Lieutenant William Ellis Gomersall, of the 22nd Manchester Regiment, was killed in action on 1st July 1916, in the advance on Mametz. He was 21 years old.
Uncle William was born in November 1894 in Hellifield in the Craven country of Yorkshire, but his family moved to Urmston near Manchester soon after. He went to Manchester Grammar School, and matriculated in Classics in 1911. He worked with a firm of chartered Accountants until the outbreak of war, when he enlisted as a private. After several months training he was offered a commission, and after further training, on 15th May 1915 he was promoted to Lieutenant with the 22nd Manchester regiment.
A few months later he followed his regiment to France. Most of his letters home to his father and mother have been typed up, possibly by his father, Hubert Gomersall, but I'm not sure if he would have had a typewriter then. They were more likely typed by his youngest brother (and my father) Frank Gomersall, when he lived with his Mother after his Father died. The first letter in this web site is dated 13th November 1915
I have organized the letters by month, the letters from November 1915 to May 1916 are in their typed versions. As I have no typed versions of the June 1916 letters, I have simply scanned the original letters, as hand-written by Uncle William from the trenches.