Notes
The extra biographical and service details are sourced from the Bradford Grammar School website (see References) where it states 'Edward was born in late 1885 or early 1886 in Sheffield. His father Charles John Vickary was then a commercial traveller, in cutlery, although he had formerly managed the family metal founding business in Exeter and at times he also worked as a gas engineer. Edward’s mother Mary Isabel Watts was born in Trinidad in the West Indies, and was sent to England for schooling at an early age. The nature of his father’s occupation meant that the family frequently moved around the country. However,
for much of the 1890s they resided in Ilkley, at Alexandria Crescent and then Sunrise View. Edward attended Bradford Grammar in the latter part of the decade.
Edward’s mother died in 1891 and his father quickly remarried. By 1901 he had moved to Hull with his second wife and their daughter - the teenage children of his first marriage were widely scattered. Edward, aged 15, was a draper’s apprentice in a large department store in Woolwich, south-east London. Perhaps this profession was not to his liking, for he
moved to South Africa. While there he served in two volunteer military units, the Capetown Highlanders and Prince Alfred’s Volunteer Guards of Port Elizabeth. By 1914 he had returned to England, where he lived with his father in Ashford, Middlesex.
When war broke out Edward did not join up with the first rush of volunteers who responded to Lord Kitchener’s appeal for men. It was not until November that he decided to enlist, and as he was then resident in Norwich he chose the Territorial Army 1/4th battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. His medical inspection shows that he was over 6 feet in height, a tall man for the era. No profession is recorded. He gave his age as 29.
The 1/4th assembled at the Drill Hall in Chapel Field, Norwich and were billeted at the City of Norwich School on Eaton Road. Red armbands were issued while new recruits waited for their uniforms, which were scarce, and they trained in their civilian clothes. Vickary was made a Lance-Corporal in March 1915, initially he was unpaid. On 30th July the battalion
sailed from Liverpool as part of 54th East Anglian Division, destined for Gallipoli, in Turkey. They disembarked at Suvla Bay on 10th August, and spent the whole of the following day sitting on the beach without instructions. The battalion’s War Diary provides only meagre details of its actions, and none for the day on which Vickary was wounded. On 19th August he received a gunshot wound to his thigh. At first he was evacuated to the base camp at Mudros on the island of Lemnos, but the injury was serious enough to justify being invalided home to Britain on the hospital ship “Alaunia”. The voyage began on 24th August, but he
died of his wound at Gibraltar on 8th September and he was buried at sea. Edward Vickary’s name was recorded on the Helles Memorial at Gallipoli. He was unmarried.'