Gilbert Edward Prior

Memorial: Chipping Sodbury Town Cross - Broad Street

Regiment: Gloucestershire Regiment

Medals: British War Medal, Next of Kin Memorial Plaque 1914 - 1921, Victory Medal

Rank and number: Private 30754 (formally Private 6095, Royal Berkshire Regiment)

Parents: James and Mary Ann Prior of Chipping Sodbury

Marital status: Married

Home address: 34 Churchill Road, Brislington, Bristol.

Pre-war occupation: House painter

Date of birth: 1883

Place of birth: Easton, Bristol

Date of death: 24/09/1918

Buried/Commemorated at: Bellicourt British Cemetery, north of St Quentin, France

Further information:

1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment.

Gilbert Prior was the third of five children born to James and Mary Ann Prior. Before him there were Douglas and Ethel, and after him came Evelyn and Mabel. These were all shown in the 1891 Census, for Easton, Bristol. By the 1911 Census, he had moved away to Clevedon in Somerset and was a House Painter there before getting married to Lilly Violet Amos in 1911 back in Bristol.

In the last few months of the war he was in the far north-west of France, beyond St Quentin and Cambrai. The village of Bellicourt sits on the St Quentin Canal. This is where Napoleon’s armies had dug themselves in and created a 5km long tunnel. The barges in the tunnel were used to shelter German reserves. The German Hindenburg Line ran west of the village, and a few kilometres to the south-west along the Canal was the village of Bellenglise. The Germans had made another great tunnel or dug-out here, while Gilbert Prior was fighting his last action. He had already been killed when the Battle of the St Quentin Canal was fought 29th September -2nd October. The main protagonists in that were the Americans and the Australians, and it was their dead who first filled most of the Bellicourt British Cemetery. This was greatly enlarged after the Armistice, and there are now over 1200 British graves there, with 313 burials remaining unidentified.

Gilbert Edward Prior is remembered on the on the Chipping Sodbury Town Cross and on the Chipping Sodbury and District War Memorial Cottage Hospital board, now at Yate and District Heritage Centre under Chipping Sodbury.

By kind permission, this information is based on the following source(s):

Alison Benton (2014) Remembered with Honour. Sprint Print, Yate. Forces War Records