Jean Longstaff has submitted the following:-

Thomas was the only boy amongst the five children born to Scottish butcher James Douglas Renwick and his Shields born wife Mary Davidson. They had married in 1878 and their first daughter was born in 1880, and the last in 1890 the year before Mary’s death. James remarried in 1894, giving his family a stepmother, Beatrice Hannay. At the time of the 1901 census James was working as an apprentice joiner and still living at home with the rest of the family.

October 1910 saw him leave Liverpool for Canada, making for Saskatchewan and a job as a joiner. What happened to him in the intervening period is unknown, but on 28th September 1914 Thomas travelled to the newly built camp at Valcartier, Quebec and enlisted in the CEF, becoming Private 47396 attached to the 17th Battalion. He gave as his next of kin a Mrs T. Renwick in Topcroft, Norfolk and his occupation as a butcher, and mentioned his time in the Royal Fleet Auxuliary in England. Just two days later the battalion embarked from Quebec on the SS Ruthenia, disembarking on England on 14th October followed by a period spent training at a camp on the south coast. At the end of May 1915 Private 47396 was transferred as a reinforcement to the 13th Battalion serving in France. At the beginning of September Thomas was punished and forfeited two days pay for being absent from his billet overnight, an occurrence that was repeated in January.

At the end of September 1915 Private 47396 was transferred and became a gunner in 12th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, attending a Canadian Corps Signalling School in February 1917 before being transferred to the 3rd Brigade, CFA. In hospital with boils at the end of April, in June 1917 Thomas Renwick was granted permission to marry and then granted ten days leave in England, but didn’t marry until the summer of the following year when he wed Minnie Hymers in South Shields.

Now attached to the 8th Canadian Area Employment Company in France, Thomas was promoted to Corporal to complete the establishment and made orderly room clerk. Treated for toothache at No.4 Casualty Clearing Station in July 1918, Thomas suffered in silence until at the end of October he was invalided as sick to No.4 Canadian General Hospital in Basingstoke, Hampshire with acute ulcerative gingivitis and all his teeth were removed. Thomas never recovered and died from septicaemia at 2pm on 2nd November 1918.

Thomas Renwick is remembered in South Shields on S86.020 and S86.053

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

Canadian Book of Remembrance
Canadian Virtual War Memorial
The CWGC entry for Sergeant Renwick