| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Private Walter Ashton served in the York and Lancaster Regiment during the war and spent time in France. He enlisted in 1915/1916 and later was transferred to the Army Labour Corps. Walter was awarded the War and Victory Medals.
Walter was born in Beverley on 3 Dec 1886. In the 1891 census he is recorded as being a “boarder”` with the Batty family in Pasture Terrace. In 1901 Walter was a “boarder” with the Brown family in Minster Moorgate. Walter was employed as a grocer’s errand boy before going to work at the East Riding Asylum at Broadgate, Walkington, as an attendant by 1911. He stayed there until 1912 and then worked in similar institutions in West Yorkshire, latterly at St John’s Hospital in Keighley as a registered male nurse.
In 1911 he married Ethel May Sample, a domestic servant working and living at Cherry Burton. They had five children: Cyril born in Beverley in June 1912, Walter and Mervyn, born in Leeds in 1913 and 1915 respectively and then Edmund and Doreen born in Keighley in 1918 and 1926 respectively.
His wife Ethel was born in Little Cressingham, Norfolk in 1891 but her family had moved to this area and at the time of WW1 were living at 16 Sloe Lane in Beverley. Elsie’s sister, Letitia, a housemaid at the Broadgate Asylum had married Alfred Noddle, a fellow male attendant of Walter’s. Elsie’s other sister, Rose, worked there as a cook. Her brothers Edmund, Fred and John were all killed during the war. The Sample family and their many sons-in-law featured in an article in the Beverley Guardian of 20 Jan 1917 entitled “Patriotic Beverley Family”. A photo of Walter was included.
Walter continued to live and work in Keighley up to his death in June 1960, Elsie died in 1978
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |