Tom Dresser

Twice wounded, he carried vital orders through hostile fire.

Tom Dresser grew up in Yorkshire. His family later lived in Middlesbrough, where he attended school and worked at the Dorman Long steelworks. He also developed an interest in drawing and contributed to local sketching activities.

Dresser enlisted in the Yorkshire Regiment in February 1916 and reached France in September. A foot wound that November brought him back to Britain for hospital treatment. He returned to the front in March 1917 and joined the 7th Battalion, arriving shortly before the fighting around Arras.

On 12 May 1917, near Roeux, he volunteered to take a message from battalion headquarters to a front-line company. The route crossed ground under enemy observation and fire. He was wounded twice but continued until the message reached its destination.

Dresser was recovering in hospital when he learned that the Victoria Cross had been awarded. King George V invested him at Buckingham Palace on 21 July 1917. He later transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and returned to France in 1918. He was discharged in April 1919 with a disability pension, carrying the effects of his wounds into civilian life.

In the 1920s he married Teresa Landers and took over his father’s newsagent’s business in Marton Road, Middlesbrough. The couple raised four sons. He continued working in the shop for many years, and during the Second World War served in the Home Guard. Middlesbrough granted him the freedom of the borough in 1944.

Dresser died on 9 April 1982. He was buried in Thorntree Cemetery beside his wife, who had died in 1965.

Official Victoria Cross citation

For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty. Private Dresser, in spite of being twice wounded on the way, and suffering great pain, succeeded in conveying an important message from Battalion Headquarters to the front line of trenches, which he eventually reached in an exhausted condition. His fearlessness and determination to deliver this message at any cost, proved of the greatest value to his Battalion at a critical period.