Yeatman

Reginald Yeatman

Appears as:

Born:

Parents:

Unit:

No.:

Rank:

Died:

Grave/Memorial:

Yeatman, Reginald

1889, Hilton, Dorset

John and Jane (née Bartlett)

1st Battalion, Duke of Edinburgh's, Wiltshire Regiment

8104

Private

16 November 1918, age 29

Brookwood Military Cemetery, Brookwood, Woking, Surrey: XIII. B. 3.

Biography:
Reginald Yeatman was born, in Hilton, Dorset, in 1889. He was the son of John Cooke and Jane Ellen (née Bartlett). He had three brothers and four
sisters. Reginald’s father died when he about five and his mother remarried. With her second husband, Thomas Churchill, Jane had a further four
children.

By 1911, Thomas and Jane had moved to Woking and were living in Oaks Road. Reginald had already joined the Army; in the 1911 census, he was with
the 1st Battalion Wiltshire Regiment, attached to the 2nd Battalion Mounted Infantry in South Africa; his trade was ‘shoeing smith’.

At the start of the First World War, Reginald was with The 2nd Battalion, which left England on 5th October 1914 with 1010 men. They landed at
Zeebrugge, Belgium on 7th October and reached Ypres after dark on 14th October.

At the end of the war, Reginald was back with the 1st Battalion.

Reginald Yeatman died, of influenza and broncho pneumonia, in Woking Military Hospital [this may have been either Beechcroft or at Inkerman Barracks], on 16 November 1918. He is buried, in grave XIII. B. 3, within Brookwood Military Cemetery.
West Surrey Times June 1918

Brookwood Military Cemetery is owned by the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission and is the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the United Kingdom, covering approximately
37 acres.

In 1917, an area of land in Brookwood Cemetery (The London Necropolis) was set aside for the burial of men and women of the forces of the Commonwealth and Americans, who had
died, many of battle wounds, in the London district.

This site was further extended to accommodate the Commonwealth casualties of the Second World War. There is a large Royal Air Forces section in the south-east corner of the
cemetery (which also contains the graves of Czechoslovakian and American airmen who served with the Royal Air Force) and the Air Forces shelter building nearby houses the register
of the names of those buried in the section. A plot in the west corner of the cemetery contains approximately 2,400 Canadian graves of the Second World War including those of 43 men
who died of wounds following the Dieppe Raid in August 1942. The Canadian Records building, which was a gift of the Canadian government in 1946, houses a reception room for
visitors and other offices.

In addition to the Commonwealth plots, the cemetery also contains French, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Belgian and Italian sections, and a number of war graves of other nationalities all
cared for by the Commission. The American Military Cemetery is the responsibility of the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Brookwood Military Cemetery now contains 1,601 Commonwealth burials of the First World War and 3,476 from the Second World War. Of the Second World War burials 5 are
unidentified, 3 being members of the R.A.F. and 2 being members of the R.C.A.F.