Missing WW1 Soldier portrait revealed by Scarborough News reader
Since the publication of the story of the missing WW1 Scarborough soldier’s recent burial in Belgium (The Scarborough News October 29), a photo of LCpl. Claude Dell has emerged via a reader’s conscientious research.
‘The Scarborough Pictorial’ was a weekly tabloid newspaper comprising 15 pages priced at 1p and published between 1913-15.
At the commencement of World War One, it listed volunteers and recruits to the armed forces and on many occasions a photograph of the individual would be included.
Such an instance occurred with 632 Lance Corporal Claude Stanley Dell who was featured in edition no. 89, published on April 6, 1915.
Aged 25, LCpl. Dell was killed in action on April 25, 1915 whilst serving in the Ypres Salient with Alexandra, The Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment (later to become The Green Howards).
He was recorded as living at South Villa in Londesborough Road in Scarborough.
Some 111 years later, with his body having been discovered and positively identified, he was finally laid to rest in a service with full military honours on October 13 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.
One of five brothers, all of whom had seen service in The Great War, Claude Dell had been born in New Cross in London in 1889, the family having moved to the North Yorkshire coast and had been living in the town at 147 Falsgrave Road from 1911 onwards.