27 Hubert Charles Ayres

Corporal: 10th Battalion South Wales Borderers Rifle volleys and the sound of bugles playing "The Last Post" rang around Avening on Saturday the 15th of June 1918. This was for the funeral of Hubert Ayres who had died in Cardiff Military Hospital the previous Sunday. He had received injuries to his spine during action in France but we are unsure as to when or where this happened. Newspaper reports tell us that he joined the Army in November 1914 and it would have taken some time for him to be trained for frontline service. Subsequently, he left for France on the 3rd of December 1915. Hubert, born on Saturday the 11th of February 1893, was baptised in our church six weeks later. He was the second child of eight children born to John Ayres and Lucy Ann née Ind, who had married, also in our church, on the 13th September 1890. Their youngest child, Edward, was born in April 1905. Lucy Ann was solid Avening stock and her ancestry can be taken back to well into the 18th century but John was a Frampton man whose father, William, came from Sherston. The family lived in a four-roomed cottage in Church Street in 1901. (The cottages forming that street between The Bell and the School were demolished some years later and our Memorial Hall now stands on the site.) Hubert and his brothers and sisters became orphans by 1911 as Lucy Ann died in 1909 and John two years later. At the moment it is hard to see who brought the family up although Ernest, the eldest, was twenty and Hubert eighteen when their father passed away. The eldest daughter, Winifred was just sixteen so may have taken up the care of the family. Hubert never married and his family would have received his three medals (1915 Star, Victory Medal and British Medal) along with the bronze medallion awarded for his sacrifice. His Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone can be seen in the churchyard, just a few yards away from that of his uncle, Dick Ayres, who had been killed in 1915 (Roll of Honour No. 6). Have a look—it is in the back, right hand side of the churchyard, near the top gate.