Researching Walter Lyon

Son of Walter F. K. and Isabella R. Lyon, of Tantallon Lodge, North Berwick, Scotland, he was one of five brothers, three of whom were killed in the war and one of whom died while a student at Haileybury.

Walter went to Balliol College, Oxford and began a career as a Scottish Advocate.

He volunteered for the 9th Battalion Royal Scots before the First World War and was sent to Belgium in February 1915, to the trenches near Glencose Wood outside Ypres. He served as a lieutenant. Soon after he wrote two poems, Easter at Ypres and Lines Written in a Fire Trench. A few weeks later while the Second Battle of Ypres was at its fiercest, he wrote two more poems, On a Grave in a Trench, which he inscribed "English killed for Patrie", and I Tracked a Dead Man Down a Trench.

In early May 1915 Walter Lyon and the Royal Scots were in dugouts in Potijze Wood near the Menin Road, just 200 yards from the firing line. The shelling was so fierce that trees were torn up by the roots and the tops sliced by shrapnel. The stream of wounded from the wood was continuous and Walter Lyon was among the dead. He has no known grave and his name is listed on the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, panel 11.

A collection of his poems was published in 1916 and two are included in an anthology of Public School War Poetry called "A Deep Cry" published in 1993.

He was born in Shaler Township, Pennsylvania. He was educated at the Wakeam Academy and was admitted to the bar as an attorney in 1876. In 1889, he was appointed as United States District Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. He resigned from this position in 1893 to run for Pennsylvania State Senate; he served in this body for one term until his election as Lieutenant Governor. After leaving politics, he founded the Pittsburgh law firm of Lyon, Hunter & Burke. He later retired to Sewickley, Pennsylvania.

Lyon was educated at a private school called Highstead in Torquay, Devon and at Trinity College, Cambridge. As a cricketer, he played in six first-class matches over three seasons, five for Cambridge University and one for a "Gentlemen of the North" side for whom he made his highest score of 22. His Cambridge matches included the 1861 University Match against Oxford University; batting in the lower order, he made 15 and 16 as Cambridge won the match by 133 runs. He did not appear in the University Matches with Oxford in 1862 and 1863. He played a lot of amateur non-first-class cricket for teams such as Free Foresters through to the 1880s and beyond.

Lyon graduated from Cambridge University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1864. The following year, he and his younger brother Charles moved to Tutbury to take over the cotton mill previously owned by their uncle, Charles Webb. The cotton mill was transferred to Rocester in 1888, after which the mill in Tutbury was used for grinding locally mined gypsum. Tutbury being sited on the county boundary, Lyon was a Justice of the Peace for both Staffordshire and Derbyshire.