WW1 Thomas Patrick Hoare (Service Number 23/1673)

Thomas Hoare was born 22 July 1888, the son of Richard Joseph and Margaret Hoare, of 8 Ada St., Remuera, Auckland, New Zealand.

He was a member of St. Benedict’s Sports Club and the City Junior Football Club. [1] Before enlistment he worked as a carpenter at the Railway Workshops in Newmarket, Auckland.

He enlisted in Auckland on 19 October 1915, as a Private. He was 5ft 5 1/2inches tall, with grey eyes and black hair. He embarked on 8 January 1916 from Wellington for Suez, Egypt on the vessel ‘Tahiti’ as a Rifleman, with the 3rd Reinforcements, 1st Battalion, E Company in the New Zealand Rifle Brigade.

Whilst in Egypt, was hospitalised with measles in February 1916 and returned to duty in March 1916. Thomas Patrick Hoare, as part of the newly formed New Zealand Division, left Egypt for the Flanders region in Northern Europe in early April 1916. There they were to gain experience of new trench conditions, spending the next three months guarding a ‘quiet’ sector of the line at Armentières. In late August, the entire division withdrew from Armentières and moved south to the Somme to join the XV Corps of the British Fourth Army, which was still waging an offensive begun the previous month. [2, 3]

A truly nightmarish world greeted the New Zealand Division when it joined the Battle of the Somme in early September 1916. Rain quickly turned the shell-torn battlefield into a quagmire. Soldiers huddled in their trenches, sometimes knee-deep in mud and often without proper cover not achieving a decisive breakthrough. While in France he was selected as one of a bombing party, which position, he held up to the time he was reported wounded, and then killed in action on the Somme on 20 September 1916.

He is buried at Caterpillar Valley (New Zealand) Memorial, Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval, Somme, France, and is remembered on the memorial at Otahuhu Railway Workshops War Memorial, corner of Piki Thompson Way, Otahuhu Auckland.