Private William Bernard Nankervis, 23rd Battalion, AIF
Australian War MemorialWilliam Nankervis was born in 1895, the second son of James and Bessie Nankervis of Long Gully, Victoria. His father was a miner who went on to work as manager of the United Ulster mine. William was educated at the Gravel Hill State School in Bendigo, and later found employment as a salesman for Mr. Warren’s drapery establishment.
William Nankervis enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in May 1915. After undergoing a period of training in Australia he left for active service overseas with reinforcements to the 23rd Battalion the following July. In a relatively short period of time he reached the Gallipoli Peninsula, arriving as the major campaigns of August were dying down, and spent the remaining months of the campaign manning the hard-won Australian positions at Lone Pine. Two days after Christmas 1915 he embarked for Egypt again.
After several months training in the Egyptian desert, Private Nankervis’s battalion was sent to France to fight on the Western Front. Within a fortnight the battalion had been put into the front line in a quiet sector near Armentieres in order to get experience of trench warfare conditions. However, this did little to prepare the men for their first major operation near the French village of Pozieres in late July 1916.
On 29 July 1916 the 2nd Australian Division attacked two strongly-held German trenches to the north-east of Pozieres, known as the O.G. Lines. Held up by swathes of uncut barbed wire, the attack failed with heavy casualties. During the operation the 23rd Battalion manned the left flank, attempting to advance a short way to the north, but were unsuccessful.
After more than a week of preparations, the attack against the O.G. Lines was renewed, with the 23rd Battalion now taking part in directly attacking the German trenches. The attack began at 9.15pm on 4 August, and the German positions were successfully captured.
But the operation to capture the OG Lines was costly to the men of the 2nd Australian Division. In the midst of the battlefield, a lieutenant from Nankervis’s 23rd Battalion described what he saw:
I write from the battlefield of the Great Push with thousands of shells passing in a tornado overhead, and thousands of unburied dead around me. The horrors one sees and the never-ending shock of the shells is more than can be borne … we are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless.
When the 23rd Battalion was relieved on 7 August, half of its strength was wounded, killed, or missing. One of those who did not return was William Nankervis.
It would take some time for military authorities to determine his fate. Private Gordon Cullum, who was in the same platoon as Nankervis, stated that two hours Nankervis was in the reserve line trench before the second attack on the OG Lines when Cullum had to leave to go forward with the machine-gun section. He never saw him again.
It was not until 17 December 1917, 16 months after Nankervis went missing, that the inquiry formally determined that Private William Nankervis had been killed in action. It appears that Nankervis was continuing to dig his own jumping-off position for the attack when he was hit by an artillery shell and killed. However, with many witnesses killed or hospitalised, this story is based on rumour, rather than being a definitive account of Nankervis’s death.
What is certain is that his body was never recovered from the battlefield, and today Private William Nankervis is commemorated on the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. He was 21 years old.
- AWM Honour Roll https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/R1646147
