Brave George

When he was 6 years old, George Wilkinson was surviving as best he could in the Workhouse in the Cheshire town of Northwich. His 3-year-old brother Willie was with him.

Quite what had happened to Mum Martha is unknown; their struggling Dad was living with his uncle in the town as a single (not widowed) man, though he’d married Martha in 1894.

At 13, Willie would be sent to Canada as part of the British Home Children scheme; when War came, he was still too young to enlist.

16-year-old George, by 1911, must have had something about him, for he’d been sent to the National Children’s Home & Orphanage in Bethnal Green, working as an office boy.

Soon he’d make his way back north and find work at Entwistle Hall Farm, Turton, where he’d fall for a weaver named Beatrice Green, who herself had been brought up by her aunt and uncle and perhaps understood some of George’s childhood battles herself.

They married on 27th May 1916 and had 6 weeks together before he embarked for France, as it happened on Beatrice’s birthday, 20th July.

George was destined to make up the numbers in 7th Loyal North Lancashires, which had been badly mauled on the Somme and had lost a third of its strength by the time George joined them at Bailleul, where they were resting and refitting.

George would be with his Battalion when they were sent back into action on 11th October, to hold the line at Hebuterne.

Their next big fight would come a month later with the final action of the Battle of the Somme.

They went into forward positions around Stuff Trench on 12th November, preparing for an attack the following day at St Pierre Divion.

The attack was a reasonably successful one by Somme standards, with around 150 prisoners taken in return for 86 Battalion casualties.

George Wilkinson, who had withstood so much rotten luck in his short life but who’d survived a Dickensian childhood in the workhouse looking out for his little brother, and made a real life for himself in spite of it all, was one of those who fell in the dawn charge.

Beatrice would remarry after the War but I am sure she never forgot George’s bright smile and cheerful courage; neither must we.