Michelson - father and
son
The names of a father and son are
included on the War Memorial, the father having been killed in the First
World War and his son in the Second World War.
WILLIAM SMITH MICHELSON was a farm
worker, married with four children, who lived at Bedehouse Bank, Bourne,
and enlisted in the Lincolnshire Regiment when the war broke out in 1914.
He came home on leave only once and after bidding him farewell at the town
railway station, the family never saw him again. While serving with the
8th Battalion in Belgium, he was reported missing presumed killed on 7th
October 1917. He was 35 years old and his family learned later that he had
been blown up by a shell at the Battle of Ypres. He has no known grave but
is commemorated at the Tyne Cot Memorial to the missing in Belgium.
Although his name is included on the town's
War
Memorial, for some unaccountable reason it was not among those on the Roll
of Honour in Bourne Abbey. His widow Rosamund had died in 1963 and so his
daughter, Mrs Margaret Taylor, then aged 74, of 22 Willoughby Road,
Bourne, asked for the omission to be remedied. She was told that there was
no room and so she approached the Royal British Legion who intervened and
after consultations with church authorities, a local sign writer was
commissioned to add his name in March 1985.
CLARENCE ERNEST MICHELSON was the
youngest of his four children. He served as a sapper with the Royal
Engineers during the Second World War and was drowned during an exercise
off the Norfolk coast on 9th November 1944 at the age of 29. He is buried in the town
cemetery at Bourne where his grave is marked with a headstone from the
Commonwealth War Graves Commission (pictured right). His father is remembered on the same
headstone. |

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