BORN HULL 1887. HULL PAL. WIFE HANNAH KIRK AND BABY LIVED AT 5 MAYO TERRACE, STANLEY STREET, HULL AND LATER 1 ADELAIDE PLACE, ADELAIDE STREET. SON OF HENRY MARSHALL & MARY ANN KIRK -NEWSTEAD STREET. EX BLUNDELL’S PAINT WORKER, BANKSIDE. HE WAS KILLED AT OPPY WOOD, ON HIS 30TH BIRTHDAY, RESCUING A COMRADE. HE WAS BURIED ON HIS WIDOW’S BIRTHDAY. HIS DEATH WAS REPORTED, WITH HIS PHOTOGRAPH, IN THE HULL DAILY MAIL ON 25TH MAY 1917. *
Hull Pals Memorial Post. CORPORAL PERCY KIRK 11/30. Born in April 1887, Percy was the third of four children to Henry and Mary Ann Kirk of 8 Olive Villas, Kimberley Street, Hull. A Fruit Shop Manager before the war, he dropped everything to enlist and was only the 30th man in the queue for the new 11th Battalion: The Tradesmen. Before he left for the war he married Hannah Thacker in July 1915, though they will have had little chance of much time together before he left for first Egypt and then the trenches of the Western Front. A veteran of the Somme attacks, Percy was killed in action in the small hours of the morning of 3rd May 1917, as the battalion attacked German positions in front of Oppy Wood and were machine gunned and shelled into oblivion, sacrificed as a diversionary attack to distract the Germans from more important operations further up the line. It seems all the more pointless when you weigh up just how many weeks we have spent at Oppy Wood to consider how little even High Command cared about the attack; and all the more poignant that, yet again, no trace of our man could be found and Percy Kirk is commemorated on the Arras Memorial; he was 30 years old.
