Barwick in Elmet Great War Casualties in Detail

15/488 PRIVATE JOHN HENRY HUNTER
15^th (Service) Battalion (1^st Leeds), The West Yorkshire Regiment.

Killed in Action, 1^st July 1916.
Aged 27.

No known grave, therefore, commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, Somme, France.Pier and Face, 2A, 2C and 2D.

John Hunter, or Jack as he was known to the family, was born in 1888 in Beckett Street in Leeds. He was the only son and eldest of three children born to the marriage of Thomas Hunter and Ann, or Annie Hunter (nee Wright). Jack’s sisters were Ethel Wright Hunter, known as Cis (b.1891) and Annie (b. 1893). Thomas Hunter was in the Brewing trade and progressed from being a Brewers Clerk in 1891 to being a Brewery Manager in 1901. He died in 1910 aged 53.

Jack Hunter was among the first recruits to the battalion raised as the ‘Leeds City Battalion’ but which later became better known as the ‘Leeds Pals’. The Pals battalions were raised nationwide, but predominantly in the industrial towns and cities of the North of England with the basic premise that men who volunteered to join the Army together would be trained together and would fight together.

Jack Hunter was Killed in Action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, which remains to this day the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army. On that day alone the British Army suffered very nearly 60,000 casualties, of which almost 20,000 were killed. The Pals battalions’ system ensured that not only did men that joined together, trained and fought together, they also died together, in huge numbers. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists 278 men from Leeds in their records who were killed on this date; there will be more, however those listed have next of kin details provided which include Leeds in their address. It is easy, therefore, to understand the stories that whole areas of densely populated towns were plunged into mourning.

For years after his death, Jack’s sisters, Cis and Annie, placed an ‘In Memoriam’ notice in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Jack’s body was never recovered after the war, or if it was he could not be identified and his name is engraved alongside those of 72,190 (at January 2012) other men who are still missing on the Somme Battlefields.

A Union Flag hangs on a wall inside the parish church of All Saints’ in Barwick in Elmet. This flag once flew atop the Thiepval Memorial alongside its French Tricolore counterpart. Below the flag is a framed photograph of the Thiepval Memorial and a listing of five men from the villages in the parish. Research has shown that of these five men, one is named on the Loos Memorial and one is actually buried in the churchyard outside.