Alfred Sowry was the middle child of five born the marriage of John Percy and Annie Maria Sowry. He was the only son in the family John Sowry was a partner in the Jowett and Sowry company, which was a printer and stationer based in Albion Street, Leeds. The company is still trading but has moved to Wetherby and now specialises in office furniture.

Alfred Sowry was born in Barwick on 12th August 1897 and was baptised in the parish church of All Saints the following month. The procession to the church, from the Sowry home at Ings House, next to the Black Swan pub at The Cross was no more than fifty yards, door to door. The family later moved to ‘The Limes’, on Potterton Lane, but before the 1911 census was taken, they had further moved to 25 Well Close Place, between Blenheim Square, and Carlton Barracks.

After leaving school, Alfred Sowry took up employment as an Accountant’s Clerk, but at the age of 18, and with the Great War now seven months old in May 1915, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, in the Mersey Division. He was sent to the Royal Naval Division Depot at Perham Down, near Tidworth, in Wiltshire for his training. Following his training, he was posted from the depot’s 3^rd Battalion to the 1^st Reserve Battalion at Blandford. Here, he applied for a commission in the Army, and was discharged for commission on 22^nd January 1916, the commission being notified through the London Gazette and dated 17 February 1916. The Royal Naval Division was created to serve on land from officers and men of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve for whom there was no place aboard ships of the fleet. In the early part of the war, the men retained their blue naval uniforms, but as the war progressed, they adopted Army khaki, upon which they wore their navy badges of rank and distinctions. The officers, curiously, wore both naval rank on their sleeve cuffs, and the equivalent army rank badges on their epaulettes. While the men wore distinctive battalion cap badges on army caps, which replaced their sailors' caps and tallies, the officers continued to wear the Royal Navy officers cap badge.

On 31^st August 1917, the 17^th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment was holding a position called ‘The Knoll’, which looked out over the Macquincourt Valley towards the major German defensive line called the Hindenburg Line, near the small town of Vendhuille. This area was particularly important to both the British and the German armies. This part of the line was just west of the St Quentin Canal, which, for the most part, lay in a deep open cutting which had steep sides and posed a major obstacle for attacking forces to cross. Just south of this area, the canal went into a tunnel and there was no such obstacle, and so it the German Army had ensured that defences and fortifications here were formidable. Because ‘The Knoll’ offered good observation of German positions, the Germans were determined to throw the British Army off it. For the entire period, the Leeds Bantams were in occupation of the position, the Germans shelled it and mortared it. ‘The Knoll’ was attacked by the Germans at 4:45 am following about 36 hours of hostile shelling. The morning was misty, and the Germans benefitted from this and their own smoke barrage. Such was the level of confusion in the fighting that ensued, that no formation higher than the Battalion Headquarters knew what was happening at ‘The Knoll’. The best that could be done was for Brigade Headquarters to contact other battalions to find out from them if they were being attacked, and when they reported that were not under attack, the artillery that was assigned to cover their positions could be redirected to fire on where they thought the Germans were attacking.

During the Great War, there was an enormous flow of information from the belligerent nations to the Red Cross, based in Geneva in neutral Switzerland. Notifications were made of the prisoners of war each side captured, and any of the prisoners who died in captivity, and this information would then be passed to the opposing Armies. As far as the British were aware, Second Lieutenant Alfred Sowry had been killed in his position during the fighting, but the Germans notified the Red Cross that they had buried him at Lempire. It appears that Second Lieutenant Sowry’s parents were told that he had been killed at Le Catelet, a short distance from where the fighting had been taking place, as they had a memorial tablet created and placed in All Saints’ Church to that effect. It seems likely that, in that event, that he was wounded in the fighting, and captured alive, and evacuated to Le Catelet, where he later died. Despite the high probability of the Germans marking and recording the location of the grave, and any others with it, the area was fought over on numerous occasions, and therefore the grave is now lost.

Second Lieutenant Alfred Allan Sowry is now commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial at the heart of the Somme Battlefields of 1916.