Albert Bazeley

Name	Albert Bazeley
Corps	426 Agricultural Coy., formerly East Kent (The Buffs) Regiment, 7th Battalion
Rank	Private
Service No.	255512, formerly G/21078, L/1176, G/2567
Date/Place of entry
Date of death	11 March 1919
Memorial/Grave	Greatworth Parish Churchyard

Albert Bazeley was the eldest of the five sons and four daughters of Henry Bazeley and his wife Rose Hannah nee White. Henry was a great nephew of Rhoda Lines nee Bazeley.
Albert was born in1887 and brought up in the small village of Greatworth, a few miles south east of Chipping Warden where his father Henry was a small farmer / milkman. No occupation given for him or his siblings in 1911 but he was described as a worker, presumably for his father.

Service or pension records for Albert have not survived but his name and regiment appears on the ‘Army Registers of Soldiers' Effects’ following his death in 1919. He was a private in the 7th Battalion of the East Kent Regiment (The Buffs) and later transferred into the Labour Corps. There is no way of knowing at what dates he joined or was transferred, but servicemen were often placed in the Labour Corps if they were judged unfit for service on the front line, so it is likely he was injured and later died from his injuries.

The 7th Battalion was raised September 1914 as part of Kitchener's Second New Army and joined the 55th Brigade, 18th (Eastern) Division which arrived in France in July 1915. It remained on the Western Front throughout the war, taking part in most of the engagements on the Somme, Ypres, the Hindenburg Line and the final advance on Artois. The overall number of officers and men of the Division, who were killed, wounded or missing during the war was 46,503. They are listed in the Divisional roll of honour at St. James's Church in Colchester.

Albert Bazeley died at Egerton, near Ashford in Kent on 11 March 1919. He is buried in Greatworth churchyard. His death must have been related to his war service as he is listed on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. His younger brother Frank Walter had died in 1915. Both men were named on the Greatworth War Memorial unveiled on 8 July 1921.

Albert’s father Henry died in May 1934 aged sixty six, a year after his two middle daughters were married. He is buried at Greatworth. The date and place of his wife Rose’s death cannot be 100% verified but she is most likely to be the Rosa Bazeley whose death was recorded in the Banbury registration district in 1952. If so, she outlived four of her five sons by fifteen years.
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Albert was a second cousin of Owen George, Henry William and Frederick Albert Lines, and of Ernest Cowley. His younger brothers Edmond White Bazeley and Frank Walter Bazeley also served, as did their cousin Arthur Bazeley,

(On19 October 1917 a house in Northampton was hit by an incendiary bomb during a Zeppelin raid. Eliza Gammons and her twin daughters were killed, the only known victims of the raid. Another Private Albert Bazeley, a relative of the Gammons family, was staying with them at the time and got the two girls out of the house, to no avail. In 1871 this man’s father, named Estell Bazeley, was living in Helmdon, a village neighbouring Greatworth and coincidently where Rose Hannah White was born, but I do not know if the two Albert Bazeleys were related to one another.)