Pte 63809 Robert Walter Lane

 

In 1891 the family, with three children, is living at at 9 Claypath, Durham, where his father is a tailor, and Robert is 5.

 

By 1901 they are back in Newcastle, at 21 Sunderland Street, Westgate. His father, 37, is a tailor, his mother is 41, Robert is 15, George 7, and Catherine 4.

 

His mother died in 1910, aged 50.

 

The 1911 census finds Robert as head of household at 81 Pine Street, Newcastle, with his four siblings. He is aged 26, single, and employed as a glazier. James, 24, and George, 17, are employed as boiler makers in a shipyard. Maud is 20, no occupation, and Kate is 13, at school. They have a boarder, John Miller, 26, a general labourer in an ordnance works.

 

He married Elizabeth Ann Harrison in the summer of 1916. There appear to be no children born to the marriage. 

 

His service record has not survived so the details are not known.  Robert enlisted in Newcastle (in July or August 1916, based on the amount of the War Gratuity), as Private 23055, East Yorkshire Regiment. 

 

At some point he was transferred to the 17th Battalion of The King’s Liverpool Regiment as Private 63809.  In May 1917 the 17th Battalion moved from the Arras area to the Ypres Salient. The Third Battle of Ypres, also called Passchendaele, began on 31st July.  It is not known when Robert was wounded, but he died from his wounds in No.2 Casualty Clearing Station at Outtersteene on 05th November 1917, aged 33.

He now rests in Outtersteene Communal Cemetery Extension, Bailleul, France

Outtersteene was captured by the III Corps on 13 October 1914 but no Commonwealth burials took place there for nearly three years. In August 1917, during the Third Battle of Ypres, the 2nd, 53rd and 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Stations came to Outtersteene, and the first and last of these remained until March 1918. The hamlet was captured by the Germans on 12 April 1918, and retaken by the 9th, 29th and 31st Divisions, with the ridge beyond it, on 18 and 19 August, but the cemetery was not used again during hostilities. After the Armistice, over 900 graves of 1914 and 1918 were brought into Plots I, II and IV from the battlefields surrounding Outtersteene and from certain small cemeteries. In the Extension, on the East side of the Communal Cemetery, were buried 17 soldiers from the United Kingdom and one from Australia, who fell in August and September 1918. 1,147 German graves were initially concentrated into Plot III. These were later removed to Steenwerck German Cemetery. The extension was used again in 1940, for the burial of those killed in the fighting which covered the withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force to Dunkirk. Outtersteene Communal Cemetery Extension now contains 1,393 Commonwealth burials and commemorations of the First World War. 499 of the burials are unidentified but there are special memorials to 14 casualties known or believed to be buried among them. Second World War burials number 72, of which 23 are unidentified. The extension was designed by Sir Herbert Baker.

His father died in March 1917 aged 54.

 

It is not known if there was some delay in the news reaching his wife, but it wasn’t until two months later that notice appeared in the newspaper.  In the Newcastle Journal on 5th January 1918:

“Mrs. Lane, 81, Pine Street, Newcastle, has been notified officially that her husband, Private Robert W. Lane, Liverpool Regiment, has died of wounds.”

 

His widow Elizabeth received his effects, including a War Gratuity of £6-10s, and a pension of 13/9d a week.  She appears to have died in 1958, aged 72.