Notes
The Bradford Grammar School website (see References) states: 'Walton Thomas was an early volunteer who survived two wounds before his luck ran out. His father John Mason Thomas moved from Otley to Burley-inWharfedale to work as a clerk at William Fison’s Greenholme Mill. Mason Thomas progressed to book-keeper and then in the early 1900s to
Company Secretary, and he would eventually become a Director of the company. In 1891 he
married Alice Mary Casson, daughter of a Burley butcher. They had three children, one of whom died in infancy. Walton, the younger of the two surviving boys, was born on 14th November 1894. For his secondary schooling he travelled into Bradford from Burley station, firstly to attend Belle Vue School on Manningham Lane, and then to Bradford Grammar School from 1906-10 between the ages of eleven and fifteen. Walton was in the Modern forms. His academic record was an average one and each year he came in the lower half of the form order. When he left he worked as an office boy to a firm of yarn agents, and later his father found him a place as an apprentice in the wool warehouse at Fison’s mill.
In August 1914 Walton enlisted in Ilkley. He was one of the early volunteers responding to Lord Kitchener’s appeal. He was posted to the 10th Battalion Duke of Wellington’s Regiment which went to France on 26th August 1915 with 69th Infantry Brigade, part of 23rd Division. After ten months at the front on 5th July 1916 the 10th Dukes made their first attack, shortly after the Battle of the Somme began. Walton was part of a bombing section sent to consolidate a captured trench south of Contalmaison. A shrapnel bullet ricocheted from his helmet into his wrist. He was treated by a German doctor who had been taken prisoner and then convalesced in hospital at Nottingham. He returned to the front in April 1917 and was posted to the 8th Duke of Wellington’s. In October near Ypres he received his second wound when he was shot through the muscles of his arm.
After convalescing in France in early 1918 he was posted to ‘C’ Company, 1/7th Duke of Wellington’s, his previous battalion having been broken up. In early April the battalion was moved from Ypres to block the German advance towards Hazebrouck. On 12th April it took up a position just south of Bailleul in French Flanders. Thomas’s company was one of two holding the front line. About 4.30 p.m. the Germans attacked. While their barrage was light they had heavy covering fire from rifles and machine-guns. The 1/7th Dukes held their ground into the evening until things quietened down around 7.30. The battalion suffered
only a dozen men killed including Walton Thomas. He was one of four who have no known grave and whose names were recorded on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing.'