Gunner Arthur Wilcock aged 25

Arthur Wilcock was born in 1893 and christened at St Mary’s on 9th April of that year. In the 1901 census, he was the youngest of six children of Mark, aged 49 a stonemason and Annie aged 48. They were all living at 28 Duke Street. By 1911, three of the children had moved out and Arthur was working as a joiner. He signed up into the Royal Garrison Artillery in July 1916 and was sent to France in February 1917. In June that year he was invalided back to England but returned again in August 1917. His story can best be told from the obituary in the Courier: On the gravestone in the cemetery in Belgium, his mother had put “Some day I hope to clasp his hand in the better land – his mother”. His father had died in 1915.