PRIVATE HENRY GEORGE HAYWOOD
SOUTH STAFFORDSHIRE REGIMENT
27TH JULY 1917 AGE 19
BURIED: LA BELLE ALLIANCE CEMETERY, YPRES, BELGIUM
'His life was taken away' - there's no suggestion of Private Haywood having 'given' his life, the form of words most families used to describe the death of a soldier, it was taken away. Does this indicate that Henry George Haywood was a conscript? His father, also Henry George Haywood, a self-employed chimney sweep, signed for the inscription carefully enumerating those for whom his son had died: his mother and father, his sisters - Sophia, Hilda and Alice - and his brother Arthur ... 'And for his country'.
Thirty-two members of the 7th Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment were killed in that sector on 27 July 1917: a second lieutenant, a corporal and two lance corporals, plus twenty-seven soldiers. This compares with only one soldier on the 26th and one on the 28th, which would suggest either that the South Staffordshires had attacked the German lines on the 27th, or the Germans had attacked them.