Claude Wilson

He was the youngest son of Harry Jas. John Brett Wilson and Julia Wilson. According to the information provided on the 1911 census, his parents had by then been married for 27 years and had had ten children born living of whom only six were still alive. Eight children were named on the three census between 1891 and 1911: Clara, Tom (Thomas), Edith, Harry, Albert, Bertie, Violet and Claude. In 1891 Harry was employed as a coachman and he and Julia were living at 24 Commercial Street, Lenton. There were four children in the household; Clara (6), Thomas (4), Edith (2) and Harry (1). By 1901 they had moved and were living in the ecclesiastical parish of Holy Trinity, Nottingham. Harry was now a stableman. Six children were in the household at the time of this census; Clara, Thomas, Harry (11), Albert (6), Bertie (4) and Violet (1). Their sister Edith, who was recorded on the 1891 census, was not in the house although there is a census record of an Edith Wilson of the right age in the household of an aunt and uncle, Gilbert and Elizabeth Handly, at 4 Alfred Street, Nottingham. By 1911, when Harry declared on the census that he had six children still living, only Albert, Bertie and Claude were recorded in their parents' home at 143 Annesley Street, Meadows. Thomas had joined the army in 1906 and was still serving in 1911. Harry, who would have been about 21 years old in 1911, may well have left home. Claude's three sisters, Clara, Edith and Violet, have not been positively traced after the 1891 and 1901 census, and when Harry Wilson senior completed the declaration of the living relatives of his late son, Thomas, in 1920 he named Thomas's four brothers (including Claude, who had been killed some months earlier), but none of their sisters. It is likely that both Edith and Violet, the youngest of the three sisters, had died before 1911; Clara as the eldest was old enough to have left home. Thomas, Harry, Albert and Bertie all served in the war; Claude may not have seen active service although he was in uniform and serving abroad by December 1919. Harry served in the Grenadier Guards and Albert and Bertie in the King's Royal Rifle Corps while Thomas was in the 2nd Bn Sherwood Foresters and killed in action in France on 20 September 1914. Their mother, Julia, died in 1915 (death registered Jan/Feb/Mar) aged 55. The family home by this time was 14 Nelson Terrace, Hutchinson Street, Nottingham, the address to which Thomas' personal effects were returned to his father in March 1915. However, by 1920 Harry was living at 3 Victoria Terrace, Hartley Road, Radford.

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