Thomas Edmund Gidley 1890 - 1915

Thomas Edmund Gidley was the first Gidley to die in the war and was a Private in the Manchester Regiment.
He was the the elder son of Arthur William Gidley and his first wife, Mary Jane, nee Cheetham. In 1911 Thomas was a packer of calico goods, working for a shipping house, and living at home in Salford, Lancs. His mother had died in 1902 and his father had married again. The stepmother, Annie, was blind by the 1911 census.
In 1912 Thomas married Mary Jane Lee in Salford and they had two children, Annie born in 1913, and a son called after his father, Thomas Edmund, who, tragically, was born only five weeks before his father's death. Thomas's widow married again in 1920.
Thomas Edmund must have joined up very early in the war. It seems that he was already serving in September 1914, departing for the Middle East. He was killed on May 18th 1915 at Gallipoli in the ill-fated Dardanelles Campaign, having landed probably only a couple of weeks earlier, to reinforce the British beachhead. His Medal Rolls index card records that he died of wounds. He was awarded the 15 Star, the Victory and the British medals. He is commemorated on the Helles Memorial in Turkey, pictured above.
The Dardanelles campaign against the Turks was intended to divert the Ottoman Empire from disrupting British oil supplies in the Middle East, from attacking the Russians in the Caucasus, and from cutting off access to India.