| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Tom was born in Beverley the 10 Nov 1891 and baptised with his twin sister on 2 Mar 1892, the son of Charles Cunningham and Ellen (nee Nutchey). Charles came from Malton and his family had connections with the racing industry. He became a groom, trainer and horse dealer. The family lived at 6 Willow Grove, Beverley but spent time in France in the early 1890s, where Tom's brother Harold was born at Maisons-Lafitte, Paris; and later at Royston, Hertfordshire. Tom became a baker, working for Richard Care who had shops in Eastgate and Saturday Market, Beverley.
Tom enlisted in the Army in 1914 and on 25 Nov 1915 he joined the Army Service Corps at Aldershot. He joined the 77 Field Bakery and on 7 Feb left Devonport for Mombasa, Kenya where his unit joined the East African Expeditionary Force. Fighting took place predominantly in the German colony of Tanganika. Tom would not have had a frontline role and he spent the next eighteen months in and out of hospital with malaria and dysentery, sufficiently serious for him to be returned to the UK in Sep 1917. By May 1918 he was fit enough to return to duty but this time as an infantry Private in the 4th, then the 11th, Manchester Regiment before switching to the 1/5th York and Lancaster Regiment in France. His records indicate that he may have been gassed and suffered from cholera. He left the army in Mar 1919 and was awarded the War and Victory Medals.
He returned to Beverley initially but seems to have moved regularly with his bakery job. He married Lilian Hepple in 1929 in Richmond, North Yorkshire, their son, Christopher, was born in 1929. By 1939 the family were living in Houghton-le-Spring, Spennymoor, in Co Durham. Tom died in the South Shields area aged 54 in 1945. Lilian died in 1951.
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |