Captain, Household Brigade
Born: February 19th 1884
Died: October 12th 1917
Age at Death: 33
Killed in action, France, October 12th 1917
Grave reference Panel 3 Tyne Cot Memorial, Belgium.
Brighton War Memorial.
A donation to the memorial statue has been made in honour of this soldier by Ian Howard-Harwood (Du. 1955-58), Alan Howard-Harwood (Ch. 1964-68), Mark Howard-Harwood (Ch. 1985-90), Basia (nee Jaskinski) Howard-Harwood (Fe. 1988-90).
Leslie Scott
Leslie Scott was born in Ryde, Isle of Wight in 1884. He was the younger son of John Allen Scott, who owned an upholstery business, and his wife Florence (née Cranbrook). Scott’s father died in 1886 and his mother married again to Olive Gabell, a Brighton hotelier, with the result that Scott was, briefly, a pupil at the school in the last years of the nineteenth century. After leaving school Scott became a ‘borough surveyor’ who lived and worked in Brighton before immigrating to Canada in 1906.
At the start of the war Scott returned to Britain and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant. It is unlikely that he was initially commissioned into the Household Cavalry and at some point in the period 1914-1916 he was promoted to Lieutenant. As a Lieutenant he was, in 1916, drafted into the newly formed ‘Household Battalion’, a unit of infantry composed of various reserves and ancillary personnel from the Household Cavalry who were retrained as infantry to serve on the Western Front. During the assault on Poelcappelle on 12th October 1917, which formed part of the Third battle of Ypres (Passchendaele), the battalion suffered 348 casualties including 13 officers out of only 498 Officers and men who took part. Scott was one of those within these horrendous casualty figures who was initially registered as missing and whose body was never recovered, suggesting that he may have been one of the many wounded who simply sank into the mud where they were hit.
Scott is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial, Passchendaele, Belgium.
Source: LEST WE FORGET PROJECT, Brighton College 2014/15