4th June 1915

Lance Corporal Harry Pugh, 4th Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, was killed in action on 4th June 1915. He was the sixth of ten children, and the second to be killed in the war. His brother, Harold, died on 12th March 1915.

Harry Pugh was born in Shirley on 22nd February 1887 during the time that his parents, Charles (a carter) and Priscilla (née Ward) lived in the village. Charles’ widowed father, Samuel, lived at Tanworth Lane, Shirley – his wife Mercey died of pneumonia in 1881.

Charles and Priscilla had married, aged 18, in 1876, at Moseley Road Congregational Chapel in Balsall Heath and their eldest child, Charlie, was born in Balsall Heath in 1878. The family had moved to Shirley by the time of the birth on 29th October 1880 of their second child, Walter William (1880-1901).

Walter worked as a labourer before joining the Royal Navy in 1899 and signing up for 12 years’ service. He was serving as a Stoker aboard HMS Humber when he drowned whilst bathing off Hung Hom docks, Hong Kong, in 1901. His shipmates paid for a headstone on his grave in Hong Kong Cemetery, Happy Valley.

At the time of the 1881 census the family was living at 4 Haslucks Green, Shirley with Priscilla’s widowed mother, Elizabeth Ward, and her 25-year-old daughter, Clara Ward. Charles and Priscilla’s next four children, Betram (born 1882), Mary (born 1884), Harold (born 1885) and Harry (born 1887) were all born in Shirley. Harry was baptised at Nuthurst-cum-Hockley Heath on 29th April 1888, with his parents’ abode listed as Shirley.

The couple’s next child, Ted, was born in Smethwick in 1889 and, by February 1891, when their eighth child, Gilbert, was born, the family had moved to Deritend and then remained in Birmingham.

Charles Pugh died from inflammation of the lungs and pleurisy at the age of 36 in 1894, leaving his widow, Priscilla, as a single mother of nine children aged between two and 16. She was around four months pregnant with her youngest child, Frank Edward Pugh (1894-1896), at the time of her husband’s death.

Priscilla had worked as a servant in Moseley before her marriage and information from a family member is that she is also believed to have worked at “Packwood Hall” [unsure if this is likely to have been Packwood House or Packwood Haugh]. After the death of her husband, she made ends meet by taking in washing from better-off people in the neighbourhood.

At a time when there was no social security, the whole family would have pulled together to avoid becoming so destitute that they would have had to resort to requesting admission to the workhouse. Her son, Gilbert, recalled that as a child he had the job of delivering the washing back to the owners in a large pram.

Information from Gilbert’s great-grandson is that Gilbert joined the Machine Gun Corps and served as a mule Driver at Loos, Vimy Ridge, Messines, Ypres, Passchendaele, Pilkem Ridge, Langmarke, Cambrai, Sambre and Grande Honnelle. When he was demobbed in February 1919, he was one of only three men left alive from when he joined his company of twenty troops.

By the age of 14, Harry was working as a gas fitter in a brass foundry. Some sources suggest that he married Ethel Maud Williams in Birmingham in 1908 but this appears to be a different Harry Pugh.

The marriage certificate of Harry Pugh and Ethel Maud Williams gives Harry’s father as William Thomas Pugh, a carpenter, rather than Charles. The Register of Soldiers’ Effects also names Harry’s next of kin as his mother, Priscilla, and siblings Mary, Charles, Ted, Bertram and Gilbert, indicating that the Lance Corporal Harry Pugh, who died on 4th June 1915, was actually unmarried.

Harry Pugh was killed in action and has no known grave so is commemorated on the Helles Memorial.

If you have any further information, please let us know.

Tracey
Library Specialist: Heritage and Local Studies
The Core Library, Solihull
email: heritage@solihull.gov.uk