Samuel Percy Closs – Private 18544 East Lancashire Regiment
Killed in Action Sunday 9th April 1916 AGE: 21
He was born in Mathern, the son of John Maynard & Elizabeth Closs, who we think lived near the top of Pwllmeyric hill, John being at one time a Churchwarden at Mathern. He was a brother of the late Bessie Bryant, whose son George still lives in Mathern.
Samuel enlisted at Newport giving his address as Mathern. The Chepstow Weekly advertiser gave his current address as Mounton House, so it may be that he was ‘living in’ there as a member of staff. He joined the Welsh Regiment and was at first in D Company, with the service number 11328. On 1st August 1915 was serving on Gallipoli but later he was transferred to D Company of the 6th Battalion East Lancashire Regiment, fighting in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and “presumed dead” on 9th April. This was at the start of a long campaign to liberate Kut Al Imara near the site of ancient Babylon – it took 12 months!
The predicament of Sam and his comrades has come to light via the Regimental Diary: they laid out all night in readiness for the charge on Sannaiyat – the order came at 4.20am. When they were still 250 yards from the enemy’s trenches the sky was lit up by flares and immediately they were cut down by shell, machine gun and rifle fire.
Sam has no known grave and is listed on the Basra memorial, 250 miles away from where he was killed. He is entitled to the 1915 Star Trio.
The Basra Memorial
Basra is the southernmost city of Iraq, situated near the Persian Gulf. The Memorial consists of a roofed colonnade of white Indian stone, 80 meters long, with an obelisk 16 meters high as the central feature. The names are engraved on slate panels fixed to the wall behind the columns: there are more than 40,000names of Britons, Indians and West Africans who died in the Mesopotamia campaign between autumn 1914 and summer 1921. Robert’s name is on panel 19.
The memorial was originally sited within the Basra War Cemetery but following a presidential decree from Saddam Hussein it was rebuilt in 1997 20 miles to the west. The new site, where the memorial has been perfectly reconstructed, is the middle of what was a major battleground during the 1983 Gulf War and only about 20 miles from the Kuwait border.