Lionel Turpin

Rifleman Lionel Fitzherbert Turpin was a Guyanese soldier of the British Army who fought during the First World War.
He was born in 1896, in Georgetown, British Guiana. A merchant seaman, Turpin enlisted in the army in August 1915, at York, in England. He was sent to the Western Front in February 1916, with the 2nd Battalion, The King's Royal Rifle Corps.Turpin, Jackie (2012), Battling Jack Turpin: You Gotta Fight Back, pp. 3-5.
On the Western Front, Turpin fought in the Somme Offensive, and later sustained severe wounds from a gas shell which necessitated his hospitalisation in England and eventual placement in a convalescent home near Hill House, Warwick. His lungs had been burnt, while the shell inflicted a gaping wound to his back.Phillips, Caryl (2007), Foreigners: Three English Lives, pp. 89-90.
Turpin settled in Leamington Spa after his discharge, and married Beatrice Elizabeth Whitehouse, with whom he had five children. He became an iron-moulder at a gas stove works, but his wounds deteriorated over time, requiring full-time care and the partial removal of a lung. He died on 6 March 1929, at the Ministry of Pensions Hospital in Highbury, Birmingham.Scott A. G. M. Crawford, ‘Turpin, Randolph Adolphus (1928–1966)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 accessed 4 Sept 2015 Two of his sons, Dick and Randolph, became middleweight boxing champions.
==Notes==
Category:1896 births
Category:1929 deaths
Category:Guyanese military personnel
Category:British Army
Category:Buried in England
Category:Rifleman