| Description | Work completed by volunteer includes the following information:
Harry was born in Beverley the 11 May 1893 (as “Harry Crow”), the son of Robert Stanley Crowe, a tanner's labourer and Rachel (nee Parks), they married in Beverley in 1889. The family lived in Wilbert Lane, later in Minstermoorgate and by 1914 at 12 Regent Street, Beverley. Harry was in the Beverley Church Lads’ Brigade from 1908-10 but “dismissed for deliberate disobedience”. He had been a Lance-Corporal and a bugler, he worked as a grocer’s porter in Beverley.
Harry enlisted at the Central Recruiting Office in Hull on 6 Apr 1915 and joined the 2nd and then the 3rd Northumbrian Field Ambulance (2nd Line Division) of the Royal Army Medical Corps. In early Aug 1916 he was released to do farm work for a Mr Briggs on the Haltemprice Farm, Anlaby. On 9 Sep 1916 he left the UK to serve on the Salonika Front. He was in the Sanitary Section whose job was to maintain clean water supplies, cooking facilities and billets and, finally, de-lousing stations. The war in the region ended in the autumn of 1918 but Harry was not disembodied until Oct 1919. He was attached to French troops who intervened in the Russian Civil War in the Ukraine region of southern Russia in support of the anti-Bolshevik White forces. By the time he left the army Harry had caught malaria and was allocated an army pension as a consequence. He was awarded the War and Victory Medals.
Harry returned to Beverley and worked as a mental attendant at the Broadgate Asylum at Walkington, living at Empson Terrace, Grayburn Lane. On 23 Nov 1920 he married Anne Spilman Priestly at the parish church at Beeston, Leeds. They a son Robert, born 1922. Harry suffered poor health and died aged 36 in 1930. His widow married, Cyril Banchard, a local electrical engineer.
Includes information taken from census, military records, Commonwealth War Graves, newspapers |