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Lance-Corporal Robert Baldwin was taken prisoner on 4 Nov 1914 at the First Battle of Ypres in Belgium. He spent the rest of the war in captivity. robert was a regular soldier before the war in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (joining after 1906). He arrived in France on 31 Aug, his Battalion arrived on the 13th. He was later awarded the 1914-15 Star and the War and Victory Medals.
On his return home after the Armistice he was interviewed by the Beverley Guardian and his story was printed on 30 Nov 1918. He had had nearly four years of captivity, of which three and a half years were spent in Germany and the last six months spent in internment in neutral Holland as part of an international deal to reduce overcrowding in German POW camps. Robert noted that it was in Holland, “under considerate treatment” that “he largely recovered from the physical wreck to which he had been reduced by the brutal and inhuman treatment of the enemy…” The Germans, he said, were “nothing but a shower of bullying cowards.” In all he spent time in ten different camps and had done six months farm labour but seemingly not any work in coalmines or factories as other POWs had. At Gustrow camp in early 1915 he was with another Beverley POW, Tom Campey (WL/3/2) who later died there of dysentery. He went on to outline the lack of food and comforts and regularity of severe punishments: “We were a mass of vermin from head to foot.”
Robert was born in Beverley on 15 Jun 1884 and was an apprentice printer. He was baptised at St Mary’s on 30 Jul 1884. He was one of eight children: his father Robert Baldwin was a cabinet maker, his mother Mary Ann (nee Wales) who died in 1893, was from Bridlington. His father remarried in 1909 and had two more children. The family home was 58 North Bar Without. Robert’s brother, Arthur (WL/2/5), was also in the army. Shortly after returning home Robert married Florence Yeats in Hull. The 1939 Register tell us that Robert worked as a labourer on the LNER railway. He died in Mar 1942
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |