Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

 
Sam Gourley was born in Ballyskeagh, County Down, Northern Ireland; the son of John and Agnes Gourley. He attended school at Ballyrogan and then probably worked as a labourer on farms in the Lisburn area on the outskirts of Belfast.
 
According to Sam’s mother, he emigrated to Australia at the age of 22, around the beginning of 1914. It is likely that he was accompanied by his brother Robert who also settled in Queensland. When Sam presented himself for enlistment at Brisbane on 2nd March 1916, he was 24 years old. He named his mother back in Northern Ireland as his next of kin and stated his occupation as farm labourer of Gayndah. Sam also reported that he had served three months with the Ulster Volunteers.
 
Sam was placed into a depot battalion at the Enoggera camp but by the 25th April, he had been sent to the isolation camp at Lytton with a case of gonorrhoea. Dealing with venereal cases caused ongoing issues for the authorities throughout the war due to the ineffectiveness of treatments available. Sufferers were put into isolation wards within a hospital or in some cases sent to camps until the symptoms of the disease had subsided. In the case of particularly virulent strains, a cure was unlikely. Sam spent a total of 148 days at Lytton, during which time his training suffered. He was discharged from Lytton on 25th October 1916. Two days later, Sam boarded the “Marathon” in Brisbane as part of the 17th reinforcements of the 25th Infantry Battalion, part of the 7th Brigade of the 2nd Division AIF. During the voyage, Sam spent some time in the ship’s hospital under observation, probably due to his VD flaring up.
 
The Marathon docked at Plymouth on 9th January 1917 and the reinforcements were marched out the transit camp at Durrington. On 16th January, Sam was in the Bulford VD Hospital with the recurrence of his gonorrhoea infection; he would spend a further 56 days in the VD ward. Army procedure was to treat VD as a self-inflicted injury and sufferers were denied pay for the period of the hospitalisation. Sam had spent a total of over 200 days in VD wards and had lost pay amounting to around 50 pounds, for the time a sizable amount.
 
On 25th April 1917, exactly a year since being marched into Lytton Camp, Sam began a journey from England to France and then on to the 25th Battalion which was preparing to go into the line at the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt. Given the amount of time Sam had spent in isolation, his level of training would have been quite low. It is more than likely that he was kept out of the attack at Bullecourt.
 
Bullecourt was the last action the 25th was engaged in on the Somme. The battalion was withdrawn from front line duties for an extended period of rest, reorganisation and rebuilding after extensive operations on the Somme since the previous July.
For the latter half of 1917, the British Forces under Douglas Haig shifted their focus from France to Belgium with a plan to drive out of the Ypres salient towards the Belgian channel ports, thus denying the German navy of an easy route to the Atlantic. The campaign which became formally the 3rd Battle of Ypres, was based on a plan to take small “bites” out of the German defences with overwhelming force and the “hold” those gains as a springboard to the next objective. All five divisions of the AIF would play a part in this offensive which began in June 1917 at Messines. During July and August, the 2nd Division’s preparation was underway for the start of the “bite and hold” advance beginning in the ancient city of Ypres and heading east along the line of the Menin Road across the fields of Flanders towards the Passchendaele Ridge.
 
For its part in this grand strategy, the 7th Brigade was put into the fight at Menin Road in September and then again at Broodseinde Ridge in early October. The generals were fortunate with the weather in those early battles but by the middle of October, the low lying swampy ground of the battlefields were turned into a sea of stinking, clinging mud with the arrival of unseasonal flooding rains. Men, horses and wagons became stuck in the mud. Artillery sank into the ooze after the firing of a single shot and had to be man hauled out.
 
As the Flanders campaign floundered, Douglas Haig made a decision which condemned him to history when he ordered that the assault on Passchendaele should continue, whatever the cost. It was obvious to the field commanders that the conditions were exhausting their troops even before they reached the front line areas but Haig continued to order assault after assault, all of which bogged down. To compound the difficulties for the infantrymen in the trenches, the German artillery continued to hit the front and support lines with shrapnel and gas, mainly mustard gas.
 
Passchendaele would eventually be captured, not by Australians but by Canadians. However it was clear that the plan to advance to the Belgian ports had failed. The front was closed down for another winter and the Australian divisions went into comfortable billets around Poperinghe for a sustained rest before beginning a rotation in and out of the line in the area of Ploegsteert Wood during January and February 1918. During this relatively quiet period, Sam was granted 18 days leave to England, perhaps giving him enough time to cross the Irish Sea to visit his parents.
 
The German Command had been gifted a small window in which a major offensive could be launched in 1918, due to the collapse of the Eastern Front and an armistice with Russia. The resultant superiority in troop numbers available for the Western Front would be negated once the United States could muster its large conscript army in France.
 
The British Commander on the Western Front, General Douglas Haig, was anticipating a large German offensive in the Spring of 1918. Haig incorrectly guessed that the main thrust of the offensive would be in Flanders and he kept his best troops, the Australian divisions in Flanders to be ready to meet an attack.
 
The Spring Offensive began on 21st March 1918; but not in Flanders. The German blitzkrieg was aimed back along the old battlefields of the Somme in France. Haig began to shift most of the AIF divisions to the Somme to defend Amiens. Beginning on 2nd April, the 25th Battalion travelled by bus, train and forced march to arrive in a defensive position on the south bank of the Somme. This area was virgin battlefield and there were few pre-existing defences. When in the line, the Australians had to dig a series of forward posts while under observation by enemy aircraft, and then join the posts up into one firing line. By the end of April, the German advance had been halted in front of Amiens by two brigades of Australian infantry. The Australian Corps Commander John Monash had his troops engage in harassment and active patrolling at night to unsettle the enemy through May. On 23rd May, Sam reported sick to the 61st Casualty Clearing Station. He was diagnosed with pneumonia and died on 26th May 1918.
 
Samuel Gourley was buried in the Vignacourt British Cemetery. His personal effects and the residual of his personal estate was passed to his brother, Robert Gourley, of Greenslopes, South Brisbane. When the imperial War Graves Commission erected permanent headstones in official cemeteries, Samuel’s mother chose the following inscription:
EVER REMEMBERED BY HIS SORROWING MOTHER