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 in 1887 during the approximately five-year period that his parents, Charles (a carter) and Priscilla (née Ward) lived in the village. He was baptised at Nuthurst-cum-Hockley Heath on 29th April 1888, with his parents’ abode listed as Shirley. The family had moved to Deritend by 1891 and seem then to have remained in Birmingham.
By the age of 14, Harry was working as a gas fitter in a brass foundry. Some research suggests 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.
He was killed in action and has no known grave so is commemorated on the Helles Memorial.
Solihull Life 
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