208447 Pte. Samuel Langley British Army 7th Battalion Duke of Wellington West Riding Regiment from:Mossley, Lancashire My Grandfather, Samuel Langley, born in 1891, was a finisher of cloth in a family woollen firm called Hugh Kershaw and Sons Ltd in Mossley, Lancashire, was in the Territorial Army before the outbreak of the Great War. My father had been born in the March of that year. Samuel went to Summer camp in Marske, Yorkshire in 1914 and did not return home, but marched to Immingham and sailed from there to France. He was wounded in the leg in 1916, invalided back to Blighty, to Chichester and then to somewhere near Bentley, Doncaster, where my Grandmother (and presumably my father) went to stay with a mining family who made her very welcome, before Samuel was sent back to the Front. He was the Company barber which I think showed there was some attempt to match civilian skills with life in the army! I think he was at the Somme and Ypres. His brother-in -law was killed on Armistice Day 1918.
He returned to his job in the woollen mill and retired from there in his early seventies, having received a gold watch for fifty years'service in 1961. Both my Grandfathers were in the 7th Duke of Wellington Regiment, but did not know each other then.
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