P/SSX 19234
Able Seaman Stanley James Cotton died on 1st September 1940 when his ship HMS Esk was sunk in the North Sea. He is also commemorated on Portsmouth Naval Memorial.
(Leamington Spa Courier, 13 September 1940)
Stanley Cotton was born in Leamington in 1919, the son of Ernest and Emily Cotton who lived at 6 Windsor Street. He went to Milverton School and then worked for Barnes fruit stores in Regent Place and Cecil Mason Ironmongers. He joined the Royal Navy in 1936.
In April 1940 Stanley married Mary (Molly) J. Mooney at St Peter’s RC Church.Mary lived with Stanley’s family in Windsor Street.
HMS Esk was a destroyer which had been converted to minelaying duties. She was working with other ships off the coast of Holland when she was hit by a mine. Accounts of the disaster can be found at
https://www.scarboroughsmaritimeheritage.org.uk/article.php?article=150
https://portal.sds.ox.ac.uk/articles/online_resource/Seaman_James_Halliday_and_HMS_Esk/25923091
Stanley had younger sister, Florence, who worked as a factory hand manufacturing jewellery. She married Arthur Taylor in Leamington in 1953.
He also had an older half-brother, William Percy Smith, born in 1913. William was the son of Stanley’s mother Emily and her first husband Sidney George Smith. Sidney Smith was a shoeing smith, caring for horses in the Royal Horse Artillery, and was killed in action in 1917. He is commemorated on the WW1 section of the Leamington War Memorial.
William Percy Smith served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in WW2 and survived the war.
After Stanley’s death his widow Mary (Molly) re-married a US soldier Ellsworth A. Burkhardt from Pennsylvania in 1944. Their daughter Patricia Josephine was born at the Cay Unit, Warneford Hospital on 12th March 1946. Mary and Patricia sailed to the Us from Southampton in May 1946 aboard the General Henry Gibbons.
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Sources of information:
County of Warwickshire Roll of Honour, Kenneth Fowler
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
UK 1921 Census
UK 1939 Register
US 1930 Census
Registers of Births and Marriages
Immigration Passenger Lists
Military Service Memorial Collection
All accessed via FindMyPast
Archives of Leamington Spa Courier, accessed via British Newspaper Archive and/or FindMyPast
Google search for HMS Esk – Wikipedia and other links
