We welcome Library and Digital Assistant Becky Bavill this week on the Secret Library Leeds, who follows up her superb three-part investigation of a First World War diary with a short biography of another Leeds soldier of the time. Keep a look out for two more articles in this series coming soon…

Percy Longfield is mentioned in the diary of William Smith. I found one link between them, they had both been in the Territorial Regiment. His name did not appear on our indexing system, so my main source of information for this work was ancestry.com.

Percy was baptised at All Souls in Leeds in March 1891.  He was listed on the 1891 census as being just 1 month old.  He lived with his parents, Harry Pearce and Sarah Maria Gaunt (as was) at 24 Herbert Terrace in Leeds. 

He would end up with two more brothers, Leonard Gaunt (born 1894) and Sydney Pearce (born 1896).  Harry was a coach builder by trade in the early days, later a book-keeper and then a rent collector and estate agent.  Two of his sons would follow him into that trade, starting out working with him, and Sydney would later become a clerk with the Inland Revenue.  The family moved from Herbert Terrace to Grosvenor Street at Sydney’s birth, later settling at 104 Blackman Lane for some considerable time.  By the time of the war, the family address was 31 Brudenell View.

Percy joined the 1/8 West Yorkshire (Territorial) Regiment – The Prince of Wales’s Own; on 02/09/1909.  His join up papers survive and are available on Ancestry.  This is a stroke of luck – WO 363 are known at the National Archives as ‘The Burnt Papers’.  An unlucky hit by a German incendiary device on a warehouse in London on 7/9/1940 destroyed most of them, although records relating to officers survived in a different part of the building.

Percy almost certainly went to France at the same time as Fred Luff and William Smith – April 1915.  He was definitely there in September 1915, as that is when William records an encounter in his diary – ‘met Percy Longfield and his lot’.  His brother Leonard, a peacetime farmer living in Darlington had also enlisted by this stage and was in the same regiment but a different battalion, the 1/4.  Their brother Sydney would enlist at the beginning of December 1915, but he would not be immediately mobilised because of his occupation; eventually being assigned to the London Regiment (Prince of Wales’s Own Civil Service Rifles) 1/15.  His eldest brother was killed in the same month as he enlisted.

Percy Longfield died of wounds at the Australian Hospital in Wimereux, 20/12/1915 and is buried in the cemetery there.  The Commonwealth War Grave Commission records his details here:

Serjeant Percy Longfield | War Casualty Details 509086 | CWGC

He is also commemorated on a war memorial in St Peter’s Church in Leeds:

West Yorkshire Regiment (Leeds Rifles)… © Alf Beard :: Geograph Britain and Ireland

This must have been a huge blow to his father Harry, having lost his wife in 1910.  He remarried to Lois Whitely in November 1916 at Wrangthorn St Augustines Church with Sydney as his witness; but worse was to come for the family when Leonard was killed in January 1917.

Sydney was then mobilised in February 1917, and tragically killed in December of the same year.  Both Leonard and Sydney are commemorated on large scale war memorials (Thiepval and Cambrai respectively), suggesting that in each case it was not possible to recover a body.  Following Sydney’s death, Harry was presented with his wrist watch and strap – a very small consolation and possibly more traumatic than nothing at all.

Private Leonard Longfield | War Casualty Details 801293 | CWGC

Private Sydney Pearce Longfield | War Casualty Details 1754759 | CWGC

The Longfield family had a very hard war.  They kept on suffering blows, and I can imagine them trying to rally before knocked back down again.  Harry and Lois did not have any children together, leaving Brudenell View between 1923 and 1925.  He does not appear at all in the 1925 Leeds trade directory.  I found them next in Morecambe in 1934.  This was also the year that Harry died; before the onset of the Second World War so at least he never shared the experience of so many grieving parents of feeling that the deaths of their children had been in vain.  Lois remained in the North West at the home she had shared with Harry until at least 1939.  She died in 1949.  The three brothers are commemorated on the war memorial plaque inside at Wrangthorn St Augustines Church in Hyde Park.

History — St. Augustine’s Wrangthorn

You can download extracts from the Leeds Mercury war diary to read this fascinating slice of local and international history for yourself.