The evening’s Northern Despatch reported the deaths of Private Albert Peart, 29, a Co-op grocer from Wales Street, and of Lieutenant Ronald Pike Pease, 19, of Hummersknott, the son of the local MP. Peart and Pease had died on the same day in the same battle: Flers-Courcelette, the first tank engagement.
The paper also contained news of the deaths of Captain David Henderson, 27, the son of Arthur Henderson, the former Mayor of Darlington who had just become the first Labour representative ever to sit in the Cabinet, and of Lieutenant Raymond Asquith, 37, the son of the prime minister H.H. Asquith.
It also included the story of Captain Hugh Wilson, 38, of Langholm Crescent, a veteran of the Boer War. Five days before Flers-Courcelette, he and two officers had drawn straws to see who would go over the top first. Captain Wilson had drawn the shortest, and had immediately been shot through the heart.
He was buried in the same cemetery as Captain Thomas Rowlandson, 36, of Newton Morrell, near Barton, who had also died at Flers-Courcelette. The paper noted that Charterhouse- and Cambridge-educated Rowlandson had played for Corinthian FC and had captained ‘an English team’ on a tour of South Africa. It said he died racing his men across no-man’s-land towards the German trenches, armed only with a walking stick.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2012)