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Sgt. Christopher Charles Waller
British Army C Battery, 79th Brigade Royal Field Artillery
from:Birkenhead
Born 30th of June 1887 Christopher Waller worked at Birkenhead docks at the Lairage. At some point after 1911 he went to Argentina and worked as a gaucho, the only picture we have of him is in a cowboy outfit. He returned to Birkenhead on 22nd of October 1914. From the Lairage memorial currently in Wirral Tramway and Transport Museum, about 212 volunteered and of those 90 were killed. His service records were among those lost in the Blitz, but his medal card shows he began service abroad on 15 July 1915 after training and started as an Acting Bombardier. His unit went to Dickebusch south west of Ypres initially, then to the northern gate of the town, Dixmude. I have the war diary and there is a lot more, this is just the first few months.
He was treated in a field hospital near Arras on the 31st of August 1917, at which time he was a Sergeant in C Battery of 79th Brigade RFA. A letter from his commanding officer in April 1919 says he had been acting as his gun line Sergeant-Major and right-hand man under very trying conditions for (part of) the past 15 months. The unit is stated to be 93rd Army Brigade, R.F.A., so he would have been there from about January 1918.
After the war he returned to Birkenhead and the Lairage and had six children, one of them my mother. He died in 1951 aged 64. We have sketchy details of his later life. He was a raconteur in the local bars, and a bookie of some sort. He is supposed to have been a cabin boy on a polar expedition, but I suspect this may have been one of his stories! Other than that, he seems to have had a good war. Having only recently got in touch with my cousins in the UK, Canada and Australia, and found details of his service, we are all proud to have him as our Grandfather. I visited Dickebusch (Dikkebus) last week, and will be going back to Flanders next year once I have transcribed the war diaries and found exactly where he served.
