RBR 18/9/2014

The Biscuit Boys

Section 0002

The Project
This work began life as an attempt to document the Royal Berkshire Regiment in the Great War. However it has expanded to encompass all the Berkshire Regiments and soldiers who served their country over many centuries and also the effect that war has had upon the peoples of Berkshire. It is now being provided as a website to make the results of our researches available to the public.

F Loraine Petre wrote the definitive history of the Regiment in 1925. He had the advantage of being able to talk with survivors of almost every engagement he described. His account was severely curtailed simply for lack of space and the need to cover an enormous subject in two volumes. His inspiration is gratefully acknowledged. Later many further volumes have been published by a variety of authors, several have emerged from our research and these are all noted in our bibliography

Since the Kitchener Battalions Project was launched in 1993 an incredible volume of new material has emerged from newspapers of the period, from families and from material in the Public Record Office. We are grateful to the members of the team who sifted through newspapers and records, who tracked down the families of men who fought with the regiment and exercised charm, blackmail and every variety of virtue and vice to get them to loan material for copying and also to those who patiently transcribed the material, entered it into computers and extracted new meaning from the information.

Our group was renamed 'The Royal Berkshire Regiment Great War Project'; but of necessity we had to extend our remit beyond the Great War, So in this account we have tried to provide a framework, to include the essential history of the regiment, and two aspects totally missing from Petre's book, i.e. the overall war situation and the home front in Berkshire, to complement the story of the individual battalions as they fought their way through the war. Petre's account has been embelished and expanded by verbatim reports from men who were involved and wrote home to loved ones or to the local press. At the time much of the local press was censored and it has taken a considerable effort to relate incidents from which battalion and location were censored to the incidents recorded by Petre and in the War Diaries. We still have a long way to go and there are many, as yet un-attributed, stories.

As time goes by this work will grow and become more and more complete but there will always be new material coming along, new insights and new methods of analysis. It is a task therefore which is doomed never to be completed.

For our own convenience we have assigned a number to the numerous webpages and document that can be displayed. The first digit indicates the part and in the lists provided the number may be prefixed with x to indicate a pdf document, p to indicate a webpapge and n to indicate that the part is yet to be produced.

We are keeping three quite separate objectives in mind as we produce these books and research this material. First we wish to commemorate the men from our County who fought with such valour in the first world war and whose deeds and names shall not be forgotten. Second we are keenly aware of the growing interest in family history and the desire of the men's families to learn more about their relatives' careers in the army. Finally the Royal Berkshire Regiment lived on as a constituent part, first of the Duke of Edinburgh's Royal Regiment and then of the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Regiment and now The Rifles.

A knowledge of a regiment's history is a vital part of building regimental pride and esprit de corps among present day soldiers. We have received tremendous support from both the regiment and the regimental museum and we owe a great debt of gratitude to both.

There are so many people and organisations who have helped with our research and who have freely made their material available to us that it will be impossible to acknowledge every contribution. However we will do our best.

At the top of the list is the late Colin Fox who was the inspiration for the whole project. He stimulated interest, gave us a good start and pointed us in the direction of many sources. For the last few years of his life he was an integral member of the team accompanying us on visits to the western front writing most of our first four books and mobilizing the resources of Reading University to get the books published. Next on the list comes the four other members of the project team. They brought together a rare mixture of skills and aptitudes which blended together very effectively. Ian Cull brought a background of a military childhood, a comprehensive grasp of the western front, IT skills and literary skills which enabled him to produce our fifth and sixth books. Len Webb was an inve4terate researcher who spends so much time at the National Archives that some thingks he works there. Martin McIntyre now retired, was a police inspector with a gift for interrogation. He managed to extract so much information from familes of men from the Royal Berks and had an eye for images that enabled him to identify many men from group photos and work out the context of the many hundereds of photos he unearthed. John Chapman brought IT and database skills with a passion for collecting that has taken over his house. Also as a Trustee of the regimental museum he developed many useful contacts.

This brings us to the Curators of the Regimental Museum. We started with Major John Peters who gave us access to the archives and who was a great source of information. Then he was succeeded by Lt Col David Chilton who not only possessed considerable IT skills but was able to apply them to make The Wardobe perhaps the foremost military museum in the country on the web. He also mobilised an enormous army of volunteered and extracted everything he could from the National Archives and persuaded the volunteers to transcribe these and the other records from the museum's paper archive and so build up an electonic archive. The two Colonels of the Royal Goucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Regiment have also been very supportive. Major General Robin Grist is an historian in his own right and General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue has taken a keen interest.

Now we come to the staff of several museums, archives and libraries who have helped in our research. We must mention the National Army Museum and Imperial War Museums and also the staff of other military museums, notably those of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry and the Essex Regiment. The Berkshire Records Office, Oxfordshire Archives, Reading University Library, Reading Central Library, Slough Library, Maidenhead Library and Newbury Library have also given us help and access to facilities. And we must not forget Dr Andrew Bamji whose library of medical records from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital at Sidcup gave us insight into some of the advances in reconstructive surgery made in the Great War.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Maidenhead have not only answered our questions but have taken on board suggestions we have made so we can take credit for at least one addition to the memorial at Thiepval. Researchers of other regiments have also been very helpful. We must mention Jim Parker (Machine Gun Corps), Ivor Stone (Labour Corps) and Joe Devereux (Gloucestershire Regiment) Also the denizens of establishments on the western front who have always been most welcoming and helpful. We have often looked forward to our good cup of tea at Auchonvillers. and been grateful for Paul help and guidance. We have also drawn inspiration from many members of the Western Front Association and The Military Historical Society. The families and descendants of many of the men who fought with the Royal Berks during the Great War have also made major contributions. They have made available documents, diaries and photographs. We get queries by post by e-mail and through the Guest Book on the Museum's website and are pleased to be able to try to help. Almost invariably they come back with a few snippets of information which help to fill in the bigger picture. It a bit like trying to do a million piece jigsaw when you have only a few hundred pieces and often the families provide the means of joining two pieces together.

Finally let us pay tribute to the several authors who have written regimental histories. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to F Lorraine Petre and to Captain C R M F Cruttwell whose histories of the Regiment form the basis of our work. We are also grateful to the several battalion diarists who penned their accounts of their battalions' activities often under very trying circumstances and to the numerous reporters of our local papers who interviewed almost every man home on leave or in hospital wounded to report matters which would make the official censors blush. We hope the Germans were not reading the Berkshire papers!!




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