LANCE CORPORAL 39971 HAROLD ALLEN STONES, 13th BATTALION YORK AND LANCASTER REGIMENT (1st BARNSLEY PALS).


LANCE CORPORAL 39971 HAROLD ALLEN STONES, 13th BATTALION YORK AND LANCASTER REGIMENT (1st BARNSLEY PALS). KILLED IN ACTION 15th JUNE 1917 AGED 29

From Ancestry

Harold Stones was another Ilkley Pal who had originally enlisted in 'A' Company 9th West Riding Regiment, on 31st August 1914. Throughout 1915 and into 1916 the Ilkley Pals served in the trenches in the Ypres sector where Harold developed rheumatism and was sent back to England to recover. In 1916 he returned to his old unit now fighting on the Somme where he was wounded sufficiently seriously to be sent to recover in a military hospital in Glasgow. Upon his return to France in 1917 he would have had to endure the notoriously fierce discipline at the base depot at Etaples.

Harold probably expected to return to his old unit, but instead was allocated as part of a draft to the 13th York and Lancasters a Pals battalion raised in Barnsley. The battalion had suffered grievously during the Somme Battles the previous year and was only now recovering some of its former strength. In June 1917 it was holding the front line at a position known as Railway Cutting at Rolincourt in the Oppy Sector north of Arras. The battalion war diary for that day makes no reference to any particular incident but simply records that 3 Other Ranks were killed. Harold was one of these men, although, the circumstances of his death is unknown.

Born in Bradford on the 9th November 1887, Harold was one of seven surviving children of William and Alice Stones. His father was a chartered accountant who lived in Edmund Street, in the Little Horton District of the City. William brought his family to live in Ilkley before the outbreak of war and lived in a house 14 Eaton Road. In 1913 Harold now working as a clerk, married Alice Maude Thomas and together set up home in a house on Wellington Road where the following year a son, named after his father, was born.

Harold was laid to rest, alongside the other two men from the battalion who were killed on the same day, in the little cemetery at Albuera. On his headstone his wife had engraved "Worthy of love and remembrance from his loving wife and son". Lance Corporal Harold Stones is remembered on our war memorial in Ilkley.


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