Name
Percy Stanley Hampson
1882
Conflict
First World War
Date of Death / Age
22/05/1915
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Private
1752
Royal Scots
7th Bn.
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
Searched but not found
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
EDINBURGH (ROSEBANK) CEMETERY
Memorial Ground
United Kingdom
Headstone Inscription
N/A
UK & Other Memorials
Leith Methodist Church, Scotland, Not on Hemel Hempstead Town Memorial
Pre War
Percy Stanley Hampson was born in 1882 in Forest Hill, Lewisham, London the son of James and Catherine Hampson (nee McAdam) and one of two children.
On the 1891 Census the family were living at 5 David's Road, Lewisham, where his father was working as a Bootmaker, (N.B. James Dyer, his future stepfather was living with them as a boarder).
His father died in February 1893 and his mother remarried in November 1894 to James Dyer at St Luke, Chelsea. On the 1901 Census the family were living at 57 Portland Road, Hove, Brighton, Sussex, where his stepfather was a Printer's Foreman and Percy was a Printer's machinist. He and his sister Edith (born in 1891 in Lewisham) were listed with the surname Dyer, although their births were both registered as Hampson.
On the 1911 Census his mother and stepfather were living in Paddington with his sister Edith, but Percy was a boarder living with Herbert and Edith Sarney at 9 Cromer Road, Tooting, London, and working as a Machine Manager at a Printing company.
He married Ellen Oldring in Hemel Hempstead in summer 1911 and they had a son, Norman James Eric Hampson, born in Leith, Scotland on 19 December 1914.
(N.B. his widow gave an address at 30 Marine Parade, Dover on a pension record.)
Wartime Service
Percy had enlisted at the outbreak of war and joined the 7th Battalion, Royal Scots (Lothian Regiment). He was with a large group of fellow soldiers, mainly Royal Scots Territorials, who were travelling by train, en route to Gallipoli., when they were involved in a multi-train rail crash which occurred outside the Quintinshill signal box near Gretna Green in Dumfriesshire, Scotland.
The Quintinshill signal box controlled two passing loops which, at the time of the accident, were occupied by goods trains and a stationary local train on the main line. The first collision occurred when the southbound troop train travelling to Liverpool collided with the stationary local train. The wreckage was then struck by a northbound sleeping car express travelling from London to Glasgow, resulting in a fire from the gas lighting system of the wooden carriages of the troop train. Only half of the soldiers on the troop train survived and the precise death toll was never fully established as some of the bodies were never recovered, having been wholly consumed by the fire. The official death toll was 227 (215 soldiers, 9 passengers and 3 railway employees). This was, and remains, the worst rail disaster in British history.
Percy is one of the soldiers whose remains were buried together in the mass grave at the Memorial Ground of Edinburgh (Rosebank) Cemetery, Scotland.
Additional Information
Brother in law to Hubert Oldring named on Hemel Hempstead war memorial. His widow received a war gratuity of £3 and pay owing of £5 0s 5d. She also received a pension of 17s 6d a week for herself and her son, which later rose to £1 8s a week from 5.3.19.
Acknowledgments
Brenda Palmer
www.hemelheroes.com., www.nrscotland.gov.uk
