Today We Remember

Alfred WRIGHTON
Service no. 17146

Private, 7th Battalion,
The Northamptonshire Regiment

Family Background

Alfred was one of ten children born to Frederick and Mary Ann Wrighton of Aynho between 1870 and 1894. The Wrighton family had been in Aynho since the 1670s.  In the 1901 census the family lived in a cottage on Back Road which is the first part of Butts Close as we know it today. Frederick was a railway plate layer. He was also one of Aynho’s first parish councilors after it was formed in 1894.

Alfred left Aynho to work as a railway bricklayer in Walsall as shown in the 1901 census. His younger sister, Keziah, married a master plasterer from Bloxham and left Aynho for Canada around the same time. Alfred returned to Aynho a few years with his wife, Minnie (Cross) the daughter of a family he had lodged with when working away from Aynho, and they had two sons, Charles, born in 1910 and Dennis born in 1913.

Clement Wrighton was his younger brother by 13 years and served in the same battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment– he was killed two days later in the same battle. Albert Stewart also perished in Delville Wood one week after Alfred. His sister, Keziah’s husband was also killed in 1916. This sadly is a typical story of Kitchener’s early volunteer Army.

Albert and Reginald Wrighton were his first cousins.

Alfred has surviving relations still living in the village – one first cousin twice removed (Stewart Brown) and one second cousin twice removed (June Alsford).

He has no known grave but his name appears on Pier and Face 11A and 11D of the Thiepval Memorial. Like his brother he is listed on his parents’ headstone in the churchyard. Their mother died a few months later in February 1917, whilst their father lived until he was 94, dying in 1936.