Thanks to the sleuthing efforts of Zelda Matheson, and the resources of the Westport Genealogy and History Group, another mystery has been solved. I couldn’t work out why T A Mathieson was commemorated on the Granity war memorial on the West Coast, yet I could find out nothing about him on the Cenotaph database or at Archives New Zealand.
Thomas Alexander Mathieson from the West Coast had gone to the UK before WW1 and joined the British Army, and was killed in Belgium during the German spring offensive of 1918. He was married, and might have left children behind; we don’t know. Read more of his story in this article on the website.