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61st (South Midland) Division, Royal Engineers 16th Oct 1915 The Derby Scheme 1st Dec 1915 Derby Scheme Armlets 11th Sep 1915 Last day of Derby Scheme Recruitment 10th Jan 1916 Group System Reopens 9th February 1916 Call Ups If you can provide any additional information, please add it here. Want to know more about the Royal Engineers? There are:8880 items tagged Royal Engineers available in our Library   These include information on officers, regimental histories, letters, diary entries, personal accounts and information about actions during the Great War. Those known to have served with 61st (South Midland) Division, Royal Engineers during the Great War 1914-1918. Bamber George. Sgt. All names on this list have been submitted by relatives, friends, neighbours and others who wish to remember them, if you have any names to add or any recollections or photos of those listed, please Add a Name to this List Records of 61st (South Midland) Division, Royal Engineers from other sources. The Wartime Memories Project is the original WW1 and WW2 commemoration website. 1st of September 2024 marks 25 years since the launch of the Wartime Memories Project. Thanks to everyone who has supported us over this time. Want to find out more about your relative's service? Want to know what life was like during the Great War? Our Library contains many many diary entries, personal letters and other documents, most transcribed into plain text. Looking for help with Family History Research?    Please see Family History FAQ's Please note: We are unable to provide individual research. Can you help? The free to access section of The Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers and funded by donations from our visitors. If the information here has been helpful or you have enjoyed reaching the stories please conside making a donation, no matter how small, would be much appreciated, annually we need to raise enough funds to pay for our web hosting or this site will vanish from the web. If you enjoy this site please consider making a donation. Announcements 19th Nov 2024     Please note we currently have a massive backlog of submitted material, our volunteers are working through this as quickly as possible and all names, stories and photos will be added to the site. If you have already submitted a story to the site and your UID reference number is higher than 264989 your submission is still in the queue, please do not resubmit. Wanted: Digital copies of Group photographs, Scrapbooks, Autograph books, photo albums, newspaper clippings, letters, postcards and ephemera relating to the Great War. If you have any unwanted photographs, documents or items from the First or Second World War, please do not destroy them. The Wartime Memories Project will give them a good home and ensure that they are used for educational purposes. Please get in touch for the postal address, do not sent them to our PO Box as packages are not accepted. World War 1 One ww1 wwII greatwar great battalion regiment artillery Did you know? We also have a section on World War Two. and a Timecapsule to preserve stories from other conflicts for future generations. 239815 Sgt. George Bamber 61st (South Midland) Division Royal Engineers My grandfather George Bamber fought with the Royal Engineers and was captured by the Germans in France and gassed. He was temporarily blinded and left permanently with weak lungs. He joined up in 1914 when he was a mature 34. I never had the privilege of knowing him since he died of a stroke when my mother was in the early stages of pregnancy with me. He left school at 14 and became an apprentice engineer, finally ending up as a factory inspector. George was a talented cornet player and played solo in front of Queen Victoria. A mark of his talent is that he must have only been 20 when he performed before her since she died in 1901. He lost three sons in infancy. The next arrival was Hilda in 1910, Leonard in 1912 and finally my father Ronald in 1916. These tragedies left their mark and he took to drink. He was always sloping off to the off-licence to buy bottles of Guinness before band practice or rehearsing in his bedroom. But he cured himself of alcoholism; and when he died, my grandmother found a crisp 50 pound note in his pocket. He was a good-natured man and despite his travails had a well-developed sense of humour. At one stage Grandma got a telegram from the War Office that ran something along the following lines: "This is to inform you that your son/father/husband/brother George Bamber has been killed in action/captured/wounded (strike out as applicable)." But nothing had been struck out. She immediately hotfooted it to the police station where the duty sergeant licked his pencil and said something like "Right missis, nothing we can do about it at this hour. Have to wait till morning when they're open." So poor Grandma was left having kittens. Shortly afterwards as my grandmother was walking through Bristol with the pram carrying two-year-old Leonard and holding four-year-old Hilda's hand she was approached by a gypsy woman bearing a sprig of heather. She merely said "He's all right and is coming home soon." And he indeed did. When he was captured by the Germans they were being marched through a remote village, and a local woman took pity on them and tried to give them food. If they were caught doing this, then the food was confiscated and the woman beaten. One of them succeeded in giving Grandpa a baked potato which he surreptitiously put down his trousers, giving himself a serious burn. He was the oldest of eight children of George Bamber and the indomitable Mary Anne Freeth, who ruled the family with a rod of iron. What she said went. Grandpa George had to lock his trunk so that Mary Anne couldn't pawn his clothes. John Bamber Add to this record. Recomended Reading. Available at discounted prices.

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