Current Information:

Age-19

5, Green Lane, Hanwell

Born-Kensington

Third Battle of Ypres

This was a campaign fought between July and November 1917 and is often referred to as the Battle of Passchendaele, a village to the north-east of Ypres which was finally captured in November. It was an attempt by the British to break out of the Ypres salient and capture the higher ground to the south and the east from which the enemy had been able to dominate the salient. It began well but two important factors weighed against them. First was the weather. The summer of 1917 turned out to be one of the the wettest on record and soon the battlefield was reduced to a morass of mud which made progress very difficult, if not impossible in places. The second was the defensive arrangements of concrete blockhouses and machine gun posts providing inter-locking fire that the Germans had constructed and which were extremely difficult and costly to counter. For 4 months this epic struggle continued by the end of which the salient had been greatly expanded in size but the vital break out had not been achieved.

16th Middlesex of 86 Brigade, 29th Division, had spent four days from 9th August in the new front line east of the Steenbeck stream and on their relief moved back to a camp north-west of Elverdinghe. From here on 16th August they moved back up to support positions in the Blue Line, near Langemarck and then, on 18th August, 16th Middlesex moved into the front line with Battalion HQ at Wijdendrift blockhouse. They only spent 24 hours in these forward positions before being relieved and moving back to Dublin Camp. Their casualty list  for the five days was sixteen killed and sixty seven wounded but the Battalion Diary gives no other information other than the figures. Some of them might have occurred on 18th August when units from 29th Division established posts east of another small stream, the Broembeek, but many would have been victims of the relentless shell fire that was such a feature of the battlefield. One of those killed was Stanley Farndon on 19th August.