BERTRAM HAROLD WALLER

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BERTRAM HAROLD WALLER (1886 – 1961) 

Bertram Waller’s religion is entered as ‘PB’ in his army service records which suggests that he was a member of the Plymouth Brethren. We can’t be sure because that’s the only evidence we’ve got. His case isn’t included amongst the other men who claimed exemption and who came before the Middlesex Tribunal some time after early 1916. This means we don’t know how he would have described himself.

Bertram, like Thomas his father, was born in Hackney, while his mother came from the Bristol area of Gloucestershire. He was the second oldest of four of their five surviving children. Thomas was a foreman blind maker working for a government department, Bertram’s older brother, William, was a litho printer, his sister Daisy was a piano teacher and his younger brother, Frederick, was a brassworker at the time of the 1911 census.

What know from the Pearce Register, is that he was a wholesale fruiterer and a member of the Plymouth Brethren. He was living at 3 Ashmount Road, South Tottenham, and age 31 in 1918. He is recorded as single but he and Eva Alice had married in 1912. He joined the Non-Combatant Corps  in January 1918 at Stratford, London and posted to the 11 Eatern Corps in July and the 4 Southern Corps in October, serving all his time in this country, before being demobilised in January 1920.

The Plymouth Brethren claimed to be recognized as non–combatants as distinct from conscientious objectors. A such they experienced reproach during WW1 for refusing to carry arms. Bertram must have claimed an exemption from military service and accepted Non-Combatant status.

Bertram’s military service records show that his service was reckoned from January 1918 which is very late, given that he was 31 and so well within the age groups being conscripted.

After the war, he and Eva Alice were living in Enfield and then later, in the 1930s they move to South Tottenham and then back to Southgate, at 25 Melbourne Avenue and are still there until 1956. Bertram dies in 1960, at Birdlip, in Gloucestershire.

Joanna Bornat