Rank: Private 1760 Regiment: 1/4th Bn., Devonshire Regiment Died: 9 November 1916 Age: 21 Parish: Newton Poppleford Local Memorials: Newton Poppleford War Memorial Other Memorial: Amara War Cemetery [Google] PDF Download: WHEATON Alfred Thomas
Alfred was the son of Eli Wheaton and Mary Ann, nee Beard. Eli was born in 1869 and died in 1939 but Mary Ann lived until 1961 aged 92. They were married in 1893 in Newton Abbot. They had four children; Jonathan, Alfred, John and Alice.
Despite being the oldest, Jonathan was the last to die at the age of 93, in 1987. All the children were born in Bristol which shows that it was in this city the Wheatons were living in the mid 1890s. In 1911 their oldest son Jonathan had left home, and Eli and his wife and family were living at Beehive Cottage, Newton Poppleford, together with Eli’s father Jonathan who was a widower. Both Eli and his father were wheelwrights.
By this time Alfred, born in 1895, was aged 15, and while still living at home, was a baker. Eli and his father had been born in Newton Poppleford, and they had returned to it by 1910. Certainly the youngest three children went to Newton Poppleford school. Alfred (Alf) enlisted in the army at Salcombe Regis; quite a walk from Newton Poppleford, unless by then he had got a job there as a baker.
He joined the Devonshire Regiment 1st/4th Battalion, who called themselves The Territorials. He served, like several others from the village, in Mesopotamia, now Iraq. The army called it The Messpot! Around the beginning of November, Private Alfred Wheaton was carried from the battlefield and died of his wounds in a field hospital on 9 November 1916. He is buried in part 11 of the British War cemetery in Amara, Iraq.
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