RICHARD PALMER

It is probably safe to assume that Richard Palmer, who, at 54, was buried in an unmarked grave at Newtown Road Cemetery on 20th June, 1908¹, was the father of Walter Henry Palmer.

The son Walter was a casualty at the Battle of Jutland on 31st May, 1916. This was recalled in the Newbury Weekly News on 8th September 1916 in their “First World War Remembered” series, and is detailed in the West Berkshire War Memorials Website².

These include family details and the following is an extract from the latter.

Walter was born on 14 September 1898, the son of Richard Palmer and his wife Elizabeth Maud, née Whiteman. In all Richard and Elizabeth had six children: Annie Maud (born 1892),  Ernest Alexandria (1896),  Walter Henry (1898),  Elsie May (1901), Winifred Evelyn (1904) and  Leslie Francis R (1907).

Richard was a groom, born in Lambourn, who came to Newbury in the 1870s after his sister Elizabeth married Henry Wainwright and settled in the town. He married Elizabeth Whiteman, his second wife, in 1891.

He died in 1908 (in his early 50's³), when Walter was only nine years old, leaving Elizabeth in a very precarious position. She was rescued from this position when she remarried in 1909 to William Charles Westall; she had another child, Daisy Louise, later that same year.

Brian Sylvester

September 2016