WILLIAM ROBERT WAITE

William was born in Easton on the 10th September 1889. He was the second child and eldest son of Robert and Harriet Waite who went on to have another nine children. Robert worked as an agricultural labourer and in 1893 Harriet was employed by the village school as a cleaner.   They lived at number 26 – not the present 26 – but one of a row of thatched cottages which in 1911 had two rooms upstairs and two downstairs.

The School Log records that he was admitted to Easton Royal School on 3rd October 1892 (Admission number 373) along with two other infants, William Tucker and Albert Hillier. He was just three years old.   Only a few weeks later he appears again in the Log because on 29th November he and five other children were away with measles. On 1st August 1902 William left school to work on a farm. By 1911, aged 21, he was still living with his parents and working as a cowman on one of the farms in the village.

William enlisted in the Army in Devizes in December 1914 and by May 1915 he was in France with the 2nd Battalion Wiltshire Regiment. On the 18th May his unit was in the Rue de L’Epinette Trenches.

The Regimental War Diary for that day records - “All day long the whole area occupied by the Battalion was heavily shelled with all varieties of high explosives and shrapnel in bursts of approximately 1 - 2 an hour, with a heavy shell about every 8 or 9 seconds.” Initially William was reported killed in action on the 18th but he actually died from his wounds the following day 19th May. He was 25 years old and is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery within the town cemetery in Bethune.

Before his death he was able to make a will, handwritten, in which he left ‘the whole I possess to my Father Robert Waite’.

Robert died in 1950 aged 84 and his mother, Harriet, in 1982 aged 95 and they are buried in Easton Royal Cemetery.

The Wiltshire Regiment badge

Nos 25-28 Easton Royal

The gravestone of Private William Robert Waite