Missing WW1 Scarborough soldier buried in Belgium over a century later
“Well known in swimming circles and had won the Scarborough Amateur swimming club gold medal for swimming around the castle foot”.
An article published in The Yorkshire Post of May 4, 1915, in reporting that 632 Lance-Corporal Claude Stanly Dell from Scarborough had been killed in action had noted the above personal detail from his life.
With his body having not been recovered from the battlefield his name had been duly inscribed on The Yorkshire Regiment panel on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres, recorded as ‘Missing’.
Some 111 years later, in a service with full military honours held on Tuesday October 13, LCpl Claude Dell’s remains were finally laid to rest at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s (CWGC) Poelcapelle British Cemetery in Belgium in the presence of both his military family and his great-niece Judith.
His story recommences in 2021 after workmen, while digging a rainwater cistern in Hazeweidestraat, St Juliaan, Belgium, discovered human remains in their trench.
An archaeological excavation was subsequently undertaken by the Flanders Heritage Agency.
Artefacts recovered alongside the remains proved them to be those of a soldier who had served in the 5th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment.
The Ministry of Defence’s Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre (JCCC), known as the ‘MOD War Detectives’, initiated an investigation to name him.
Research would identify 20 men from the regiment missing in the area, all of whom had died in the Spring of 1915.
Following genealogical investigation, living descendants of the missing men were traced individually, until eventually DNA testing proved that the remains were those of LCpl Claude Stanley Dell from Scarborough.
From the archive of The Green Howards Museum in Richmond, North Yorkshire, his military index card poignantly states his details and illustrates his entitlement to the 1915 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.
He had been awarded the 1915 Star as he had landed in France on April 18 of that year with what was then Alexandra, The Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment (later The Green Howards).
On April 25, 1915, aged 25 and only some 10 days after arriving in France he was killed in action when he and his comrades in the 5th Battalion were situated near to the village of St Juliaan near Ypres.
One of five brothers, all of whom had seen service in World War One, Claude had been born in New Cross in London in 1889 with the family having moved to the North Yorkshire coast and had been living in the town at 147 Falsgrave Road from 1911 onwards.
The Menin Gate Memorial to The Missing lists the 55,000 British & Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient and whose grave was unknown.
In due course his name will be removed and Lance Corporal Claude Dell, formerly of Scarborough, is one more combatant of The Great War who is no longer designated among the missing.