Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

- Researched and written by Anthony Stimson - 

Tpr. Percy Nagor Graham Wilson, 5’7”, was 32 when he enlisted. The son of the Registrar of Probates at the Supreme Court, he was educated at St. Peter’s College and on leaving school joined the Treasury Department as a clerk, remaining there for 20 years. On 24 April 1900, a week before 4SAIB sailed, his uncle Stephen King wrote to him: ‘Accept from us all, our best wishes for your success – hoping you will come out of every battle with honor and glory on your side, and for our glorious Empire and beloved Queen fight like only true British soldiers can – and let them know Australians are to be counted as true ‘Soldiers of the Queen’.

Wilson came down with enteric in March 1901 and was packed off to Cape Town’s Woodstock Hospital where he conceded, in a letter to his mother, that he had downplayed the severity of his case. He had come through the bout of fever, he wrote on 27 April, and was earmarked to be invalided home when dysentery struck, but he was better now and had decided to recuperate in Britain before visiting family and friends and returning home. While in hospital a man in a nearby bed, delirious with enteric, cut his throat with a razor and expired minutes later, but it did not affect him unduly, Percy said, given the sights he had seen since leaving Adelaide. He volunteered for service in the Great War but was knocked back due to age and ill-health, and for the last 27 years lived with his sister at Echunga in the Adelaide Hills. He died, a single man, at his brother’s house in Fisher Street, Fullarton, in 1931.