Regiment: Army Service Corps
Service No: S4/143728
Date & place of birth: July 1886, Egdean, West Sussex
Date & place of death: 29 September 1916(aged 30), Aldershot Isolation Hospital
Private Ernest William Hamilton never went to war but died of fever in an army isolation hospital. His brother Robert Henry who was four years younger also enlisted and was killed in the war.
Family background
Ernest William Hamilton was the son of Robert and Fanny Hamilton. Robert was a gamekeeper and by 1911 he was working as a gamekeeper on the Petworth Park estate. The family resided at Adelaide Lodge Limbo where Ernest lived with his family and worked as an apprentice baker. Ernest had two sisters, Ethel and Gertrude, and a brother Robert Henry who also fought and died in the war. His father Robert had died by September 1918.
Military service
He enlisted on 25 October 1915 in Petworth and went to Aldershot where he worked in the 67th Field Bakery and did not go the front.
Death and commemoration
He died on 29 September 1916, aged 20, of Cerebro/spinal fever having been admitted to Aldershot isolation hospital two days earlier. His body was sent home to Petworth at the request of his father and is buried in Horsham Road Cemetery. His family received the plaque and scroll given to all soldiers who died in the war
Subsequent family history
His brother is the Robert Henry Hamilton also remembered on the memorial.