1/3rd Gloucestershire Battery, 1st South Midland Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
Edwin Henry Woodward was born at 64 Widden Road, Gloucester in early 1897.
He was the only child of Frank who was a pattern maker with the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Waggon Works and his wife Emma.
Prior to the start of the Great War Edwin was employed as a clerk with the Education Department of of Gloucestershire County Council at Shire Hall and lived with his parents at 18 St Paul’s Road in Gloucester.
Thanks to the survival at the National Archives of his Pension Record, quite a lot of information is available on his Army service.
He enlisted into the Territorial Force, for the duration of the war, on 14 November 1915 and was posted to the 1/3rd Battery, 1st South Midland Brigade, Royal Field Artillery and spent the period from enlistment until 23 March 1916 in the UK.
From the 24 March until 9 July 1916 he was with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front.
When serving with the BEF he contracted pleurisy and was sent back to the UK for treatment at the 5th Northern General Hospital, Leicester, where he stayed until 14 September 1916.
He returned to duty at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain, however his stay was short as on 8 October he was admitted to the Military Hospital located there. He was diagnosed with tuberculous peritonitis and was discharged from the Army as unfit for further military service on 6 December 1916.
The medical board noted that he was ‘wasted and in poor health’, his condition being related to his experiencing exposure to inclement weather during service.
He was granted a Silver War Badge, to denote discharge on medical grounds and the Medical Board noted his now total incapacity and the fact that he was going to enter a sanatorium.
His total Army service had amounted to one year and 23 days, of which 108 days were spent on the Western Front.
Upon discharge from the Army he entered Over Hospital near Gloucester, which was a hospital for infectious diseases (which opened in 1903 and was closed in 1991). There he died on Christmas Day, 25 December 1916 at the age of 19.
Various local papers carried a notice of his death and the Gloucestershire Journal of 6 January 1917 reported his funeral, which took place at East End Tabernacle on 30 December, prior to his interment at Gloucester Old Cemetery.
A private headstone marks his grave and also buried in the same plot is his mother, who died in 1945, aged 77. His father lived until 1954, aged 85 .
Gunner Edwin Woodward is commemorated on the Gloucester War Memorial.
The Pension Record which has survived in the National Archives, contains a copy of Edwin’s Attestation Form for service with the Territorial Force. There are hand-written notes added to it.
One says his date of birth to be ‘5/8/1896 Gloucester’ and the other he ‘enlisted for service with his brother’. Both of these annotations are questionable because his birth was not registered until the first quarter of 1897 and the age quoted on his headstone (and on the newspaper death notice) is 19. The annotation date would have made his 20th birthday to have been on the day quoted.
According to the 1911 Census Frank and Emma Woodward had only one child within their sixteen year marriage and therefore there was no ‘brother’ linked to Edward’s enlistment so this is probably a case of a ‘clerical error’.
Research by Graham Adams 27 July 2018