The Bedfordshire Regiment in the Great War

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1st Battalion Officers (2)

Captain Basil John ORLEBAR

3rd (Reserve) Battalion, attached 1st Battalion

Basil John Orlebar was born on the 8th of September 1875 and educated privately and at the Currie Engineering Schools Folkestone and was for some years a civil engineer in the employment of several leading firms. He joined the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment in November 1909 becoming Lieutenant in March 1911 and Captain in June 1912 qualifying at the Hythe School of Musketry.

 

He joined the battalion from the 3rd battalion (the regimental reserves) on the 4th September 1914, having been rushed across the channel after the heavy losses at Mons the previous month. He was present at the engagements of Crepy (en Laonnais), the Aisne, the Marne, Givency, Festubert, La Bassee, Neuve Chappelle and Neuve Eglise. However on the 15th January 1915 he was killed instantly when a shell landed on top of his dugout as his Company held the front line trenches at Wulverghem, just west of Messines.

 

He was the son of Mr and Mrs John Orlebar of Silsoe in Bedfordshire and the husband of Barbera Florance Orlebar from The Dene, Triangle in Yorkshire, whom he married on the 12th September 1912. He is buried in the Dranoutre Churchyard which lies a few kilometers west of where he was killed.

Captain Orlebar gained great credit in the field for his soldierly qualities and died, to quote the words of one of his men, "a soldier and a gentleman".

 

(My thanks to John Hamblin for the obituary information)

2nd Lieutenant John Hewitt Sutton MOXLY (Moxley)

4th (Extra Reserve) Battalion attd 1st Battalion

 

John was born on the 27th of December 1891, the second son of the late Rev J.H.Sutton Moxly, Principal Chaplin to His Majesty's forces. He was educated at Victoria College Jersey where he took the King's Gold Medal for classics and was head of his school. In 1910 he was elected to a King Charles I Scholarship at Pembroke College Oxford. There he obtained a second in Honour Mods. and a second in Greats, and was preparing for the Civil Service when war broke out.

 

He applied for an Officers commission immediately and was gazetted into the 4th (Reserve) battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment on the 15th of August 1914 and landed in France on the 2nd January 1915, joining the battalion within days. John spent the time he served in the battalion around Wulverghem and St. Eloi, south of Ypres and endured the daily sniping and shelling duels that typified the first winter of the war.

 

On the 12th March he was sent for by the O.C. to supervise the repair of a section of trench that had been blown in, as the Company Captain next to his post had been wounded. Whilst lifting a wire entanglement onto the parapet he was killed instantly by a sniper who “shot him through the heart”. His commanding officer wrote "It was the death of a brave and devoted gentleman. He was always the same; resourceful, alert, loved by officers and men, as good an officer as one could ever wish to meet"

 

He had served just two months in the trenches before he was killed on the 13th of March 1915 near St Eloi, aged 23. John is buried in the Ramparts Cemetery in Ypres itself.

(My thanks to John Hamblin for the Roll of Honour information and Martyn Smith who forwarded his obituary that was shown in the St.Neots and County Times, 3rd April 1915)

More 1st Battalion photograph pages:

1st Battalion Officers (2)

1st Battalion 'Other Ranks' (1)

Biography of Private 7602 Edward Warner who won the Victoria Cross on Hill 60 in May 1915