SKELTON - IN - CLEVELAND
IN HISTORY
"WE WILL REMEMBER THEM"

Serjeant J W SKIPPER.

10602 9th Bn, Yorkshire Regiment.

who died, aged 27, on the 9th October 1916.

Eldest son of John and Mary Skipper of Massingham, King's Lynn, Norfolk.
Husband of Minnie E. Wooding (formerly Skipper), of Castle Ashby, Northampton.


Dernancourt Communal Cemetery Extension.
[Shown by kind permission of ww1cemeteries.com].

Sgt Skipper's name appears on the North Skelton War Memorial and the plaque in Skelton Church.
A Skelton Parish Magazine gives his address at time of War as 16 Vaughan St, N Skelton.
Family connection in Skelton not yet traced.

The 9th (Service) Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment was formed at Richmon on the 22nd September 1914.
It was attached to the 69th Brigade of the 23rd Division.
The Division, like most, was involved in the Battle of the Somme, which began at the end of June 1916 and was pursued with a series of offensives into the winter of that year.
Sgt Skipper lost his life during the final stages - the Battle of Le Transloy.
With the successful conclusion of the preceding Battle of Morval at the end of September, the Fourth Army of Lieutenant General Henry Seymour Rawlinson had finally captured the third line of Germany defences on the Somme.
Unfortunately, while there had only been three lines at the start of the Somme battle in July, the Germans had not been idle during the slow Allied advance and Rawlinson's army was now confronted by a fourth line of defences along the Transloy ridge beyond which fifth and sixth lines were under construction.
The prospect of a breakthrough seemed as distant as ever.
Nevertheless, the United Kingdom commander-in-chief, General Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, still had plans to achieve a breakthrough involving his three armies on the Somme; the Fourth Army in the south, the British Reserve Army (later the Fifth Army) in the centre and the British Third Army of General Edmund Allenby in the north.
The first step was the capture of the Transloy line by the Fourth Army.
The battle, which opened on 1 October, began well with the capture of Eaucourt L'Abbaye by the British 47th (1/2nd London) Division as well as an advance along the Albert, France-Bapaume road towards Le Sars.
The advance was resumed on the 7th of October and Le Sars was taken by the British 23rd Division, but progress elsewhere was stalled.
The weather was rapidly deteriorating and the battlefield, which had been pummelled to dust by relentless arillery bombardment over the preceding three months, turned to a quagmire.
Rawlinson mounted further attacks on 12 October, 18 October and 23 October but there was little chance of a significant gain.
The last effort came on 5 November despite protests from some corps commanders who believed continued attacks to be futile.
Dernancourt, where Sgt Skipper is buried, is a village 3 kilometres south of Albert.
The XV Corps Main Dressing Station was formed at Dernancourt in August 1916, when the adjoining Extension was opened.
At the Armistice, the extension contained more than 1,700 burials; it was then enlarged when graves were brought in from small cemeteries and isolated positions in the immediate neighbourhood.
The extension now contains 2,162 Commonwealth burials and commemorations of the First World War.