Gillett, Arthur John

Gillett, Arthur John

Military History:

Regiment:
Shropshire Light Infantry 5th Battalion

Rank:
Private

Service Number:
26224

Date of Enlisting:                            

Date of death:
11.4.1917

Cemetery/ Memorial:
Cemetery Etaples Part III UK, Artois, France

UK Cemetery/Memorial:       None

Arthur enlisted at Royston, Hertfordshire.  He was a private in the 5th Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, Regimental number 26224.  Previously he had been a private in the Nottingham & Derbyshire Regiment (Sherwood Foresters), regimental number 5790.  Arthur served in Western European Theatre of War, France and Flanders.  He died of wounds on 11th April 1917.

Arthur was awarded the Victory Medal and the British War Medal.

Arthur is buried in the Etaples Military Cemetery in Artois France.

Family History:

Date of Birth:
c. 1883

Birth Place:
Ashwell, Hertfordshire

Residence:
Royston, Hertfordshire

Marriage:
Single

Arthur was born in Ashwell in 1883 to Samuel and Eliza (nee Brown) Gillet. Arthur’s grandmother had been a shopkeeper in West End, Ashwell.  Arthur grew up in the Bassingbourn/Melbourn area of Royston.

Commentary:

Étaples War Cemetery, the largest of its kind in France, overlooks the Canche Estuary. The six-hectare site is the last resting place for some 11,500 soldiers who came to Europe from throughout the British Commonwealth to fight in the Great War and who died as a result of their wounds or of disease.

It was here in 1915, on this narrow strip of land behind the fishing port, that the British Army set up what was to become the largest field hospital complex of its time. At its height the site comprised more than a dozen hospitals and over twenty thousand beds. The hospitals were specialist units and included one which treated infectious diseases, another which cared exclusively for German prisoners working in the British bases, yet another which was manned entirely by volunteers, and so on. In 1917 the field hospital received forty thousand wounded and sick soldiers every month. They were brought to Étaples on a dozen ambulance trains which ran every day.

Formerly a vast British Army field hospital, the site is now the largest Commonwealth War Cemetery in France