| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Albert Atkinson served in the York and Lancaster Regiment. He enlisted on 8 Jul 1915 and served in the 1st/5th and 1st/4th Battalions as a Private. In 1916 he was wounded in action and this may explain his transfer to the 10th Battalion as Private. He then contracted the lice-borne disease trench fever and was invalided home. He was subsequently discharged from the army as being "medically unfit" and awarded the Silver Badge which was given to those soldiers forced to leave the military due to injury or bad health. He was awarded the War and Victory Medals.
His father James Atkinson of Beverley married Elizabeth Hullock. Arthur had three brothers: Charles, James and Albert and two stepsisters. The family lived in Beverley but had spent a short time in Leeds.
On the death of his father in 1888 his mother remarried to John W Lawson of Little Weighton, and had three further children George, John and Robert. The family are recorded as living at Hind's Yard, Keldgate in the 1891 census and then Meaux in 1895 and Thixendale in 1901.
Albert was employed as a labourer and on the 1911 census he is a labourer in an oil mill. He married on Alice Davis on 13 Jan 1907 at St Nicholas' Church in Beverley. They had two children Ivy born in 1910 and Dorothy born on Sep 1914. A family portrait presumably taken prior to Albert's departure for France in 1915 has them together, Albert in his military uniform.
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |