Lieutenant William Aubrey Bowers

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1/5th Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment. He died of wounds on 2nd July 1916, aged 29.

 

He was born at Barlaston on 22nd January 1887, the son of William Eli Bowers and Alice (nee Blagg). His father was a Justice of the Peace and the leading colliery proprietor in the Cheadle area. William (junior) was schooled in Sailbury at the Sandroyd School, later attending both Winchester School and New College, Oxford. Graduating from Oxford in 1906 with Honours in Classics and History.

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In the early 1900s, his father brought Caverswall Castle, which William inherited along with the colliery business when his father was killed in a motor car accident in 1911. In 1913, William married Vera Aimee Latham, their daughter Penelope was born in January 1915.

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He died at Walincourt, of wounds received the day before at Gommecourt during the first hours of the Battle of the Somme. He had been assisting one of his men carry a load of barbed wire, when a shell exploded overhead and he was hit by shrapnel.

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William is named on the Park Hall Colliery war memorial, now sited outside the former Foxfield Colliery site. A stained glass window in Cheadle's Parish Church (St. Giles the Abbott) is dedicated him and two of his cousins (Charles J. B. Masefield and John H. A. Addenbrooke), who were also killed in the war. His widow erected a plaque and new choir-stalls in his memory in St Peter’s Church, Caverswall.

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