Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1916, Private Hugh Aubrey Cockerton, 1st Battalion, the Cambridgeshire Regiment, died in hospital from the effects of poisonous gas as well as wounds suffered on the Somme.
At the outbreak of the Great War, the battalion had been stationed at Cambridge as part of the East Midlands brigade of the East Anglian Division, and was mobilised for war in February of 1915. Private Cockerton saw action in an attack near Richebourg l'Avoue and the Battle of Thiepval Ridge.
His parents’ youngest son, he was one of eight children. His brother, Private John Cockerton, 1st Battalion, the Bedfordshire Regiment, had been killed in action at the age of 23 on the 9th of November, 1914. Their father had died when they were still children, and their mother passed away four months after Hugh’s death.
Private Cockerton is buried in the Doullens Communal Cemetery on the Somme, in northern France. He and his brother are commemorated on the war memorial in St. Paul’s Church, Cambridge, where their family lived for some years.
Hugh, from Norwood in Surrey, was 17 years old.