Thomas Walter Robertson

Jean Longstaff has submitted the following:-

The son of iron foundry worker Burdon and his wife Jane (nee James) Robertson, Thomas Walter was born in Southwick on 25th February 1872, the youngest of four children, the others being Jane, Burdon and Mary. His father died when he was seventeen, and the following year Thomas was advertising in the Sunderland Echo for pupils to learn to play the piano, presumably in addition to his work as a clerk at a Sunderland paint manufacturers.

On 11th November 1893 Walter married Winifred Crute in Southwick parish church and at the turn of the century they and their six-year-old daughter, Winifred May, were sharing a house in High Southwick with another family. Ten years later they had a house of their own in Osman Terrace, but in August 1912 Walter left for Canada, sailing on the Empress of Ireland, making for Hamilton, Ontario, where he was joined eleven months later by Winifred and May. They remained living in Hamilton where Walter found work as a bookkeeper.

Walter enlisted with the 58th Battalion Canadian Expeditionary Force at Paradise Camp, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario at the end of June 1915, becoming Private 541920 with “B” Company, and remained training there until the end of October. There was a shortage of uniforms and some men were issued with wide brimmed straw farmer's hats, some with out of date surplus left over from the South Africa war twenty years earlier, most men only received their rifles during in mid-August.

At the end of October, the 58th left Niagara on a 112 km route march for Exhibition Camp, Toronto. This route march was treated as a tactical exercise, chasing after a retreating enemy. They then left Halifax on 22nd November on the SS Saxonia, arriving in Plymouth on 2nd December and a posting to camp at Bramshott, Hampshire, which they left in late February to travel to France as part of the 5th Infantry Brigade, 3rd Canadian Division.

Private Robertson was killed in action in the early hours of 13th June 1916 during a rare night assault against enemy trenches at Sanctuary Wood. His remains were recovered and buried in a registered grave, the map reference on his Circumstances of Death card is several hundred metres behind the front lines, just south of Ypres. When the battlefields were being cleared, his remains either could not be located, or they could not be positively identified, hence the name on the Menin Gate.

Thomas Walter Robertson is remembered in Sunderland on S140.048 part 9 page 201

In Canada he is remembered on their Virtual War Memorial and in their Book of Remembrance.

Canadian Book of Remembrance
Canadian Virtual Memorial
The CWGC entry for Corporal Robertson