ANTHONY BATTERSBY recalls the astonishing wartime exploits of his father who later became a Church of England vicar.

REGINALD St John Beardsworth Battersby was born on 26 February 1900, the second son of the Rev Walter Schofield Battersby and his wife Susannah.

Walter was the first vicar of Blackley, then a settlement on the edge of Manchester.

I know nothing of my father's childhood except that he adored his mother and did not get on with his father.

In 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, Susannah died and St John decided to join the Army. On 30 January 1915 he walked into a recruiting office in Manchester and enlisted.

He said he had been born on 26 January 1896 and that he was a draper by trade. Accepting this subterfuge, the Army drafted him into the 14th (reserve) battalion the Manchester regiment stationed at Litchfield, where, after one week, he was made a Lance Corporal.

My grandfather, horrified that his son had enlisted as a "common soldier", asked two friends to vouch for St John so that he could receive a commission in the East Lancashire Regiment.

The headmaster of Middleton Grammar School and David McCabe, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, duly obliged and on 6 May 1915 my father, aged 15 years and two months, was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the East Lancashire Regiment, serving with the 10th and 3rd battalions before joining the 11th, the famous Accrington Pals.

I think he was the youngest commissioned officer in the British Army in the Great War.

My father trained with his regiment at home bases until April 1916 when he went to France to join the battalion. His time on the Western Front was typical of so many, best described as weeks of sheer boredom interspersed by moments of sheer terror.

From the stories he told me it seems that the horrors of the front did not heavily impinge on his young mind. I remember him telling me how they used to go on raids to the German wire and how one night, after he and his batman were surprised by a German patrol, they both escaped by throwing pepper into the eyes of the enemy.

On another occasion they were in a part of the front which had been fought over in the Franco-Prussian war 40 years earlier. The trench led to the officers' dugout cut through a mass grave. The officers used the bones projecting from the side of the trench as coat hooks.

On 1 July 1916 St John, now a platoon commander, was in a trench just behind the front line waiting for the signal to advance towards Serre where for him the Battle of the Somme was about to begin.

At 7.30am officers blew their whistles and the advance began. Before my father had even reached the front line trench he was hit several times in the back, leg and forearm by a machine gun strafing the advancing troops.

He was lucky; the machine gun stopped firing just as he was hit and he fell far enough away from the front so that he could be evacuated to the field dressing station in Railway Hollow.

He was sent back to England and by August 1916 he was fit enough so that after one month's leave he returned to France to rejoin his battalion, a battalion made up of almost entirely new faces because 75 per cent of the men had been killed, wounded or were missing after the disaster of 1 July.

Through the winter of 1916-17 my father remained in the line before Serre while attack after attack failed to capture the village.

By March 1917 the front line had advanced about a mile and his company was occupying Orchard Trench just outside the village of Puisieux-au-Mont, a little to the north of Serre.

Nothing much was happening on the night of 7 and 8 March. Second Lieutenant Wild was out on patrol, subsequently taken prisoner by a German counter patrol.

My father, Second Lieutenant Thomas Cronshaw from Blackburn and Captain Dodson, commander of Y company, were in a section of the trench hit by a shell. Cronshaw was killed and Dodson and my father were both seriously wounded.

My father had celebrated his 17th birthday a week and a half earlier.

Evacuated to Number One hospital Étretat, his left leg had to be amputated above the knee. He was sent back to England to recover and, undaunted, when the War Office asked him in November 1917 to resign his commission my father replied that he would be getting an artificial limb "about Christmas'', that he was "quite fit in every other way'' and that he wished "to remain in until the end of the war.''

He did. In fact he remained a serving officer attached to the Royal Engineers until 1920 when he was finally forced to retire.

So my father emerged from the Great War with one leg missing, a younger sister who was still at school, (my grandfather died in 1917) and a brother with whom he did not get on (I only found out about his brother in 1976 when my father died).

St John went to King's College, London, to study theology; how he managed this without any secondary education I do not know. But study he did and in 1928 he was ordained a priest in the Church of England, marrying my mother, an Anglo-Swiss Turk, and moving to the West Country, first as a curate in Trowbridge and Beaminster before becoming vicar of Chittoe, near Devizes in Wiltshire, in 1934.

In addition to being a vicar he was also an heraldic artist and genealogist.

Being invalided out of the Army was not quite the end of his military career. At the outbreak of World War Two he organised the Home Guard in Chittoe, turning the vicarage into the Home Guard headquarters. In 1943 just after I was born he became a naval chaplain and joined the Royal Marines at Chatham where he served until the end on the war.

Even then he did not give up and through the 1950s he served in the Civil Defence, receiving the Civil Defence medal in the late 1950s.

I think it can be safely said my father "did his bit".

He remained vicar of Chittoe until 1972 when he retired.

Throughout his life he suffered from phantom pain every time the weather changed. He described this to me "as if someone was twisting his big toe off". His stump would also jump uncontrollably. For many years he had to take increasingly strong painkillers, finally having to use Pethadine and morphine and these, I think, shortened his life.

He died in 1977 and is buried in his churchyard at Chittoe under an oak tree facing his parishioners whom he served so well.