Description:Submitted by Maggie Burns, Birmingham Archives and Heritage
Thomas Ewart Mitton, called Ewart (his family name)in this article, born in April 1897, died young. Like most of his generation he enjoyed life and had great hopes for the future. But, as his older brother Eric wrote, there was a ‘bolt from the blue… War was declared in August 1914.’ [1]
Eric himself was an officer in the first Territorial signals section to be sent to France at the start of World War I. He was promoted to Captain in October 1915, and had risen to the rank of Major by the end of the war. [2] Ewart followed his brother, and after leaving school enlisted as a signals officer with the Royal Engineers in February 1916. He went to France in March 1917. His company then moved to Belgium. He died in an accident on Christmas Eve whilst erecting telegraph wires over a railway near Ypres.
Eric and Ewart were part of a large and prosperous Birmingham family. They attended Moseley Baptist Church. The family had a high sense of social responsibility; an article in the Birmingham News, August 1932 stated that the Mittons as a family had ‘played a prominent part in the public and religious life of the district for the past fifty or sixty years’. Thomas Evans Mitton, father of Eric and Ewart, had studied at King Edward’s School, the ancient Birmingham grammar school for boys, as they did later. In 1874 he founded the firm of Hunt and Mitton, brassfounders. The business thrived. T. E. Mitton was a skilled engineer, later on the executive committee of the Engineering Employers’ Federation. He was appointed a magistrate in 1906. After the war he took a leading part in the training of disabled soldiers.[3]
In 1880 he married Mabel Tolkien, and they had a large family. They lived at Abbotsford, a large house on Wake Green Road, Moseley [4], from 1902. [5] There is no ford by the house, nor any history of a monastery, so it was probably named after Sir Walter Scott’s historic house in the Scottish borders. T. E. Mitton took an interest in literature; he had been a member of the Birmingham Central Literary Association, as had Arthur Tolkien, his wife’s brother. [6]