Cemetery Study: Leeds (Beckett Street) Cemetery

During the Great War, a ban was introduced on the repatriation of fatal casualties from operational areas overseas to the UK. It is known that a very small number among the total number of the dead were brought back to the UK from abroad, but the number is so small that those who were brought back are exceptional. Because of this, it can generally be said that the casualties we see buried in churchyards and cemeteries across the UK, died in the UK. In this study of the cemetery listed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as ‘Leeds (Beckett Street) Cemetery’, there are a total of 71 burials of war dead, from the Great War and the Second World War. Sixty-seven of those burials are of men and one woman who died during the Great War, and eight are men of the Territorial Force Battalions of the West Yorkshire Regiment.

The cemetery was opened in 1845 as Burmantofts, or Leeds, Burial Ground, and along with Hunslet, or Woodhouse Hill, Cemetery, also opened in 1845, it is one of the earliest publicly funded cemeteries in England.

The cemetery continued to be known as Burmantofts Cemetery until much of the slum housing in the Burmantofts area was demolished to make way for new, less densely packed housing in new estates during the 1950s and 1960s. Around this time, the cemetery was renamed Beckett Street Cemetery after the name of the road on which the main entrance stands.

A phenomenon began in Leeds in the 1850s to address the perceived shame of the ‘pauper’s burial’ in which the poorest in society were buried in unmarked graves and largely forgotten by all but their closest relations. Burials societies were created, and people were able to take out weekly subscriptions to these societies, for which they would be guaranteed a basic burial with the lasting dignity of a grave marked by a headstone marker. The full subscription for this type of burial was one guinea, one pound and one shilling, and so, the graves which these burial societies offered became known as ‘Guinea Graves’. What the subscribers were buying was simply the right to buried in a grave, shared with other subscribers, that would, when that plot became full, be marked by a headstone on which their name, age, and date of death would be inscribed. They were properly known as ‘Inscription burials’, but the alliterative ‘Guinea Grave’ is the name that has stood the test of time.

Of the eight Territorial Force soldiers of the West Yorkshire Regiment buried in Beckett Street Cemetery, only one is buried in a grave which is marked by the distinctive Portland Stone grave marker we usually associate with a Commonwealth War Graves Commission War Grave. The other men’s graves are marked by their details being included on a shared ‘Guinea Grave’ headstone. This is not an oversight on the part of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Of the men included in this cemetery study, only two died after the end of the Great War, and one of those died in the same week as the Armistice was signed, thus, six of the men died during war time, and their families realised the services of the burial society to which they had paid their subscriptions, including, when the burial plot was full, the inclusion of their loved one’s details on the headstone for that grave. It appears that the one man who is buried in a plot marked by a CWGC headstone was not a subscriber to the burial society, and was, therefore, buried in a plot obtained by his family at the time of his father's death. It is possible that the family could not afford to have a headstone erected on the grave at that time, and the grave was left unmarked, to be marked later as the then Imperial War Graves Commission worked through it’s gargantuan task of building war cemeteries abroad, and recording and marking war graves in the UK. All the men are commemorated within the principles laid down by the Commission, subject to restrictions placed on their work by the ownership by the burial society of the plots in which the men are buried.

Here is what the CWGC says about War Graves in the UK in general, noting the presence of privately-owned plots, such as those owned by the burial society, and about the burials in Leeds (Beckett Street) Cemetery:

“During the two world wars, the United Kingdom became an island fortress used for training troops and launching land, sea and air operations around the globe. There are more than 170,000 Commonwealth war graves in the United Kingdom, many being those of servicemen and women killed on active service, or who later succumbed to wounds. Others died in training accidents, or because of sickness or disease. The graves, many of them privately owned and marked by private memorials, will be found in more than 12,000 cemeteries and churchyards. During the First World War, the major hospitals in Leeds were the 2nd Northern General with 1,800 beds and the East Leeds War Hospital with 1,900. Leeds was also one of the principal hospital centres in Yorkshire during the Second World War. Leeds (Beckett Street) Cemetery contains 67 scattered burials of the First World War and four from the Second.”

It is important to note that the hospital referred to above as 2^nd Northern General Hospital, is Beckett’s Park Hospital in Headingley, and the East Leads War Hospital is St James’s Hospital, and is directly opposite Beckett Street Cemetery.

The Men buried at Beckett Street Cemetery in Chronological Order of their Death

3610 Rifleman Simeon Heaton, 2/8^th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment.

Simeon Heaton was born in Leeds on 14^th January 1881, the son of James, a painter who later became a coal miner, and Jane Heaton of 17 All Saints’ Street, York Road, Leeds. The family home was separated from Burmantofts by the main thoroughfare of the York Road. He was baptised at the nearby All Saints’ Church, on 2^nd March 1881, along with his sister, Florry.

Marriage came for Simeon Heaton in 1898, when, at the age of 17, he married Annie Lumb on 26^th November at the Church of St Alban the Martyr, a little further along the York Road, in Harehills. Simeon was a Labourer, and his bride was a servant. Together, the couple had five children over the next twelve years, including in 1901, a son named Simeon who also served in the West Yorkshire Regiment shortly after the end of the Great War.

Simeon Heaton volunteered for the Army in March 1915. It is probably no more than a coincidence, but it was in March 1915 that the reserve battalion of the 8^th Leeds Rifles, the 2/8^th, was moved from Carlton Barracks in Leeds to Matlock and Denby Dale in Derbyshire. Up to that point, the soldiers had been billeted at home, but now they were on the move. The battalion spent a month in Derbyshire, followed by a month in Doncaster, and then moved to Thoresby Park, near Newark in Nottingham. Simeon Heaton fell ill with Pneumonia and was moved back to Beckett’s Park Hospital in the Headingley area of Leeds, which had been requisitioned by the War Office and designated 2^nd Northern General Hospital. He died there on 29^th September 1915 and was buried in Beckett Street Cemetery on 2^nd October.

1512 Lance Corporal John William Cooper MM, 1/7^th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment.

John Cooper was the son of Alfred and Gertrude Cooper of 24 Morrell Street, Roundhay in Leeds. Alfred was a leather currier. John was born in 1893 and was baptised at the church of St Michael in Buslingthorpe.

John Cooper followed his father into the leather working industry and became a boot finisher. In November 1910 he, along with two other men took part in a break in at a wholesale clothier’s warehouse. He was the youngest of the three men, and the only one without a previous criminal record. The police who brought the case to court submitted evidence the raid was planned by 26-year-old James Joseph Ellis, a tailor who had a string of convictions for theft and controlling prostitution in both Runcorn and Leeds. Although he did not take part in the actual break in, the police were convinced that he had been close by when his young companions, 19-year-old hawker, Walter Meakin, and 18-year-old John Cooper broke in. The men got away with 31 complete suits of clothing, 10 jackets, 10 vests, or waistcoats, and 74 pairs of trousers, which presumably, Ellis, the tailor hoped to sell on.

The men were quickly identified, and by 17th November 1915, only two days later, Cooper was arrested. He and Meakin pleaded guilty in court and were duly convicted, receiving a sentence of two years’ Borstal training. Ellis attempted to establish an alibi, calling witnesses to vouch for him in court, but he was found guilty and received a sentence of 18 months in prison, with hard labour.

When war came, John Cooper enlisted into the Territorial Force at Carlton Barracks, and became a Rifleman in 1/7^th Leeds Rifles. He embarked for France with his battalion when the 49^th (West Riding) Division was deployed on 15^th April 1915. It appears that soldiering suited him, and that he made a good soldier. He was mentioned in Field Marshal Sir John French’s final despatch as Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force which was published in the London Gazette on 1^st January 1916. Five months later he was included among those who had been awarded the Military Medal for bravery in the field. The Gazette published on 3^rd June 1916 was the very first listing of recipients of the Military Medal, and some of those decorated were being recognised for acts bravery from 1914. Because of a combination of factors, it is impossible to say what John Cooper had done to deserve the Military Medal. Very few of the official citations for the Military Medal were published in the Gazette during the Great War. Later Gazettes established a pattern where it is possible to gauge the approximate date of the action working backwards from the date of publication, but because this first Gazette covered the battalion’s entire deployment back to April 1915, that method cannot be used. The war diary of the 1/7^th Leeds Rifles does not mention John Cooper, who continued as a good soldier by being promoted Lance Corporal.

From July 1916, the battalion was engaged in the battles that were being fought on the Somme. They had begun the Battle of the Somme in reserve behind the 36^th (Ulster) Division, but because the Ulstermen had suffered such terrible casualties, they were brought into action later in the day. Despite not being supposed to be actively involved, one member of the battalion, 3203 Cpl George Sanders, received a Victoria Cross for his actions and the actions of his men in their occupation and defence of part of the Schwaben Redoubt at Thiepval. After the first few days of the 1916 Battle of the Somme, through to September, the battalion was not involved in any large-scale operations. Instead, the battalion was used as a reserve unit and continued a cycle of rotations between trench holding and rest camps where they provided working parties. It was during this period of relatively minimal activity that John Cooper was wounded, but records are scant enough for the precise date of his wounding to be unclear. Evacuated to England, John Cooper eventually came to Ampton Hall, a 19^th century Jacobean style manor house near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which was used as an auxiliary hospital during the Great War by the Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance.

Lance Corporal John William Cooper MM died of his wounds on 27^th September 1916 and was buried in Beckett Street Cemetery two days later. His name is listed among those men who died at Ampton Hall on a memorial plaque in the church of Saints Peter and Paul which stands within sight of the Hall

4219 Rifleman Harold Carling, 1/7^th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment.

Harold Carling was born in Leeds in January 1895 and was baptised in the church of All Souls. He was the son of a milkman, Thomas Henry Carling, and his wife Emma. The family lived at 8 Stonefield Terrace in Leeds, and later at 4 Oakfield Street, Oxford Road.

By the age of sixteen, in 1911, Harold Carling was working as a leather scourer in the boot-making industry.

He attempted to become a Territorial Force Rifleman by enlisting in the 8^th Leeds Rifles in April 1914, and he was allotted the number 1703. This attempt failed, when on 19^th September 1914, he was discharged as physically unfit. He reenlisted, this time into the 1/7^th Leeds Rifles, in late July to early August 1915, and was probably sent out to France in a draft a few months later.

Harold Carling was wounded on 3^rd September 1916. The 1/7^th Leeds Rifles was moving into reserve from Aveluy Wood to Gordon Castle in the centre of Thiepval Wood. He sustained wounds to his arms and legs, most likely shrapnel wounds from artillery fire on the wood. He was evacuated to No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station at Puchevillers. From No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station, he was transferred to 22 Ambulance Train the following morning and taken by rail to a waiting hospital ship at Boulogne, after being routed through Abbeville.

It isn’t known what the next part of Harold Carling’s journey involved. It seems likely that his wounds, though serious, were not immediately life-threatening. If they had been, moving him a long distance would have been too dangerous, and he would have been retained at one of the Field Ambulances that served his brigade until he was stable enough to be moved back to the Casualty Clearing Station. Eventually, Rifleman Carling was admitted to the Metropolitan Hospital on Kingsland Road, Hackney. He died there on 11^th October 1916 with the death certificate citing Gunshot wounds, sepsis and haemorrhage as the causes.

It is interesting to note that Rifleman Carling has an entry in the Leeds section of the National Roll of the Great War, a publication which listed those who served in some capacity during the Great War. In order to have an entry published in the roll, a fee was paid, and the entry was submitted. Entries tend to be formulaic, and it is not uncommon to find that some of the information isn’t wholly accurate. The entry in respect of Rifleman Carling was made in his memory, presumably by his family and states that he volunteered in August 1914 and was sent to France in time to earn the award of a 1914 Star. Both statements are incorrect.

467 Private William Baines Myers, Supernumerary Company, 5^th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment.

William Myers was born in Leeds in March 1869. He was the son of a plumber, William Dickenson Myers, and his wife, Jane Elizabeth. The family lived at England Street, in Burley, Leeds, and William was baptised at St Simon’s Church in February 1870, when he was almost a year old.

William Myers was employed as an axel turner, a highly skilled and relatively well-paid occupation. To have been able to get a start in this kind of work, he would have needed to have a good level of education and have served a lengthy mechanical engineering apprenticeship.

In May 1891, William Myers married Emily Dunn Crawford at Leeds Register Office. At the age of 22, he was well qualified and well employed, and he was married. Life was good for William Myers, but it was not to last. He divorced Emily for adultery in 1906 after it was discovered that she was having an affair with a man named Charles Copley. The divorce petition makes for very sorry reading and paints a picture of William Myers being a man who was married to a woman who abused her husband’s income, was erratic and unstable. She is described as a woman of ‘drunken and dissipated habits’. Although the divorce proceedings were conducted at the High Court in London, William Myers had obtained the services of the well-known and highly respected Leeds solicitor, Arthur Willey to act as the agent for the London Divorce lawyer who took the case through court. Arthur Willey’s son, Tom, who had been articled to his father, was killed leading his platoon of Leeds Pals in the 15^th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, in their disastrous attack on German positions at Serre very shortly after 7:30 am on 1^st July 1916 as the Battle of the Somme began.

Along with many others, the service records created in respect of Private William Baines Myers have not survived, and this leaves many questions about his service which cannot now be answered with absolute certainty. At the declaration of war on 4^th August 1914, William Myers was a skilled, 45 year old craftsman who had recovered his life sufficiently enough to have, as the Army later described it, an ‘unmarried wife’ in Emma Marshall, with whom he lived at 7 Granville Place, off Beckett Street in Leeds. He was well above the average age of those men who rushed to enlist in the first weeks of the war, and because conscription was still almost a year and a half in the future, he was under no obligation to enlist voluntarily.

When he did join the Army, he joined a Supernumerary Company. This tells us that he was a National Reservist, which in turn tells us that he had previous service in either the Regular Army, or the Territorial Force. In the case of William Myers, it is virtually certain that his previous service had been spent as a Territorial as there is no evidence to point to Regular Army service. A major part of the role of most National Reservists in the Supernumerary Companies was to guard railways and other vulnerable points, but William Myers continued to work as a turner, and was ‘stationed’ at a steelworks in Scunthorpe being billeted at lodgings in the town, probably at 29 Fenton Street, Scunthorpe, which is where he died on 22^nd January 1917 from acute peritonitis and exhaustion.

305166 Lance Corporal John William Dunn, 1/8^th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment.

John William Dunn was born in Leeds in 1893. He was one of nine children born to the marriage of William and Sarah Jane Dunn, of which three had not survived past infancy. The family lived at 15 Chelmsford Avenue in the Richmond Hill area of inner East Leeds. His father worked on the railway as a repairer, and then as a labourer, most probably at Neville Hill.

John was baptised at the church of St Edmund in August 1893 by the long serving Reverend John Thursfield who was the vicar at St Edmund’s for well over 20 years.

According to the 1911 Census, the family had moved to Wesley Place, which was still in Richmond Hill, but was a few hundred yards away. John now earned his keep at the nearby Waterloo Main Colliery, along with a brother where the young men were employed as engine drivers operating the pithead winding gear.

The new Wesley Place address was very slightly larger than Chelmsford Avenue, but it was directly overlooking the cutting through which the busy railway lines taking trains into the Marsh Lane Goods Depot ran and would have been noisy almost twenty-four hours a day. At this time, Mrs Sarah Jane Dunn was not listed as having an occupation, and with five of their children still living at home, she probably didn’t have the time to go out to work, but by the middle of the war, with her sons and perhaps even her husband away with the services, she was making a living as a draper.

John Dunn was a pre-war Territorial soldier, and enlisted in the Leeds Rifles at Carlton Barracks, which was under a mile from where he lived, in early 1913.

Like all the rest of the battalion, when war was declared, John Dunn was placed on Embodied Service, and would have worked full time as a soldier, training and preparing equipment for their ultimate embarkation to war. Until October 1914, the soldiers lived at home, but afterwards, the battalion moved out of the city and deployed to it’s War Station, near Selby. He was with the battalion when it embarked and landed in France on 16^th April 1915, and he stayed with it for the remainder of his service until he was evacuated back to England.

The battalion War Diary records the fact that John Dunn, and his RSM, had both been Mentioned in Despatches, and his name appears in the edition of the London Gazette published on 22^nd May 1917.

On 21^st July 1917, the battalion was in trenches at Nieuwpoort near the Belgian coast when it came under German artillery fire. Too late, the men of the battalion realised that there were gas shells mixed in with the high explosive shells, and most of the men who were manning the trenches were exposed to the gas. Virtually the entire battalion, 18 officers and 662 men were evacuated to medical units, and while most responded well to treatment and returned to their unit within a few days, some did not and they were evacuated all the way back to the base hospitals on the French coast that were clustered around the port areas, and some still further, back to the UK. John Dunn was one of the men sent back to England and he eventually ended his journey at the large Military Hospital that had been established in the Ripon Garrison in North Yorkshire. It was in Ripon that John Dunn died on 12^th May 1918 at the age of 24 years.

817 Private James Hill, Supernumerary Company, 5^th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment.

James Hill was born in 1871. His father, Thomas was a coal miner, and James followed his father to the pit. He married Mary Elizabeth Jordan in May 1896 and the couple had two children, Rebecca, born in 1899, and Jane in 1904.

Though Mary Hill and Rebecca are listed on the 1901 England Census; they were living at Mary’s parents’ home at 14 Lane Ends, Clayton, Bradford, there is no mention of James Hill, and it is likely that he was serving abroad with the British Army, most probably in South Africa where the British were fighting an increasingly difficult war against Boer farmers.

It has not been possible to accurately say when it happened, but Mary Elizabeth Hill died, leaving her husband a widower with two young daughters to look after. Nevertheless, when war broke out in 1914, he volunteered to serve in the Army. The National Roll of the Great War states that this was in August 1914, but his actual dates of service were between 7^th October 1914 and 25^th June 1915. It may be that he did volunteer earlier but was not called forward for embodiment into the Supernumerary Company attached to the West Yorkshire Regiment until later.

James Hill married the 32-year-old spinster, Sarah Henty at Buslingthorpe Parish Church on 2^nd November 1914. They lived at 3 Daisy Street, Meanwood Road. Marrying ensured that the daughters of his previous marriage had a home and that the Army would pay allowances to his wife respect of her and the girls while her husband was away serving in the Army.

James Hill was another man who served as a National Reservist, like William Myers had, and the regulations governing the type of men who were eligible to serve in the National Reserve lends some weight to the hypothesis that he had been serving in the Army at the time of the 1901 census, although it is not in any way confirmation of it.

The active service of James Hill came to an end on 25^th June 1915, when he was discharged from the Army due to him suffering from Bronchitis. He was awarded the Silver War Badge for his service.

He died on 25^th September 1918. Relatively strict, but clear rules were put in place which decided who would become eligible for their death to be commemorated as a war death. The rules were required as there would be an impact upon pension payments and other allowances and benefits payable to the next of kin of those who died as a result of their service. In James Hill’s case, because he had died some time after his discharge, there were two criteria his death must meet for his death to be accepted as a war death. Firstly, he must have died between 4^th August 1914 and 31^st August 1921, which, clearly his death does. Secondly, the cause of his discharge must also be the cause of his death and reflected as such in the death certificate issued following his death. We can be sure, therefore, that Bronchitis was either the sole cause of death or the major factor in it.

James Hill was 47 years old when he died. His widow, Sarah, was granted a pension of 13 shillings and 9 pence per week payable from 26^th June 1919 for her and the children in respect of the death due to service of her late husband.

1644 Rifleman Joseph Hirst, 1/7^th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, Transferred as 271945 Private, 473^rd Company, Labour Corps.

Joseph Hirst was one of eight children of Benjamin and Sarah Hirst. Two of the children had died in infancy. The family lived at 67 Bexley Avenue, Harehills Road in Leeds. Benjamin was a Turf Commission Agent, but later worked as a milkman, and Joseph Hirst worked as a labourer in the textiles industry, perhaps working for one of the many wholesale clothiers in the Harehills and Compton Road area of Leeds, close to where he lived.

On 13^th May 1912, Joseph Hirst enlisted into the 7^th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment at Carlton Barracks, but because his service record has not survived, it is impossible to say what training or camps he attended before the war began.

His father Benjamin Hirst died at home in April 1914 and was buried at Beckett Street Cemetery on 30^th April.

Joseph Hirst was a part of the original body of the battalion to embark for France, and as his name doesn’t appear in any of the official casualty lists, we must assume that, minor ailments aside, he remained with his battalion for the duration of the war, until he was transferred to the Labour Corps, probably due to the onset of the illness that eventually killed him.

On being transferred to the Labour Corps he was issued with the service number of 271945, and was allocated to 473^rd Company, which was administered by the Northern Command Labour Centre, the headquarters of which were in the Ripon Garrison.

He was discharged from the Labour Corps on 25^th July 1918 due to sickness, which his pension papers confirm was tuberculosis, and was awarded the Silver War Badge. He died at the City Hospital in Leeds on 17^th November 1918, a tragedy in amongst the celebrations surrounding the signing of the Armistice and the end of the fighting on the Western Front. On 23^rd November 1918, he was buried in the same grave as his father in Beckett Street Cemetery. He was 24 years old.

Joseph Hirst’s mother, Sarah, remarried in 1923, when she married Lawrence Watson.

3033 Rifleman James Smith, 2/7^th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment.

James Smith was born in Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast in 1878. He was the son of William Henry and Elizabeth Smith, being one of their seven children. The family moved to Leeds in about 1883, where William Smith took up employment as an Iron Foundry Labourer. James Smith left school and went to work in the foundry, where he became a furnace man, but in 1896, at the age of 18, he joined the Army.

Initially he joined the 3^rd (Militia) Battalion of the West Riding Regiment, but he enlisted into the Regular Army at the Halifax Depot in November 1896 where it appears, he was held for just over a year. He was posted to the 1^st Battalion in Malta as an unpaid Lance Corporal on 22^nd December 1897 but reverted to be a Private in the January of the following year.

James Smith returned to the UK in September 1898, and transferred to 2^nd Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment, before returning to Malta on posting to 3^rd Battalion. In November 1902, the battalion was posted to Bermuda, and it was here that James Smith spent his last two years as a Regular Soldier before transferred to the Army Reserve and returned to the UK at the end of 1904.

He quickly settled into civilian life, working as a Coal Hawker. In March 1905, he married Mary Ann Heath at Leeds Register Office. The couple lived at 127 Charles Street, off New York Road, in Leeds, and shared their house with James’ father and brother, Robert, who as a Coal Hawker himself, probably worked alongside James.

After the outbreak of the Great War, when James was 36 years old, he enlisted in what was called at the time the 7^th (Reserve) Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment. This battalion initially created when a cadre was taken from the 7^th Battalion to create a reserve which was to recruit and train volunteers before feeding them to the parent battalion. A further reorganisation saw a third battalion being created, and the battalions were allocated numbers. The original, fighting battalion became 1/7^th, and the reserve battalion became the 2/7^th, while the new reserve battalion was the 3/7^th. As a result, James’ battalion became the 2/7^th Battalion.

James Smith’s previous service was evidently valued by the headquarters of the battalion, and in November 1914, he was first promoted to Lance Corporal and then appointed to be a Temporary Corporal. A further promotion to Lance Sergeant, a peculiar rank between Corporal and Sergeant, came in the January of 1915. Lance Sergeant marked the pinnacle of James Smith’s career. In March 1915, he reverted to the rank of Corporal, and then in May 1915, he was further reduced to Rifleman.

While the 2/7^th Leeds Rifles was stationed at Larkhill, James Smith was discharged as being no longer fit for service. His military service came to an end on 22^nd January 1916. He had developed Tuberculosis.

He died on 22^nd September 1919, at the age of 41 years.