Hull Pals Memorial Post. PRIVATE, ALBERT THOMAS MARSHALL 11/1188. Born at Hull in July 1892, Albert was the fourth of seven children to Thomas (1861-1930) and Jane Marshall (1866-1943), of 173 Hawthorne Avenue, Anlaby Road, Hull. An Upholsterer before the war, he enlisted at City Hall in December 1914 joining the 11th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, ‘The Tradesmen’, Hull Pals. After serving in Egypt over Christmas 1915, the Pals arrived in France the following March and took over trenches at Englebelmer, a ‘quiet’ sector. Albert was killed in action during the day-to-day tit-for-tat of trench warfare. He may have been unlucky enough to have found himself in the path of a minenwerfer trench mortar, or grown careless and forgotten to duck on a stretch of trench where the parapet was a few inches shallower and felled by a sniper whose rifle was trained on that section waiting for an unsuspecting victim; he may have gone out on patrol in the black of night in No-Man’s Land looking for gaps in the German wire, or even a prisoner, and not made it back; I don’t know. What I do know is he lost his life on 16th June 1916 and is buried at Sucrerie Military Cemetery; a young man of 23.
