from another? The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that 217 soldiers called William Jones died in 1917. In fact during the course of the war, 726 William Joneses’ serving in the British Army were killed, along with 62 at sea and five airmen. The numbers are staggering. However, anonymity is rarely available in a Welsh village.
In addition William might have come home, but he’d brought the war with him. There was no escape from it. In July there was a concert at the Church Institute when money was distributed “to the dependents of fallen Heroes and Discharged Soldiers …by the Glynneath Male Voice Choir.” Sick and wounded soldiers in the Neath and District War Hospital at Penrhiewtyn were entertained with a variety show, “including the National Anthems of the Allies”, by the Wesley Church. In August a convoy of another 120 wounded soldiers arrived there from the Front and in September, 300 of them were brought to Glynneath. They were greeted by the local drum and fife band and “prizes were awarded for the best fancy costume and elocution.”
Lance Corporal Clifford Protheroe, home on leave in August, was presented with a “nice wallet and valuable contents by the Glynneath Billiard Club.” On 1st September 1917 the Aberdare Leader under the headline “Glynneath Heroes” reported that Gunner Rowland and Private Hall had been killed in action. Glynneath would be “poorer for the loss of these promising young men.”
Private William Jones’ gravestone
Perhaps William began to realise that he would never be welcomed home as a hero or mourned. Only if he were wounded would he ever be entertained so lavishly. As a deserter there would never be an honourable mention for him in the paper. All this is entirely speculative, but what is certain is that in September he handed himself in at the police station in Neath and he was returned to the army in Bristol. I hope that I am wrong, but I wonder sometimes whether his mother persuaded him to do so, believing that because he was young he would be forgiven. If this was the case then what a burden she would have carried. William told them that he had been wounded and had been evacuated home, a ridiculous claim that was quickly dismantled.
He was returned to his regiment at Ypres. There was a court martial, based upon a presumption of guilt. It led to an inevitable verdict, with no appeals procedure. Once the sentence was ratified the execution proceeded mercifully quickly. Private 15954 William Jones was shot on Kemmel Hill on 25th October 1917 by members of his own battalion. Like all condemned men, William Jones would have been tied and blindfolded, with a white target pinned to his heart. The officer would ensure the soldier was dead, administering a shot to the head if necessary and then the body quickly buried.
The firing squad would often be immediately sent on leave.
William is not the only soldier in Locre Hospice who was executed for desertion. Private Denis Blakemore from Shrewsbury had also been condemned to death for desertion and the sentence suspended. Like William’s, a further offence could not be forgiven. He ran away prior to an assault at Messines and was picked up after eighteen days on the run in Boulogne. Unlike William he didn’t make it across the Channel. There is nothing on either grave to show that they were executed. Indeed some parents never knew what happened to their sons in these circumstances. Perhaps neither mother was ever told anything other than their son had “died of wounds.”
!['Shot at Dawn' Memorial[Bs0u10e0 - CC BY-SA 2.0]](https://www.welshcountry.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Memorial.webp "The Battlefields of Ypres")
Eventually William Jones’ name was engraved on the Glynneath War Memorial following the pardon issued to the soldiers executed in the First World War in 2006. There is still no acknowledgement there of his fate. You must go to the National Memorial Arboretum in Lichfield for that.
William was a victim of the war just as much as anyone else. Sadly he was not the only man serving with a Welsh regiment to be executed. Most were privates and most were found guilty of desertion, the inevitable consequence of the horror of the trenches. There were 15 of them, though they were not all born in Wales. One Welsh soldier, Jesse Short from Nantyglo, served with the Northumberland Fusiliers and was the only man shot for his part in a serious mutiny at a camp in Etaples in September 1917.
I have always had particular sympathy for Private William Scholes, who was another under a suspended death sentence for desertion. He was serving with the South Wales Borderers and kept going absent because he felt the allowance given to his widowed mother, for whom he was the sole support, was measly. A principled stand certainly, but perhaps in the circumstances not wise. He was executed in August 1918 and buried in the Borre Cemetery in Northern France. Running away might be the best way to escape danger, as the Chinese proverb would have it, but in the army it was understandably a crime. Today we see things differently.
Murder of course is something different and two others from that unhappy group of 15, William Price and Richard Morgan of the Welsh Regiment, were executed for shooting Company Sergeant Major Hayes on 20th January 1915 near Bethune in France (the same day incidentally that the regimental goat died of a heart attack in the snow.) In Goodbye to All That, the author Robert Graves maintained it was all a terrible mistake. They had been trying to shoot their platoon sergeant.
