A/Cpl 52950 William Harry Watton

• Age: 31
• From: Queenborough, Kent
• Regiment: The King's (Liverpool Regiment) 17th Btn
• K.I.A Saturday 28th April 1917
• Commemorated at: Arras Memorial
  Panel Ref: Bay 3

William Harry was born in the March quarter of 1886 in Queenborough, Isle of Sheppey, Kent, the son of George Watton and his wife Mary Ann (née Wellard). His father, from Bath, Somerset, and his mother, from Queenborough, married in Sheppey in 1880.  Before his marriage his father had served in the Royal Navy, and afterwards settled in Sheppey and worked for the Coast Guard Service (then under the Admiralty).  They had nine children; William had older siblings George Richard, born in 1881, and Mary Ann Amelia, 1883.  After William’s birth the family moved to the neighbouring Hoo peninsula, a few miles west, where Annie Florence was born in 1888.  By 1890 they had moved to Walton on the Naze in Essex, a coastal village between Harwich and Clacton, where Alfred, 1890, and Ellen Elizabeth, 1892, were born, and then to Clacton, where three more sons were born, Richard 1894, Arthur Ernest 1896, and Ernest in 1899.

In 1911 his parents are living in four rooms in Martello Tower D, Clacton Beach, with Richard, 16, Arthur, 14, (both golf caddies), and Ernest, 11.  His father is unemployed, a naval pensioner.  The Martello towers were built during the Napoleonic Wars along the coast of England and throughout the Empire.  They were two-storey structures 40’ high, with walls 8’ thick.  Eleven were built along the Essex coastline, identified by the letters A to K.  Some were restored as private residences (the towers were commandeered by the Army during World War Two).

A son was born to the couple on 06th August 1911, they named him William Harry and he was baptised on 14th October 1911. William Harry Senior's occupation is shown as a Glazer. 

William Henry enlisted in Colchester into the 10th (Service) Battalion of the Essex Regiment as Private 16627. He arrived in France on 8th September 1915. The 10th Battalion were in action on the Somme, capturing their objectives near Montauban, at Bazentin Ridge, Trones Wood, Delville Wood, Thiepval Ridge, and the Ancre Heights, playing a part in the capture of the Schwaben Redoubt. 

William's body was not recovered from the battlefield or was subsequently lost as his name is commemorated on the Arras Memorial in France.

The ARRAS MEMORIAL commemorates almost 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand who died in the Arras sector between the spring of 1916 and 7 August 1918, the eve of the Advance to Victory, and have no known grave. The most conspicuous events of this period were the Arras offensive of April-May 1917, and the German attack in the spring of 1918. Canadian and Australian servicemen killed in these operations are commemorated by memorials at Vimy and Villers-Bretonneux. A separate memorial remembers those killed in the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Both cemetery and memorial were designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with sculpture by Sir William Reid Dick. The memorial was unveiled by Lord Trenchard, Marshal of the Royal Air Force on the 31 July 1932 (originally it had been scheduled for 15 May, but due to the sudden death of French President Doumer, as a mark of respect, the ceremony was postponed until July).

His death was reported in the Essex Newsman on 02nd June 1917.

Killed

King's (Liverpool Regt.) Watton, Act Cpl., W.H.