These brothers all served during World War 1. This was a worrying and stressful time for parents with so many sons serving. Their mother was fortunate, if that is the appropriate word in these circumstances, to have lost only one of her sons during the conflict.

The family

The brothers’ father was Thomas Francis Burwell who had been living in Brightside since moving from his parents’ farm in Lincolnshire sometime before the spring of 1881. According to the census of that year, he was boarding at the house of Thomas Dickinson who worked as a time keeper in one of the many steel works in the area. There was another boarder and both of them were described as engine drivers. These may have been small locomotives that moves goods around a large factory site but is more likely to have been stationary engines that supplied power to drive machinery.

Thomas Francis had followed many thousands of other young people who left the rural areas to find work in the nearby cities and towns. Both he and Thomas Burnold, his fellow lodger who was slightly older, were from Linwood near Market Rasen and so it likely that the elder man helped Thomas Francis to find work and accommodation.

Thomas Francis and Mary Ann Elwiss were married in June 1881. Mary Ann was recorded in the census of 1881 as a ‘former servant’ and it likely that she also had found work in Sheffield although she was back with her parents in Finningley near Doncaster when the census enumerator called.

From the turn of the century Thomas Francis was a commercial traveller and spent much time away from home. He has been found in Kendal and Caernarvon on different census records.

Thomas and Mary Ann remained in Sheffield for the next few years and it is where all their children were born except their youngest, Edward Proctor who was born in 1888 at Newark on Trent. This is where the family were recorded in 1891 and, indeed, they were still in the same house in Newark 10 years later when the next census was taken.[1]

The family moved from Newark to Fulwood in 1901 (a few months after the census recorded them in Newark). We don’t know what prompted this move. They moved in to Holmleigh, a substantial detached ‘gentleman’s residence’ on Brookhouse Hill opposite the junction with Chorley Road. By 1911 the family had dispersed, William Henry, the eldest son had sailed to Canada, only to return when the war started and the youngest Edward had travelled to Australia. George Stanley, the third chid, was living in Beverley where he worked as an ironmonger’s assistant (he had been an apprentice to an ironmonger 10 years before in Newark.)

The previous year, Elizabeth who was the second child and only girl, had married John Barber at Fulwood and had set up home just up the hill on Crimicar Lane. This left Mary and Thomas Percy at Homleigh on census night, 1911, Thomas Francis being in Kendal. Thomas Percy, now 24 years old, was a government auditor.

Thomas Francis died in October 1916 and is buried in Fulwood graveyard. Mary stayed in Holmleigh until 1926 when she moved onto the lower part of Brooklands Crescent. Mary died in 1943 and his buried with her husband in Fulwood graveyard.

[1] Census 1901: 37, Victoria Street, Newark