John Byron NOEL (1891-1969)

John Byron Noel (1891-1969) was the son of Major Gerard Noel, Justice of the Peace for Gloucestershire who was a prominent person in the locality.

was born on 6th April 1891 in London, the second of four children of Major Gerard Thomas Noel and his wife, Edith Mary.  He was baptised the following month at Sedgehill, Wiltshire.

He was educated at St Aubyns, Rottingdean, and Eton College which he left in 1909.  After passing out from the Royal Military College in 1910, he was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.  At the time of the 1911 census he was living at Temple Guiting near Winchcombe.

At the start of the First World War, Second Lieutenant J B Noel, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, was part of the Expeditionary Force which arrived in France on 16th August 1914.  A report received by the War Office from General Headquarters of the Expeditionary Force on 1st September 1914 said that he had been killed in action and this was duly reported in the casualty lists in the press.  It was later revealed that he was being held at Torgau Prisoner of War camp.

Lieutenant Noel was later released and went on to serve in France and North Russia.  He was awarded the Military Cross in 1920 for his work with a Volunteer Battalion Karelian Regiment south of Unitsa, North Russia on 2nd August 1919.  John applied for the 1914 Star in October 1919 when his address was then Temple Guiting, Winchcombe.

John married Rosamond Alers Hankey on 20th September 1924 at All Saints, Margaret Street, Marylebone, London.  They emigrated to the Northern Transvaal, South Africa, where John took up farming, but returned to the UK on a number of occasions.

John died on 18th October 1969, aged 78; his wife died two years later.