THE FALLEN FAMILY

This is a photo of an online link one of my sisters sent the rest of us today of the Murton Cum Hilton War Memorial in Cumbria, very much in PaulaJ's territory. Murton is the village where my Mum was born and Sister R - who is our family archivist - tells us that William F Atkinson on this memorial was Mum's great-uncle, and Anthony and John Rudd were his nephews, though older than him since he was the son of his father's third marriage.

William Atkinson had joined up aged 19, and was killed on June 1st 1916 on the first day of the Somme. £10 19s 7d was paid to his parents, and his father, Mark Atkinson (Mum's great-grandfather) died only 5 months later, before his two grandsons.

John Rudd died in France in March 1917, and his brother Anthony died of pneumonia in a Russian hospital in Kasvin, Persia (Qazvin, Iran) in September 1918 and is buried in the Tehran War Cemetery, having landed in Basra in October 1916. I see from meles' blip that her Uncle Dick was in Basra, too, so this is something I can find out more about.

I didn't know any of this before today. Mum sometimes talks about uncles who survived World War 1 but perhaps these other stories were too painful - or too common to be memorable - during her childhood. By the time she was old enough to understand, her mother died and World War 2 was upon them, giving her much more immediate traumas to deal with.

Now I need to get over to Cumbria again, see the War Memorial for myself and perhaps catch up with PaulaJ.