Alexander Coverdale Short was born in the Yorkshire village of Nafferton in the autumn of 1890. One of twelve children, his parents were labourer Benjamin Short and his wife, Emily.

Benjamin died in 1908, and the following year Emily remarried, to widow William Jefferson. He was a clerk for the council in neighbouring Driffield but, by the time of the 1911 census, the family had moved to Sculcoates, near Kingston-upon-Hull, where he had taken up employment at an auctioneer’s.

The 1911 census found the extended family living at 44 Hopwood Street in Hull, a seven-room property. William and Emily headed the household, sharing the house with William’s son Alfred, Alexander and four of his sisters, Alexander’s nephew, two boarders and two visitors – another of Alexander’s sisters and her son.

Alexander was employed as a bricklayer’s apprentice by this point, but at some point found alternative employment working for the North Eastern Railway Company. War was on the horizon, however, and he had enlisted in the Northumberland Fusiliers by the spring of 1915.

Private Short was attached to the 17th (Service) Battalion (North Eastern Railway Pioneers) and, by August 1915, his unit had moved to Codford, Wiltshire, on the edge of Salisbury Plain.

Knowing a trip across the English Channel was likely imminent, before he left Yorkshire, Alexander married Dora Harrison. The daughter of a butcher, she had been born and raised in Sculcoates.

Alexander’s time in the army was not to be a long one. Within a matter of months, his health began to deteriorate, and on 25th October 1915, he died of heart failure at Codford Military Hospital. He was just 24 years of age.

Finances appear to have prevented Private Short’s family from bringing their son and husband home. Instead, Alexander Coverdale Short was laid to rest in the peaceful St Mary’s Churchyard in Codford.

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