Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Bertie Kessels, sometimes known as Cecil, was the youngest of nine children born to Nicholas and Elizabeth Kessels on 3rd June 1894. The family had originally taken up a farming block in the Upper Mt Gravatt – Eight Mile Plains area on the southside of Brisbane and it is likely that the farm was close to Kessels Road; today a major thoroughfare.
 
Bertie’s father reported that he had been educated at a state school and then at a Christian Brother’s School. At some later stage, Nicholas and Elizabeth and at least two of their children took up a block at Degilbo on the Gayndah Line.
 
Bertie presented himself for enlistment in Maryborough on 18th October 1916. John Bramley who gave his address as Muan on the Gayndah Line also enlisted that day and it reasonable to assume that they planned to enlist together. Both young men ended up in the same battalion. Bertie’s elder brother, Leonard, had enlisted the year before and was commissioned as an officer in the 11th Light Horse.
 
After receiving travel warrants in Maryborough, Bertie and John boarded a train for Brisbane where they reported to the camp at Enoggera. Bertie was initially placed in a depot battalion and then on 19th January 1917, was allocated as part of the 9th reinforcements for the 47th Infantry Battalion, a composite unit made up of Queenslanders and Tasmanians. The reinforcements travelled to Sydney by train where they boarded the “Ayrshire” on 24th January; arriving in England on 12th April. John had sailed a moth previously as part of the 8th reinforcements of the 47th.
 
The reinforcements remained at Codford Camp on Salisbury Plain for the next three months. During that time the 47th Battalion had suffered significant casualties at Bullecourt in April and Messines in June and reinforcements were desperately needed to make up the losses. Bertie journeyed from England to the transit camp at Havre and then on to Belgium, joining the 47th in the support lines at Messines. The battalion was primarily engaged in consolidating the gains made on the first day of the battle of Messines; strengthening outposts and constructing deeper communication trenches.
 
On 19th August, while his company was holding the support trenches near Warneton, Bertie received a shrapnel wound to his left shoulder. He was treated at a casualty clearing station and once his wound was cleaned and dressed, Bertie reported to the 1st Convalescent depot at Wimereux. By the 22nd September, he was back with his battalion.
 
The 47th Battalion, as part of the 12th brigade of the 4th Australian Division had a supporting role in the 4thDivision attack on Polygon Wood in early October 1917 and was then withdrawn to prepare for the next phase of the 3rd Battle of Ypres; an attack on the Passchendaele Ridge. The series of actions that had advanced the line some distance from Ypres during September and October were a great success and the British Command became optimistic about achieving a real breakthrough before the winter set in. Unfortunately, the weather which up until the beginning of October had been sunny and dry turned, delivering an almost constant downpour which turned the ground leading up to the front into a quagmire which in the end defeated the attackers.
 
On 11th October, the 47th received movement orders to proceed from the ramparts of the city wall at Ypres along the Menin Road towards the Broodseinde Ridge and the village of Passchendaele. The battalion war diary described the conditions as “weather horrible …the going was very slow….constantly bogged, country in a bad state….all churned up by shell fire”. As the time for the attack drew nearer in the murky dawn of the 12th October, the rain fell even more heavily making the route to the jumping off tapes “impassable.” In spite of these conditions, and to his eternal discredit, General Douglas Haig ordered the attacks against the Passchendaele Ridge to continue; resulting in enormous casualties.
 
On 13th October, when the 47th withdrew from the front ,Bertie Kessels was reported as missing at roll call. He was subsequently listed as Missing in Action. Bertie’s father wrote on several occasions to Base Records in Melbourne in the hope learning more about his son’s fate. He also included a copy; which he had copied by hand, of a letter from John Bramley addressed to the Kessels, in which Private Bramley suggested that Cecil, as he called him, could not have been killed but was surely a Prisoner of War. The fact that Bertie was still listed as Missing provided the family with false hope and it was not until a court of inquiry on 11th March the following year, having allowed for sufficient time for reports from field hospitals and POW lists that Bertie was declared Killed in Action on 12th October 1917.
Surprisingly, a hand written note in Bertie’s file notes that he was buried between Zonnebeke and Passchendaele but no clue as to who had performed the burial or when.
 
At the conclusion of hostilities in 1919, work began on consolidating the many isolated battlefield graves into larger permanent cemeteries. The remains of Bertie Kessels were exhumed and he was permanently laid to rest in Tyne Cot Military Cemetery, Passchendaele. Tyne Cot is the largest Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world, containing almost 12,000 of which 8,500 are unknown. In addition, the memorial tablets of the memorial list the names of 35,000 British and New Zealanders who have known grave.