The last British Soldier killed in WW1 came from Leeds If this is so then Why have Leeds not got a field of remembrance like other cities ??? The final British soldier to be killed in action was Private George Edwin Ellison. At 9.30am Pte Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was scouting on the outskirts of the Belgian town of Mons where German soldiers had been reported in a wood. Aged 40, Pte Ellison was not the typical conscript, says military historian Paul Reed. He was a pre-war regular soldier; we can tell this by his number (L /12643) which is consistent with a man who enlisted in the early years of the 20th Century. He may even have been a Boer war veteran, considering his age. It must have been odd for Pte Ellison to be back in Mons again. This is where his war started four years earlier when he was part of the British Expeditionary Force retreating from Mons in August 1914, just weeks after the outbreak of the war. During his four years at the front, George saw every type of warfare, says Mr Reed. Almost a million British soldiers had been killed in those intervening years, yet almost miraculously Pte Ellison had so far escaped uninjured. In just over an hour the ceasefire would come into force, the war would be over and Pte Ellison, a former coal miner, would return to the terraced street in Leeds to see his wife Hannah and their four-year-old son James. Sadly this was not to be................................
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 10:03:57 +0000
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