John Thomas Churchill (1894-1916)

Service No: 305664 – 1^st/8^th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment

John Thomas Churchill was born in Chipping Norton in 1894 the son of Frederick Churchill and Florence Ada Smith. He was baptised on 18^th August of that year. He was one of ten known children born to the couple. Between 1896 and 1899 the family moved to a house on Hodge Hill Common. By 1911 John was working as a factory hand in a cotton and wool factory.

John’s service record appears not have survived, but he seems to have landed at Le Havre in March 1915 for service on the Western Front.

At “zero hour” – 7.30am on Saturday 1st July 1916 – officers in the trenches blew whistles and British troops scrambled up ladders along a 14-mile stretch of the Western Front. As instructed, they advanced at a slow, steady pace across No Man’s Land. They were met with a hail of German machine-gun and rifle fire. Accurate German shell barrages of the Allied assembly trenches cut off their lines of support.

By the end of the day, which was the first day of the Battle of the Somme, there were a total of 57,470 British Army casualties, of whom 19,240 had been killed. This is the greatest number of casualties suffered by the British Army in a single day and, because many soldiers were serving in Pals’ Battalions with other men from their local area, there was enormous impact on local communities at home. John Thomas Churchill was one of the dead. He was reported as wounded or missing in the Coventry Standard on 11^th August 1916. His body was never found and the register of soldier’s effects notes that his death was assumed to have been 1^st July 1916.

He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, Somme, France as well as locally on the war memorial and the plaque at St Mary and St Margaret Church.