Research Notes · Behind Panel 22
Samuel Rosbotham: The 19-Year-Old Behind Panel 22
A Belfast teenager, the 7th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and a name preserved on the Menin Gate.
The record
Samuel Rosbotham served as Corporal 3390 in the 7th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Surviving remembrance records give his age as nineteen and record his death on 9 August 1917. He was the son of Stewart and Sarah Rosbotham of 32 Woodvale Avenue, Belfast. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial.
Additional Belfast remembrance material records that he joined at the beginning of the war while only sixteen. The Samuel Stephen Chronicles Substack feature described him as a shipyard apprentice from West Belfast before the war.
Why one name became a novel
The historical attraction is not only the age. It is the scale at which the First World War survives in records: battalion diaries, casualty lists, memorial panels, addresses, service numbers and family details. They are precise enough to preserve identity and often too compressed to preserve experience.
Panel 22 takes that gap seriously. The novel is historical fiction, not a claim that the archival record supplies Samuel’s inner life. Its starting point is the contrast between an administrative record capable of reducing a day’s fighting to a line and a nineteen-year-old life that cannot be recovered from that line alone.
The number on the memorial
The title refers to the memorial panel on which Samuel Rosbotham is commemorated. The Menin Gate holds the names of thousands of Commonwealth servicemen from the Ypres Salient who have no known grave. For a family, a panel number could become the permanent location of a person whose body was never recovered.
Source trail
The core biographical details used here are independently supported by Northern Ireland remembrance records and battalion casualty transcriptions: Samuel Rosbotham, Corporal 3390, 7th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, aged nineteen, died 9 August 1917, son of Stewart and Sarah Rosbotham of Woodvale Avenue, Belfast, commemorated at the Menin Gate. The surviving records support those facts; the novel supplies the human narrative around them.
