Bank Top House
John Lawrence Baugust Private 432044 - 49th Bn. Canadian Infantry (Alberta Regiment) Killed in action Wednesday 4th July, 1917 Buried La Chaudiere Military Cemetery, Vimy, Pas de Calais, France. John Lawrence Baugust was the son of Henry Thomas and Clara, born in 1897, in Gnosall. He was christened in St. Lawrence Church on 29 September 1897. Henry Thomas Baugust married Clara Annie Bates in Leicester in 1886. They had both become teachers. By 1891 the couple were working in Hilderstone, near Stone in Staffordshire, living in the school house with their one year old son, Reginald Edmund. A daughter, Margeret H. was also born in Hilderstone, in 1894. Henry became head teacher at Gnosall Parochial School on 24 th  June 1895. Clara was also engaged to teach at the same time. An older sister, Constance Annie was christened in the parish in 1895. On 29 th  November 1895 their 5 year old son Reginald Edmund died of meningitis. The 1901 census shows the family were living at Bank Top House (which coincidentally had been a private school in earlier times). By 1911 Henry and Clara’s family appears to have split up. 19 years old son Ronald Henry is a Bank Clerk living in Stoke on Trent as a boarder. 15 years old daughter Constance Annie BAUGUST is a student living with an uncle in Leicester and her sister, Margaret Helen Baugust was living with, and housekeeping for, her widowed grandfather (retired shoemaker) and her aunt (school mistress) in Leicester. It seems that in the 1911 Canadian census, John Baugust is living in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Canada. John Lawrence Baugust enlisted into the “49 th  Battalion, Canadian Infantry (Alberta Regiment)”on 4 th  January 1915 at Edmonton, Alberta, Canada He was killed in action Wednesday 4th July, 1917 Buried La Chaudiere Military Cemetery, Vimy, Pas de Calais, France. Awarded Military Medal for conspicuous gallantry 8th June 1917.  1914-15 Star, British War Medal, and Victory Medal His regimental record says “Son of Henry Thomas Baugust of Edmonton, Alberta. Brother of Margaret Adams, of Loughton, Essex, England.” (Margaret had married Arthur Adams in 1914 in Leicester)
La Chaudiere Military Cemetery, Vimy, Pas de Calais, France. Vimy Ridge was taken by the Canadian Corps in April 1917 in the Battle of Vimy Ridge, although the 25th and 47th (London) Divisions had also been involved in heavy fighting there in May 1916. The cemetery was made at the foot of the ridge, on the north-eastern side, next to a house which had contained a camouflaged German gun position. It remained very small until the summer of 1919, when graves were brought in from many other small cemeteries and isolated sites (some of these from the 1916 fighting) on or near the ridge. At this time, the cemetery was known as Vimy Canadian Cemetery No.1. There are now 908 servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in this cemetery. 314 of the burials are unidentified but there are special memorials to a number of casualties known to be buried among them. Other special memorials commemorate men whose graves in some of the concentrated cemeteries had been destroyed in subsequent fighting.