| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Private Henry Kirby, aged 26, of the 6th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment (32nd Brigade, 11th Division) was killed in action on 9 Oct 1917 in the Battle of Poelcapelle, Passchendaele. An attack on the German lines was forced back by heavy machine gun fire and no ground was taken. 40 men were killed and 31 reported missing in the action, including Henry. The Beverley Guardian of 27 Jul 1918 said that his father had received information that his son was now presumed dead. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Tyne Cot memorial to the Missing at Passchendaele Ridge, Belgium. He was awarded the 1914-15 Star and the War and Victory Medals.
Henry had been in the TA before the war and initially served in the 5th Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, he was with a Machine Gun Company. He had arrived in France on 30 Sep 1915. The Beverley Guardian’s comment of 27 Jul 1918 is apt: “…he had seen desperate fighting during his service abroad.” In fact Henry had been wounded twice on the Somme in 1916, firstly on 17 Sep 1916 at Martinpuich, only rejoining his Battalion on 5 Nov, a week later on the 12 Nov he was wounded again and repatriated to hospital in Wales. The Beverley Recorder of 25 Nov 1916 contained a letter from him stating that “a shell dropped amongst them and practically wiped out the whole of his machine gun team, but by what was almost a miracle, he escaped with a nasty wound in the left thigh, his right leg twisted and slightly deaf through the shock.”
Henry was born in Grimsby in Mar 1897, his family originally came from Beverley but had moved to Cottingham, by 1913 they were back in Beverley living at 20 The Woodlands. Henry’s father was a compositor from the town; his mother, Julia Ann, was from Scarborough. Henry had three sisters Lilian Olga, Mabel Linda and Gertrude Arabelle . In 1911 Henry was working as a bobbin carrier in a cotton spinning room in Cottingham, he then worked as a printer’s machinist at W D Jackson’s of 83 Walkergate, Beverley. He was unmarried. Henry is remembered on Beverley’s Hengate War Memorial, on the East Riding Memorial in Beverley Minster, on St Mary’s Church Roll of Honour and on the Toll Gavel Wesleyan Chapel Roll of Honour
Includes photograph, information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |