McIntosh, Douglas Stewart

BORN HULL 1893. HULL PAL. SON OF KATE & HAROLD BLYTH McINTOSH ABOVE 1891 WAS A COUNCIL SANITARY INSPECTOR. NB: 412 HESSLE RD; 7 ETHEL GR, BRIGHTON ST;
Hull Pals Memorial Post. CORPORAL DOUGLAS STEWART McINTOSH 11/781. Born in 1893, Douglas was the youngest of three children and only son of Harold and Kate McIntosh of 32 Sherburn Street, Holderness Road. Harold McIntosh died when Douglas was only eleven. A Sailor before the war, he enlisted at Hull City Hall on 10th September 1914 joining the 11th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, ‘The Tradesmen’, 2nd Hull Pals. His Military career was peppered with numerous disciplinary incidents, promotions and subsequent demotions, mostly for absences including absconding from the camp at Port Said when the Pals arrived in Egypt. He was killed in action on 29th October 1916 as the Somme campaign ground on into the winter and the morass clung at frozen feet swollen into boots soaked with mud and blood. His body was never recovered, and his name is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to those who lost their lives in the Somme sector and who have no known grave. I believe Douglas and both Edward Nelson and Thomas Iveson were part of a patrol which ran into trouble out in No Man’s Land. For all his disciplinary issues, Douglas was ‘Mentioned in Dispatches’ in the London Gazette of 4th January 1917 where it stated he was “Recommended for gallantry and distinguished conduct in the field by his Commander-in-Chief”- when it mattered he produced.