SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM CHARLES TRIMMER
OXFORDSHIRE AND BUCKINGHAMSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY
21ST JULY 1916 AGE 19
BURIED: POZIERES BRITISH CEMETERY, OVILLERS-LA-BOISELLE, FRANCE
The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon it passeth it away, and we are gone.
Psalm 90:10
from the Book of Common Prayer
"The days of our age are threescore years and ten": William Charles Trimmer was 19. None of those who died in the First World War reached the age of 70. But in the great scheme of things, as the psalm from which this is quoted says: 'A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night ... so soon it passeth away and we are gone'. 'And we are gone', together with the issues that were so important, so earth shattering. And now that all those who could remember the young men who fought and died are gone - and those who remember the dead of the Second World War are fast disappearing too - we should not just be remembering THAT they died but that intolerance, ignorance and nationalism helped cause their deaths. Is this not what Remembrance should also be about today?
Trimmer's mother chose his inscription. She and her husband had two children, one son and one daughter, Dorothy. A young boy fresh from school, William Charles was commissioned into the 1st Buckinghamshire Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
On the night of the 20th/21st July the Battalion was ordered to carry out an attack on the German positions between Ovillers and Pozieres. This was to be the Battalion's first serious attack. Zero hour was fixed for 2.45 am. At 2.30 the Germans, obviously expecting something, opened up their machine guns and kept them firing after 2.45 so that when the signal came to advance few men got very far. Casualties in the Battalion amounted to 154; Trimmer was among the twelve who were killed.
Dorothy Trimmer was therefore her parents' only surviving child. She married in 1919, a man who added her surname to his own so that she became Dorothy Trimmer-Thompson. Their son, Charles Edward Adrian Trimmer-Thompson, was killed in action in North Africa on 17 March 1943.