Rank: Private
Regimental Number: 4782
Place of Birth: East Guildford
Address: Fremantle, Western Australia.
Next of Kin: William Obre Myers, 91 Packenham Street (WW1), Fremantle WA
Enlistment Date: 23 February 1916
Unit Name: 28th Battalion
Age embarkation: 18 (16 years old)
Marital Status: Single
Occupation: Farm Hand
Date of Death: 03 November 1916
Place of Burial: France
Note: Name appears twice on the Roll of Honour.
History
28th Battalion Private Noel Norbert Obre Myers was the beloved but headstrong second son of William and Catherine nee Betts, who lived at ‘Wentworth’, Preston Point Road and, later, ‘Cantilew’, on Canning Road (now Highway), East Fremantle.
His name appears on the East Fremantle Honour Roll twice – once as N N O Myers and once as N O E L Myers. There is a star against the latter as he was killed in heavy fighting in the Battle of Flers between 3-5 November 1916, just a few dozen hours after he’d joined his unit in France.
First reported missing in action on 5 November, the agony of his parents began.
It wasn’t until May 1917 they finally received word their boy had been killed in action the previous November.
Noel, desperate to do his bit, had lied on enlistment on 16 February 1916. He said he was an 18 year old, Eneabba-born farmhand when, in reality, he was born in East Guildford, or Woodbridge, on 5 October 1899, and, barely 16, was just a schoolboy, still attending Fremantle Boys’ School.
His father explained, in his Roll of Honour Circular, that they hadn’t wanted him to go, but the stubborn lad threatened to stow away if they refused him permission, so they gave it under duress. In Salisbury, England, his father wrote, Noel heard his aunt had spoken to General Birdwood in an effort to stop him from going to the front, so instead, Noel applied to go away immediately.
He left England on 14 October 1916, a week after his 17th birthday, and reached Etaples in France two days later. On 28 October he began the journey to his unit, which he joined on 1 November, as unrelenting, drenching rain, and the passage of troops, horses and artillery churned the ground to sucking mud, and one of the coldest winters ever recorded in France descended.
Likely cut to ribbons in the hail of shrapnel and withering machine gun fire that happened at Flers, Noel lay in the frozen mud and blood of the Somme until the thaw began and, on 26 March 1917 he was found, identified from the paybook in his pocket, and buried in the nearest ground - between the trenches known as The Maze and Blue Cut, north of Guidecourt.
And there he still lies as, later, when the Graves Registration Unit moved through looking for these hastily-buried bodies, Noel’s was unable to be recovered. His name appears, just once, on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial.
Researched and written by Shannon Lovelady for www.streetsofeastfreo
Family/military connections
Sgt Myers Oswald Louis of 10th Light Horse.
MYERS, Lancelot Aloysius Obre, Private, 11th Battalion — Streets of East Freo
