Now! Then! 2025! - Yorkshire On This Day

A Yorkshire Almanac Comprising 365 Historical Extracts, Red-letter Days and Customs, and Astronomical and Meteorological Data

11 November 1918: George Ellison of Richmond Hill, Leeds, is the last British soldier to be killed in action in the First World War

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Wikipedia contributors. 2021. George Edwin Ellison. Wikipedia. San Francisco: Wikimedia Foundation. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, without modification. Get it:

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Ellison was born in York and later lived in Leeds. He first joined the British Army as a regular soldier in 1902, but had left by 1912, by which time he had become a coal miner, and when he married Hannah Maria Burgan in Nottingham. Sometime just before the outbreak of war he was recalled to the army, joining the 5th Royal Irish Lancers and serving in the army from the very start of the war. He fought in the Battle of Mons in 1914, and several other battles including the Battle of Ypres, Battle of Armentières, Battle of La Bassée, Battle of Lens, Battle of Loos, and Battle of Cambrai on the Western Front. He died at 09:30 am (90 minutes before the armistice came into effect), shot by a sniper while on a patrol in woodland on the outskirts of Mons. Aged 40 at the time of his death, he is buried in the St Symphorien Military Cemetery, just southeast of Mons. Coincidentally, and in large part due to Mons being lost in the very opening stages of the war and regained at the very end (from the British perspective), his grave faces that of John Parr, the first British soldier killed during the Great War, and just a few metres away from George Lawrence Price, the Canadian soldier who was also felled near Mons at 10:58am, and was the last British Empire soldier killed in the Great War.

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Ellison was born in York and later lived in Leeds. He first joined the British Army as a regular soldier in 1902, but had left by 1912, by which time he had become a coal miner, and when he married Hannah Maria Burgan in Nottingham. Sometime just before the outbreak of war he was recalled to the army, joining the 5th Royal Irish Lancers and serving in the army from the very start of the war. He fought in the Battle of Mons in 1914, and several other battles including the Battle of Ypres, Battle of Armentières, Battle of La Bassée, Battle of Lens, Battle of Loos, and Battle of Cambrai on the Western Front. He died at 09:30 am (90 minutes before the armistice came into effect), shot by a sniper while on a patrol in woodland on the outskirts of Mons. Aged 40 at the time of his death, he is buried in the St Symphorien Military Cemetery, just southeast of Mons. Coincidentally, and in large part due to Mons being lost in the very opening stages of the war and regained at the very end (from the British perspective), his grave faces that of John Parr, the first British soldier killed during the Great War, and just a few metres away from George Lawrence Price, the Canadian soldier who was also felled near Mons at 10:58am, and was the last British Empire soldier killed in the Great War.

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