Private Alfred Henry ALLCORN (College Staff)

2/4th Battalion, Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
Born 1882 in Oxford
Died from diabetes, 3 January 1919, aged 36
Buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, Oxford. Also commemorated on a memorial at St Mary and St John Church, Cowley.

Alfred Allcorn was the eldest son of Alfred Frederick Allcorn and Kate, née Benson, of Cowley, Oxford. He was married to Mondona Annie, née Willcox, in 1911, and they had a child, also called Alfred, the following year.

He worked as a College Porter, and lived in Argyle Street, a 20-minute walk from Merton just off the Iffley Road.

Before the war he served as a territorial in the Royal Army Medical Corps for four years; he enlisted in the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, also known as the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars — or the ‘Queer Objects On Horseback’! — on 10 December 1915, and joined the 3/1st Battalion.

He sailed for France on 16 December 1916, in all likelihood one of a number of Hussars who joined the 1/4th Battalion on the Somme shortly before Christmas that year.

He suffered gunshot wounds to his left eye in September 1917, and his left leg in April 1918, after which he was sent back to England. There it was discovered he was suffering from diabetes, and in August he was discharged as ‘permanently unfit for further military service’, which had been ‘aggravated by active service’.

He died in Oxford on 3 January 1919, leaving his wife to bring up her three children – two from a previous marriage – on a Widow’s War Pension.

Thanks to the efforts of the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Trust and the In From the Cold Project, in 2012 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission accepted him as a casualty of the First World War, and commissioned a new headstone for his grave.

Additional information from Michael Cross at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Trust; with thanks to the Oxfordshire Family History Society.