Private Walter Marshall

Private Walter Marshall, 1st/7th ( Territorial ) Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers. He was killed in Belgium on 1st May 1915, aged 23. He had been born in Tweedmouth and was the son of Agnes and the late George Marshall of Tweedside House, Tweedmouth and is commemorated on the Menin Gate, Ypres, Flanders, Belgium. It was reported that he and some comrades had been killed by a shell whilst taking a calf to the Company cookhouse. Before the War he had been employed as a baker by the Tweedside Co-Op and thus he had been made a Company cook. The first photo shows troops tying on their rudimentary gas masks. ( The Germans had used poison gas for the first time on the Western Front on 22nd April ) .The second photo shows the impressive Memorial raised to the 50th ( Northumbrian ) Division of which the Battalion was part until February 1918 when it was transferred to the 42nd ( East Lancashire ) Division as the Pioneer Battalion. It was erected near the village of Weiltje in the Ypres Salient where nearby on 26th April 1915 the Division had fought its first action during the Battle of St Julien only days after landing on the Continent.