Harrogate Herald - 1st August 1917

W H Breare letter

Private W Walker, of the Beechwood lot, is a son of Mr & Mrs E Walker of 15 Avenue Street, Starbeck. He was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel on May 3rd, and for the time being has lost the use of the muscles on the right arm. He has been in hospital at Liverpool, but is now, I am glad to say, at Beaulieu, one of our Harrogate Military Hospitals, which perhaps you will remember as being situated in West End Park. While at Liverpool, Walker met Private Pacey, who used to drive for Balmforth. Walker, who went out in January, expressed his thanks for the cigarettes kind friends sent him through me. When he arrived in Harrogate he saw Lupton and Sergeant Croft, both of whom are home for commissions. He likewise told me he saw the two Greetham boys. of Starbeck, were home - one from France, the other from Aldershot. Rather lucky to be home together, isn't it? When Walker got his hurt, he experienced something that seemed like a dispensation of Providence. He was moving breast on the enemy, when "something within", he says, told him to turn round. He did so. It was just at that moment he received the bullet in his shoulder. Had he been facing the other way he would have got it in the heart, what is termed his "billet". He did not get away from the field for two hours. I was interested to hear from him that Wilfred Dickinson, one of our Herald staff, is in India. When Walker enlisted he had been two years with Grayson's. Before that he was employed on the railway.