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e-mail dated April 12, 2010.
Reading my email to you I realize that I have been careless and inaccurate when I said he'd died aged 16. Of course, he didn't . He died in 1916 on the first day of the Somme on 1st July. (When 60,000 died on that day alone). I think I was so struck by his youth in the photograph that I confused the age when he joined the army and the year of his death.
We discovered an error re his date of birth in family documents. His birth date was recorded in his grandmother's diary as 3rd June 1898 but records showed, when I checked BMDs that it was 1897. He actually died just under a month after his 19th birthday. |
