Pte Frank Wilson, 8940, 2nd Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment, died in the Military Hospital at South Tidworth, Hants, on September 15th, 1915, following wounds sustained while fighting at Neuve Chapelle. He was aged 21.

His funeral service was held at Biscot Church on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 21st, conducted by the Rev S. H. Collins, Vicar of Biscot and also Chaplain to the Artillery Training School at Biscot Mill Camp. The Commandant sent a firing party of one officer and 40 men to attend the funeral service, which closed with the sounding of the Last Post by a bugler. A party also attended from the National Guard stationed at Leagrave.

Pte Wilson, an orphan whose home had been with adopted parents at Victoria Road [now Empress Road], Leagrave, was wounded in the back at Neuve Chapelle. He died of blood poisoning.

He was born in Islington and as a 12-year-old entered the Navy, but left at the end of his period of boy service. He then worked in the Welsh coalfields, but was thrown out of work during a miners' strike.

With his resources gone, he enlisted in the 2nd Wiltshires at Devizes. He had been in Gibraltar with the regiment for about 18 months when war broke out. Returning to England at the end of August 1914, he went into training with the 7th Division in a camp near Southampton and set off for the front on October 5th. Two days later he arrived at Zeebrugge in Belgium and started off to help the Naval Brigade at Antwerp, but the city fell and the regiment had to retire, covering about 100 miles in four days, until they took up a position about five miles in front of Ypres. The first battle in which they were engaged started on October 11th, and as the enemy were in larger numbers and had heavier guns, the British Division retired about two miles and took up a new position which they held for 19 days against heavy odds until relieved.

During the following winter campaign Pte Wilson suffered frostbite which necessitate a long stay in hospital, but he was back in the fighting line to take part in the battle of Neuve Chapelle. In that fighting he suffered a shrapnel wound in the back and, while endeavouring to crawl away, he was also shot through the leg.

In notes he left he said it was something of a miracle he was then still alive as he lay unconscious on the battlefield for three and a half days after being wounded. He might have been taken for dead had he not chanced to open his eyes when a member of a stretcher-bearer party was preparing to take off his identification disc. Following this he lay for 12 weeks in a French hospital and was then brought to England, and sent to Leeds, where he was first in hospital and then in a convalescent home.

Six or seven weeks before his death he was permitted to come home to Leagrave on a week's sick leave, after which he went on to his depot at South Tidworth.  But it seemed his wounds had healed up too quickly, with the result that blood poisoning set in and on September 8th he was taken suddenly ill outside the barracks and he died in hospital a week later.

His effects were left to his adopted mother Mrs Salome Hull, who had raised the orphan Frank since he was a baby and was with him when he died. At her request his body was removed to Leagrave for burial.

Mrs Hull was born Salome Emerton, married Walter Thomas Hollett in 1895 and, following his death in 1908, she remarried in 1911, her second husband being Erskine Hull.