Source: Leicestershire War Memorials Project.
The following was kindly provided by Mark Butler in 2016:
'I am Noel Butler's great nephew and 14 of us descendants went to visit his grave at Delville on 100th anniversary of his death. The attached photo of him was given to me by the Irish Guards'.
2nd Lt Butler had another sibling, Stephen Seymour Butler born in 1880.

I am writing a biography of James Neville Marshall, VC To be published in October. He served with Noel Butler in 1916 Entries in Marshall's diary are -
23 June 1916: Lieutenant F.L. Pusch and 2nd Lieutenants. N. Butler and T.H. MacMahon joined from an Entrenching Battalion
28 June 1916: MacMahon and Butler call at the Hospital to see me on their way up to front.
7 April.1918 I am now housed in Vauchelles-lès-Authie Chateau. What strange memories the scene again stirs. It was here that we halted with the 1st Irish Guards Battalion in 1916 before the Somme. Our names are still written on the window: Pat Ogilvy, Jock Butler and my own. Two years have gone and the sacrifice of that gallant blood has been wiped away by the victorious advance of the Germans.
(Information from P Lees, 01/07/2023)

Source: Michael Doyle Their Name Liveth For Evermore: The Great War Roll of Honour for Leicestershire and Rutland.
He was the son of the Reverend George Hew Butler a Clergyman of the Church of England, born 1848 in Blendworth, Hants., and his wife Florence, born 1855 in London. Noel Thomas A., was born in 1889 in Weymouth, Dorset, his siblings were, Georgina H. M., born 1876 and Hester, born 1877, the latter two siblings were both born in Northchurch, Herts., Thomas D., born 1885 and Paul D., born 1886, the latter two siblings were both born in Herriard, Hants., in April 1891 the family home was at Vicarage House, Kerdigreen Road, Wood Dalling, Norfolk. In March 1901 Noel was residing in the family home at The Vicarage, The Street, Moulton Lane, Gazeley, Suffolk, together with his parents and siblings, Georgina and Hester. His parents later resided at Rosemary Cottage, Harting, Petersfield, Hants. He was with the Special Reserve attached to the Irish Guards. Other sources show him as with the Suffolk Regiment attached to the Irish Guards. An account of the Battle of Ginchy records. There naturally cannot be any definite or accurate record of the day’s work. Even had maps been issued to the officers a week, instead of a day or so, before the attack; even had those maps marked all known danger points – such as the Ginchy-Flers sunk road; even had the kaleidoscopic instructions about the Brown and Yellow lines been more intelligible, or had the village of Ginchy been distinguishable from a map of the pitted moon – once the affair was launched there was little chance of seeing far or living long. The two leading platoons on No. 3 Company following the Coldstream, charged through the ripping fire that came out of Ginchy Orchard, to the German first line trench which ran from the sunken road at that point. The others came behind them, cheering their way into the sleet of machine gun fire. The true line of advance was north easterly, but the 2nd Guards Brigade on the right of the 1st, caught very heavily by the German barrage on their right flank, closed in towards the 1st Brigade and edged it more northward; so that, about an hour and a half after the advance began, what the countless machine guns had left of the Irish found itself with three out of four Company Commanders already casualties, all officers of No. 2 Company out of action, and the Second in Command, Major T. M. D. Baillie, killed. They were held up under heavy shelling, either in front of German wire, or, approximately, on the first line objective – a battered German trench, which our artillery had done its best to obliterate, but fortunately had failed in parts. With the Irish representatives of every unit of the 1st and 2nd Brigades, mostly lacking officers, and some fresh troops of the Fourteenth Division from the left of the line. Outside their area, the Sixth Division’s attacks between Ginchy Telegraph and Leuze Wood had failed, thanks to the driving fire from the Quadrilateral, the great fortified work that controlled the landscape for a mile and a half; so the right flank of the Guards Division was left in the air, the enemy zealously trying to turn it – bomb versus bayonet. Judgement of time and distance had gone with the stress and roar around. The two attacking battalions (2nd and 3rd Coldstream) of the 1st Brigade had more or less gone too – were either dead or dispersed into small parties, dodging among smoking shell holes. The others were under the impression that they had won at least two of the three objectives – an error due to the fact that they had found and fought over a trench full of enemy where no such obstacle had been indicated. Suddenly a party of snipers and machine guns appeared behind the Irish in a communication trench, fired at large, as much out of bewilderment as design, wounded the sole surviving Company Officer of the four companies (Lieutenant J. K. Greer), and owing to the jamming of our Lewis-guns got away to be killed elsewhere. A mass of surrendering German, disturbed by the advance of a Division on the left, drifted across them and further blinded the situation. Nobody knew within hundreds of yards where they were, but since it was obvious that the whole of the attack of the Division, pressed, after the failure of the Sixth Division, by the fire from the Quadrilateral, had sheered too far towards the left or north, the need of the moment was to shift the men of the 2nd Guards Brigade back along the trench towards their own area; to sort out the mixed mass of orderless men on the left; and to make them dig in before the vicious, spasmodic shelling of the congested line turned into the full roll of the German barrage. They cleared out, as best they could, the mixed English and German bodies that paved the bottom of the trench, and toiled desperately at the wreckage – splinters and concrete from the blown in dug outs, earth slides and collapses of head cover by yards at a time, all mingled or besmeared with horrors and filth that a shell would suddenly increase under their hands. Men could give hideous isolated experiences of their own – it seemed to each survivor that he had worked for a lifetime in a world apart – but no man could recall any connected order of events, and the exact hour and surroundings wherein such a man private, N.C.O., or officer – met his death are still in dispute. It was a still day, and the reeking, chemical tainted fog of the high explosives would not clear. Orders would be given and taken by men suddenly appearing and as suddenly vanishing through smoke or across fallen earth, till both would be cut off in the middle by a rifle bullet, or beaten down by the stamp and vomit of a shell. There was, too, always a crowd of men seated or in fantastic attitudes, silent, with set absorbed faces, busily engaged in trying to tie up, stanch or plug their own wounds – to save their own single lives with their own hands. When orders came to these they would shake their heads impatiently and go on with their urgent, horrible business. Others, beyond hope, but not unconscious, lamented themselves into death. The War Diary covers these experiences of the three hours between 8.00am and 11.00am with the words; “In the meantime despite rather heavy shelling, a certain amount of consolidation was done on the trench while the work of reorganisation was continued.” In the meantime, also, some of the Coldstream Battalions, mixed with a few men of the Irish Guards, the latter commanded by Lieutenant W. Mumford, had rushed on into the wilderness beyond the trench towards the Brown line, or what was supposed to be the Brown line, three hundred yards or so ahead, and for the moment had been lost. About half past eleven the Commanding Officer, the Adjutant, and 2nd Lieutenant G. V. Williams and Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord of the 1st Guards Brigade Machine Gun Company, who represented all that was left of the officers, went forward with all that was left of the Irish Guards and all available, not too badly wounded Coldstreamers, towards the next objective. Everyone was glad to step out from the sickening trench into the wire-trapped, shell ploughed open whence the worse of the German barrage had lifted, though enemy machine guns were cropping it irregularly. Their road lay uphill through a field of rank, unweeded stuff, and, when they had topped a little rise, they saw what seemed, by comparison, untouched country where houses had some roofs on them and trees some branches, all laid out ahead in the hot sunshine between Flers and Lesboeufs. There were figures in the landscape too – Germans on the move with batteries and transport – an enemy in sight at last and, by the look of them, moving away. Then a German field battery, also in the open, pulled up and methodically shelled them. They came upon a shallow trench littered with wreckage, scraped themselves in, and there found some more of the Division, while the German battery continued to find them. In the long run, that trench, which had been a German covered way for guns, came to hold about sixty of the 1st Irish Guards, thirty of the 2nd Grenadiers under Captain A. F. S. Cunningham, and a hundred or so of both Battalions Coldstream under Colonel J. V. Campbell, the senior officer present. Somewhere on the left of it, fifteen of the Irish were found lying out in shell holes under C.S.M. Carton and Sergeant Riordan. They were in touch, so far as touch existed then, with the 9th Rifle Brigade on their left, but it was not advisiable to show one’s head above a shell hole on account of enemy machine guns which were vividly in touch with everything that moved. Their right was all in the air, and for the second time no one knew – no one could know – where the trench in which they lay was situated in the existing chaos. They fixed its position at last by compass bearings. It was more or less on the line of the second objective, and had therefore to be held in spite of casualties. The men could do no more than fire when possible at anything that showed itself (which was seldom) and, in the rare intervals when shelling slackened, work themselves a little farther into the ground. At this juncture, Captain L. R. Hargreaves, left behind with the Reserve of Officers in Trones Wood, was ordered up, and reached the line with nothing worse than one wound. He led out a mixed party of Coldstream and Irish to a chain of disconnected shell holes a few hundred yards in advance of the trench. Here they suffered for the rest of the afternoon under the field battery shelling them at less than half a mile, and the regular scything of the machine guns from the Quadrilateral on their right. A machine gun detachment, under Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord, went with them, and Lieutenant W. C. Mumford and 2nd Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith with their little detachments of Irish and Coldstream came up later as reinforcements. That scattered forward fringe among the shell holes gave what help it could to the trench behind it, which filled up, as the day wore on, with more Irish and Coldstream working their way forward. Formation was gone – blown to bits long ago. Nearly every officer was down, and Sergeant after Sergeant succeeding to the command, had dropped too; but the discipline held, and with it the instinct that made them crawl, dodge, run and stumble as chance offered and their Corporals ordered, towards the enemy and not away from him. They had done so at first, shouting aloud in the massed rush of the full charge that now seemed centuries away in time, and worlds in space. Later as they were scattered and broken by fire, knowing that their Battalion was cut to pieces, they worked with a certain automatic forlorn earnestness, which, had any one had time to think, was extremely comic. The Battalion had had no communication with Brigade Headquarters or anyone else since early morning. It lacked supports, lights, signals, information, wood, wire, sand-bags, water, food and at least fifty per cent of its strength. Its last machine gun had been knocked out, and it had no idea what troops might be next on either side. As the sun went down, word came from the advanced party in the shell holes where the wrecked machine gun lay, that the Germans were massing for a counter-attack on the Blue line of what had been the third objective. They could be seen in artillery formation with a mass of transport behind them, and it passed the men’s comprehension why they did not come on and finish the weary game. But the enemy chose to wait, and at the edge of dusk the Irish saw the 2nd Scots Guards attacking on their right through a barrage of heavy stuff – attacking and disappearing between the shell bursts. The attack failed; a few of the Scots Guards came back and found places beside the Irish and Coldstream in the trench. Night fell; the enemy’s conter-attack held off; the survivors of the advanced party in the shell holes were withdrawn to help strengthen the main trench; and when it was dark, men were sent out to get in touch with the flanks. They reported at last, a battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s on their left and the 2nd Grenadiers on their right. In the protecting darkness, too, water and rations arrived from the Ginchy-Lesboeuf road, by some unconsidered miracle-work of Captain Antrobus and the other Battalion Transport Officers; and throughout the very long night, stragglers and little cut off parties, with their wounded, found the trench, reported, fed, and flung themselves down in whatever place was least walked over – to sleep like the dead, their neighbours. Ground flares had at last indicated the Battalion’s position to our night scouting aeroplanes. There was nothing more to be done. The Battalion were relieved after three days by a Company of the Lincolnshire Regt. from the 62nd Brigade, casualties were recorded as Major T. M. Baillie, Lieutenant C. R. Tisdall, Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord and 2nd Lieutenant N. Butler were killed. Captain C. Pease and Lieutenant J. K. Greer died of wounds. Captain P. S. Long-Innes, Captain R. Rankin, Lieutenant A. C. W. Innes, 2nd Lieutenant’s H. C. Holmes, T. Butler-Stoney, and Count J. E. de Sallis were wounded; and there were 330 casualties in the other ranks. The total casualties in the Brigade were 1776.