Enlisted at Birmingham on the 26th of April 1846.
Age: 20.
Height: 5' 6".
Trade: None shown.
Taken prisoner of war at Balaclava, 25th October 1854, and died soon after in Simpheropol in 1854.
[Added 9 October 2026:] James Wightman, 17th Lancers, recalled Kirk in the Russian camp the day after the Charge, when General Liprandi asked the prisoners whether they had been primed with spirits:
"William Kirk, of the 17th Lancers, an unwounded prisoner who had lost his horse, was leaning against the door when Liprandi spoke. He had been punishing the Russian vodki a bit, and he stepped up to the General and said, 'You think we were drunk? By God, I tell you that if we had so much as smelt the barrel, we would have taken half Russia by this time!' Liprandi looked at him with a smile and remarked quite humorously, 'Indeed, then to be sure we should have had a poor chance!'"
[Source: James Wightman, "Balaclava and the Russian Captivity", The Nineteenth Century, May 1892: transcription.]
[Added 9 October 2026:] He is named in the list of “Non-commissioned Officers and Men, Prisoners of war, who have died either at Simpheropol or on their road there”, sent by Captain Montague, Royal Engineers, himself a prisoner, from Simpheropol on the 28th of April 1855, and published in the London Gazette of the 1st of June 1855. So he died, at Simpheropol or on the road there from Balaclava, before the end of April 1855. (The full list is quoted on the page of 597, Thomas Perry, 8th Hussars.)
Entitled to the Crimean medal with clasps for Alma, Balaclava and Sebastopol. The medal rolls state that he was "Killed-in-action", but this was not so.
According to a letter from Lieutenant Chadwick, 17th Lancers, dated 2nd of April 1855:
"Of twelve men of the 17th Lancers who were taken prisoners on the same day that I was, five only are living. . . . The seven dead are privates Harrison, Ellis, Young, Kirk, Edge, Brown, and Sharp."
[Source: Wells Journal, 12th of May 1855. The full letter is on the page of John Chadwick.]
The circumstances of his death in a hospital at Simpheropol (about the middle of November 1854) are described in James Wightman's memoir:
"William Kirk of the Lancers, lying sick in the next ward to me a among a number of Russian soldiers, was spit on by two of them. He up like a shot, and went at the crowd of them with his fists. After a struggle he was overpowered, thrust by the orderlies into something like a strait-jacket, and tied down on his bed, where he remained till that evening, when the surgeon released him, threatening him with severe punishment if he used his fists again. He died very soon after, and our suspicion that he had been poisoned that same night."
See also the record of 597, Thomas Perry, 8th Hussars.