Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

 
#6681 BUTTSWORTH Wesley            17th Battalion
 
Wesley Buttsworth was born 12th September 1885 at Ghinni Ghinni on the Manning River near Taree, NSW; one of ten children to parents, Henry and Phyllis Buttsworth. Wesley attended school at Ghinni Ghinni and then probably worked on the family farm. He also advised the Army recruiter that he had served an apprenticeship as a grocer.
 
At some point Wesley moved to Queensland and may have begun farming at Brooklands between Nanango and Kumbia in the South Burnett. He married Alice Chaseling, who was from Terara in Southern NSW in July 1916. On 11th October 1916, just three months after his marriage, Wesley enlisted in the AIF at Cootamundra in Central Western NSW. This date is quite significant as the first of the Conscription plebiscites to be conducted was held two weeks later and there was a degree of community agitation regarding the state of reinforcements for the war effort.
 
It is probable that when Wesley decided to enlist, he left Alice at home at Coolabunia outside Kingaroy and travelled to the central west of NSW to visit family before enlisting. He told the recruiting officer at Cootamundra that he was 31 years old; a farmer of Brooklands QLD. Wesley named his wife back home at Coolabunia as his next of kin, and also named her as the sole beneficiary in his will. At that time, Alice was carrying the couple’s first child.
 
Wesley took the train for the long journey from Western NSW to Sydney where soon after his arrival at Liverpool Camp he was posted to the non-commissioned officer’s school at La Perouse on 31st October. Wesley was recommended to be promoted to the rank of Sergeant, but the recommendation was changed to recommend he be posted to officers training at the Military Academy, Duntroon. The file in the National Archives contains no notation to the events that followed but on 24th December 1916, Wesley was posted back to a depot battalion at Liverpool camp with the rank of private.
 
On 1st February 1917, Wesley was taken on as part of the 19th reinforcements for the 17th Battalion. Six days later, the reinforcements boarded the “Wiltshire” in Sydney. The embarkation roll shows Wesley had allocated 3/- of his daily pay of 5/- to his wife. Wesley was given the rank of acting corporal for the voyage via South Africa and Sierra Leone. When the reinforcements landed at Devonport in South West England on 11th April, they were sent by train to the 5th Brigade Training Battalion at Rollestone.
 
A major campaign was planned for the Ypres area in Belgian Flanders in the summer and autumn of 1917. The first part of offensive was a massive bombardment followed up by massed infantry on the Messines Ridge. Once this position was secured, the main thrust of the campaign could get underway in a series of “bite and hold” engagements by British and Australian troops along the line of the road which ran from the ancient city of Ypres towards the Broodseinde Ridge and the village of Passchendaele. In order to have the AIF forces at full strength, reinforcements from the depots in England such as Wesley were sent across to France and then north into Belgium. Wesley was taken on strength by the 17th Battalion, part of the 5thBrigade of the 2nd Division AIF on 18th August 1917. A witness interviewed by the Red Cross noted that about this time Wesley received a letter from his wife to inform him that she had given birth to a baby girl, Alice Jean, born in April of that year. It was reported that Wesley was very proud upon hearing the news.
 
The first of the bite and hold attacks was the battle of Menin Road on 20th September. During this advance, Wesley was slightly wounded in the hip and foot but he returned to duty after two days at the field ambulance.
 
After the success by the AIF at Polygon Wood at the end of September and Broodseinde in the first week of October, the 5th and 6th Brigades of the 2nd Division were put into the line for an attack on the village of Poelcappelle, five kilometres north west of Passchendaele, on 9th October. The Flanders campaign had begun in dry summer weather but by October, unseasonal rains turned the battlefield and the approach lines into a sea of mud. The men of the 5th brigade had been labouring for the previous ten days laying duckboard tracks and man hauling artillery pieces into a position to support the attack on Poelcappelle. By the time the men of the 5th and 6th Brigades were sent up to the front, the men were physically and emotionally exhausted. Some battalions which had a nominal strength of 1000 men were down to less than 200. The attack on Poelcappelle, like the previous attempts that month, ended in failure. The infantry slogged across muddy ground under a desultory artillery barrage before being driven back with the objective still in enemy hands. The 5th and 6th Brigades suffered almost 1200 casualties. A 17th Battalion roll call established that as well as a number of men killed or wounded, several were missing, having failed to return to the start line; one of whom was Wesley Buttsworth.
 
A request was made to the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Service by Alice Buttsworth to provide any news of her husband. In time, a number of men who had been with Wesley during the events of 9thOctober provided statements to the Red Cross which stated that Wesley had been hit in the neck by either a sniper or machine gun fire. He fell to the ground and appeared to be paralysed. The advance moved on but no trace was seen of Wesley as the battalion withdrew later in the day. It was variously assumed that Wesley would have quickly died of his wounds out on the battlefield and that his body was lost during the fighting.
 
An official court of enquiry, which relied in part on the statements of the witnesses who had responded to the Red Cross, was held on 27th April 1918; and determined that since there was no trace of Wesley in German POW records, he had been Killed in Action on 9th October 1917.
 
Alice Buttsworth was awarded a war widow’s pension of two pounds per fortnight and infant daughter Alice Jean received one pound per fortnight. Wesley’s remains were never located. He is one of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave. Their names are inscribed on the Portland Stone Tablets under the arches of the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing at Ypres (now Ieper).
Since the 1930s, with only the brief interval of the German occupation during the Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Menin Gate Memorial at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign. The ceremony concludes with the laying of wreaths, the recitation of the ode, and the playing of the Last Post by the city’s bugle corps
The commemoration of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the Australian war artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight', which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate. The painting, which now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, toured Australia during the 1920s and 30s and drew huge crowds.
Alice Buttsworth received her husband’s service medals, a memorial plaque and scroll. She remarried and lived until the age of 96.