Major, RAMC
Born: July 19th 1911
Died: November 18th 1943
Age at Death: 32
House Prefect 1929
School Prefect 1929
Head of House 1929
1st 15 1928-1929
Medals/honours: MBE
Born in Burnley on 19 July 1911 to William James Purves and his wife Lily (née Smith), William Hay Purves became Head of House at the College, while also playing for the 1st XV. Perhaps appropriately for a boy of such exalted status at the school, he played a Noble Lord in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.
During the war he served in the Middle East with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and won the MBE for gallantry on 18 February 1943, when his unit would almost certainly have been supporting troops fighting the German and Italian forces in Tunisia. The circumstances surrounding his death are mysterious. By November 1943 the British Army’s front line in the Mediterranean had shifted from the Middle East to Italy, but he is recorded as dying in the Middle East, and is buried in the Fayid War Cemetery in Egypt. It is possible that he died of wounds received earlier, or of a disease. He left a widow, Constance, a fellow medic.