Lance-Corporal Wilfred Lockwood, T/104619, 16th Armoured Brigade Company, Royal Army Service Corps.
Wilfred Lockwood was born in the Summer of 1918, the son of John William Lockwood and Martha Hannah Dunford, who married in Ossett in 1913. There were three other children: Norman Lockwood, born in 1915; Marian Lockwood, born in 1916 and Eveline Lockwood, born in 1921.
Wilfred Lockwood married Phyllis M. Newton in Ossett in early 1942 and a son Richard Lockwood was born in 1943.
Wilfred Lockwood died on the 30th June 1945, aged 26 years, just after the end of the war in Europe, and is buried at grave reference 8. H. 1. at Becklingen War Cemetery, Germany. The small village of Becklingen lies in the north of Germany approx 85kms north of Hannover.
The site of Becklingen War Cemetery was chosen for its position on a hillside overlooking Luneburg Heath. Luneburg Heath was where, on 4 May 1945, Field-Marshal Montgomery accepted the German surrender from Admiral Doenitz.
Burials were brought into the cemetery from isolated sites in the countryside, small German cemeteries and prisoner of war camps cemeteries, including the Fallingbostel cemetery, within a radius of about 80 kilometres. Most of those buried in the cemetery died during the last two months of the war.
Becklingen War Cemetery contains 2,374 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 97 of them unidentified. There are also 27 war graves of other nationalities, many of them Polish.2
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