Bill was a Londoner, born and bred around the St Pancras area. He married Annie Whitlock in 1910 and their first daughter, Annie Catherine, was born later that year, followed by another daughter, Elizabeth, two years later. Bill had served in Bermuda in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps in the early 1900s and was in the Reserves when he was called up into C Company, 1st Battalion KRRC. He left Aldershot Barracks on 12th August 1914 en route for France. He probably wouldn't have known his wife was pregnant again. Bill was one of hundreds of riflemen captured by the Germans on November 2nd 1914 at Gheluvelt, Belgium and taken to Gustrow Prisoner of War Camp in northern Germany, where they arrived in a snowstorm and where conditions were atrocious, the men covered by one thin blanket, sleeping on straw in massive tents. By 1916 Bill had contracted tuberculosis and was in Wiedenborstel Hospital, where he was seen by a representative of the American Embassy who reported on his state of ill health to the War Office. Bill's wife Annie, meanwhile, had had a baby, named William after his father, in 1915. The following year she left her three children in London with her mother and went to work at the Royal Ordnance Filling Factory Rotherwas, Herefordshire as a munitioneer, keen to help in the manufacture of arms to help defeat the Germans and get her husband home. In December 1917 Bill was repatriated to Switzerland as a non-combatant unfit for further military service by the Swiss Red Cross and taken to a sanitorium in Leysin in the Alps. There he would have spent hours lying out in the fresh air and sunshine. He sent Annie a postcard with his room marked with an x and also a pressed edelweiss, which she treasured. Bill arrived back in London on December 9th 1918 and was taken straight to Hampstead Military Hospital; he was suffering from flu, which he had caught on his way home. He died there just eight days later, on 17th December, from lobar pneumonia. Bill was buried in Islington Cemetery on 23rd. and is commemorated on the war memorial there. His little boy Billy died the following day, of influenza, on Christmas Eve, aged just three. Annie suffered a total mental and physical breakdown as a result of this double tragedy and never forgave the German nation for its treatment of her husband.

Sara Tait