Robert James Slough was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire in 1881 and baptised at St Peter’s Church in the town, on Sunday, 30th October in the same year. He was the fourth child of Harry (Henry) Isaac Slough and Emily Payne who had a large family of thirteen children together. The children were: Julia, Ethel, Harry (Henry), Robert, Margaret, Arthur, Beatrice, Richard, Albert Joseph, Edward, Gertrude, Andrew and the youngest Hilda. Robert’s brothers Albert, Edward and Andrew also fought in the Great War and only Edward survived the conflict. Albert was killed in France in 1916 just six weeks before Andrew’s death. Their biographies are also on this site.

Robert’s father Harry, a "Machine Fitter", brought the family to Boxmoor in 1885 when he started a job at John Dickinson & Co. Limited. The family lived on the London Road in the Two Waters area of Boxmoor. In 1901, Robert’s brother Richard died aged eleven and five years later in 1906, tragedy once more overtook the family when his mother Emily died aged fifty-two. When he left school Robert went to work at John Dickinson & Co Limited in Apsley Mills where he was apprenticed as a "Stereotyper" in the Printing Department. By 1911 he had left Dickinsons and moved to Reading where he was employed by Cox & Wyman, the oldest established printing company in the country. He lived at 47 Vastern Road a short walk from his place of employment and it was from here that he went to enlist in January 1917.

Robert joined the Army under the Military Services Act when he was aged thirty-five and he enlisted with the 6th Infantry Labour Company in the Devonshire Regiment. A few months later in April 1917, Army Council Instruction 611 gave definition to the newly formed Labour Corps and the 6th Infantry Labour Company Devonshire Regiment became 171st Company Labour Corps. It has proved difficult to determine where Robert served and how his war progressed other than knowing that in early 1918, he was in the Amiens area of France. Between March and April, battles ranged from the Somme sector, north to Hazebrouck and Bailleul and it was during this period that Robert was killed.

The exact circumstances of his death are not known other than that he fell on Monday, 15th April 1918 and this may have been at Hazebrouck or Bailleul, or more likely further south and closer to Amiens. Robert’s death was the third such tragedy to befall the Slough family following the deaths of two of his younger brothers Albert and Andrew in 1916. No other family from the town suffered the loss of three of its sons during the conflict.

Robert and both his brothers are commemorated on the war memorial plaque in St John the Evangelist Church in Boxmoor where they had lived and grown up.

Robert is Remembered with Honour in the St. Pierre Cemetery, Amiens, Somme, France Grave: XVI. E. 4. The inscription on his headstone, requested by his father Henry, reads: “UNTIL THE MORNING BREAKS AND SHADOWS FLEE AWAY”

He was 36 years old when he died.

Robert was entitled to the British War Medal and the Allied Victory Medal.