Image: Men of Worth Project, Keighley.
Thomas Smith Shackleton was a promising local art student who lost his life in the Great War.
He was born 16 December 1891 in Keighley. His family: of mother Rachael, older sister, Mary, and father, also named Thomas, a coal merchant, lived at Gladstone Street.
Thomas, the father, died in 1901, and mother, Rachael, died a few years later in 1905. By the time of the 1911 census Mary, then an assistant teacher, is described as head of the household and Thomas as an art student at Keighley Art College, having previously been a pupil at Keighley Grammar School.
In 1912 he began to study art at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London as a fee-paying student with the aim of becoming an art teacher, initially studying design as his main art subject.
In 1914, at the start of the Great war he enlisted as a Private with E company of the 6th Battalion of the West Riding Regiment based at Skipton. This was no sudden impulse, as for just over three years from 1910, and overlapping with his first year at the College, he had been a volunteer with the same regiment.
In 1915 his battalion fought in France and Belgium in the region south of Dunkirk and in 1916 in the Battle of the Somme. He remained unscathed and rose through the ranks. In 1916 he returned to England for officer training and gained his commission as a probationary Second Lieutenant in December that year.
T.S. Shackleton in sheepskin winter clothing. Image: Mark Holden & Royal College of Art.
In March 1917 he returned to France to serve as an officer with the 2/6th Battalion, West Riding Regiment. In a joint operation with Australian troops, the Regiment attempted to capture Bullecourt, a village bordered by the German defensive Hindenburg Line. They met with fierce resistance and on the 5th May 1917 Thomas was killed by a shell.
He is buried at Ecoust Military Cemetery, Ecoust-Saint-Mein, Pas-de-Calais, France, and is commemorated in the Keighley War Memorial Window.