| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
John William Mitchell enlisted in Beverley the 5 Oct 1914 joining the 2nd Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment as a Private. He arrived in France in Jan 1915. His Battalion was serving in the Ypres sector, Belgium, when on 28 Feb 1915 he was seriously wounded by a "gunshot to the eye". Evacuated back to the UK he was judged "physically unfit for further War Service" and discharged from the Army on 22 Apr 1915. He was subsequently awarded the War and Victory medals.
John was born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, in Mar 1875. He was connected with Beverley through his mother, Ellen Twineham Mitchell (nee Gray), born in the town in 1856 to a stonemason. She married Charles Edward Mitchell at St Mary's Church, Beverley, on 24 May 1875. His father was the son of a veterinary surgeon from Headingley, Leeds. John's family settled in Salford, Lancashire, where his father was employed as a butcher and a beer-seller. In the 1890s his parents moved to Beverley his father had a grocery shop on Queensgate Road and then ran a boarding house on Grovehill Road.
John worked as a telegraph messenger boy and a labourer after leaving school but in 1893 he joined the Army, serving as a private in the Manchester Regiment. He served for two and a half years in the Boer War in South Africa and won both the Queen's and King's South Africa Medals. He remained in the Army based in the UK until 1909. He then came to Beverley, living with his parents on Grovehill Road and working as a shipyard labourer.
John continued to live in Beverley after 1915 but little is known about him, particularly whether he returned to his previous job. He died in 1923 aged 48.
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |