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Corporal Thomas Atkinson, GC

Corporal Thomas Atkinson was in charge of the mechanical transport when a truck caught fire at Jinsafut Camp, Palestine.   He organised the removal of the remainder of the mechanical transport to a point clear of the burning truck.
Without his initiative and energy in rallying the drivers and assisting them to move their trucks out of danger, the remainder of the transport would have caught fire as well and a general conflagration throughout the camp would have been inevitable.
Corporal Atkinson was subsequently indefatigable in his efforts to subdue the fire right up to the time he was severely burnt in endeavouring to save the life of one of his comrades.

Thomas Atkinson was born in Redcar in North Yorkshire on 27th May 1915, the son of James Atkinson, a coastal fisherman.   After his education at West Dyke Central School, it was expected that Tom would join the family business.   The Depression during the 1930s hit the fishing industry hard and young Tom had to take several part-time jobs to bring in money for the family.   Eventually he travelled to Middlesbrough where he enlisted in the Green Howards.   After a short spell doing his basic training at the Regimental Depot on Gallowgate Hill in Richmond, on 12th June 1934, Private Tom Atkinson was posted to the 1st Battalion based in Portland in Dorset.
It was here, when he was still only 20 years old, that he married a local girl, Doreen Bowen.   In 1938 he was promoted to Lance Corporal and sent back to the Regimental Depot in Richmond to train recruits.   Six months later in July 1938, he sailed to Malta to rejoin his Battalion which was preparing for an operational tour in Palestine.   In October 1938, he was promoted to Corporal just before the battalion moved to Nablus in Palestine.
4388625 Corporal Thomas Atkinson won the EGM for his bravery in Palestine on 15 March 1939.   The announcement was made in The London Gazette on 25th July 1939.
Although he was promoted Sergeant when he came out of hospital and moved to France in October 1939 with his battalion, it was soon discovered - after he suffered from frostbite in 1940 that the burn wounds made him unfit for Military Service.   He was posted to training jobs in Britain until he was finally discharged from the army on medical grounds in 1944.   Thomas Atkinson returned to Portland to rejoin his wife and took a job as an Admiralty driver on the nearby naval base.   Between 1946 - 48, he did a similar job in Singapore Dockyard before returning home to be employed as a stone sawyer in the stone industry in Portland, where he remained until his retirement in 1965.
When he died in Portland on 26th March 1997, obituaries were written about him in local and national papers which also mentioned his wife - who had died the year before him - and his two sons and daughter.   In the following October, a bench was dedicated to him in Portland, and later a plaque erected outside the Redcar and Cleveland council chambers in Eston Town Hall.


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