Bickle, Allan Edgar

Son of Mrs Annie M Bickle, Bookseller, of 48 Hampton Park, Redland. Younger brother to William A, and older brother to Harold P, Dorothy Gladys, Winifred Joyce. Both William and Allan assisted with the family bookselling business.

 

Bickle was born on 18/08/1889, and attended the School from 1899-1904. He served as a Private in the Army, with the Royal Berkshire Regiment 1st/4th Bn.. Bickle sadly lost his life on 27/08/1917, as a result of the War.

 

He is remembered on Tyne Cot Memorial, Belgium, Panels 105 to 106, and 162.

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Highbury Chapel, Memorial Service to the Fallen (Western Daily Press 7th June 1920)

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Yesterday morning an impressive service was conducted by the Rev. Dr. H. Arnold Thomas at Highbury Chapel in memory of the young men connected with that chapel who had been killed in the war. The preacher took for his text, “Zebulon and Naphthali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field” (Judges v., 18). In the course of the sermon he said that building, with which for most of them so many happy and sacred memories were associated was that day-still further enriched by the simple, but not he trusted less significant or beautiful, memorable tablet which they had set up in honour of those members of their families who gave their lives for their country in the late war. They needed no such monument to keep them from forgetting those who made so great a sacrifice on their behalf. Their names were graven on their hearts. They would never cease to think of them with affection and gratitude. In some strange way they seemed to be ever with them still.

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 “One by one they step into the ancient place, and we that thought ourselves alone meet in the shattered homesteads of the heart, the old familiar touch.”

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However near they might think them to be to them sometimes in person, they had none the less felt it to be both a satisfaction and a duty to inscribe their names upon their walls, that they might remain there so long as the walls themselves were left standing. They were not men who had any natural love for war. There was not one of them, so far as he knew, who had had any inclination to choose the Army as a profession, and most of them were already embarked on peaceful careers in which they had good promise of happiness and success. But the summons came, and they arose and left their work and their bright prospects, not without some pain and shrinking, as he knew from what one and another said to him, but without any display as of men who were doing anything difficult or heroic. It was a tremendous ordeal but they faced it with calm courage, and even with a brave show of cheerfulness. And now the record of what they did, stood there confronting that pulpit a sermon in stone. So they, being dead, would yet speak to them. They died in their early prime, but they did not die in vain. Therefore “we greet them again with tender words and grave.” Who, “saving us themselves they could not save; who kept the house unharmed their fathers built so fair, who found the secret of the word that saith Service is sweet, for all true life is death.” The tablet, which is of marble, bears the names of Alexander D. Anderson, Henry Ryan Bennett, Allen E. Bickle, Norman Durant, Bernard Roy Edgar, Charles Sidney Garlick, Wallace L. Hilljer, Frank W. Terrell, Arnold W. Tratman, Francis V. Tratmen and Michael Seacombe Wills. Mr George Oatley is responsible for the design of the memorial.