McLane, Harold Maynard

BORN HULL 1897. HULL PAL. SON OF WALTER & RACHEL McLANE. ARMY ADDRESS ABOVE. EX BLUNDELL’S PAINT WORKER. HAROLD ATTENDED CLIFTON STREET SCHOOL & IS RECORDED ON THE SCHOOL ROH. LEFT BROTHERS WALTER AND ALFRED McLANE.
Hull Pals Memorial Post. L/CPL HAROLD MAYNARD McLANE 11/33. Born in April 1897, Harold was the eldest of four children to Walter and Rachel of 56 Waterloo Street, Hull. A Paint Filler by trade he queued outside Hull City Hall on the morning of Monday September 7th 1914 as the 2nd Hull Pals battalion, the 11th East Yorkshire’s, ‘The Tradesmen’, began its first day of recruitment. He joined as a Private but had been promoted having come through Egypt, the Somme and Oppy Wood. He’d lied about his age. He’d told the Recruiting Sergeant he was 19 when in reality he was 17 and not long out of short trousers. That is an interesting thing to ponder for a moment. Most of these ‘men’ were very much still boys. Yes life was harder and children became adults very early in their young lives, but these were unsophisticated men in both their experience of the world and their ability to emotionally withstand what they were witnessing. When veterans spoke of their experiences in later life it was through the veil of their subsequent emotional knowledge- and it had also become a shared recall as one man made sense of his own memories through the explanations presented by others. In this way memories were recalled by veterans, and understood by listeners, through the prism of literature and poetry, through the images of Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Blunden and others; as if an individual memory was too painful to see for what it was. Small wonder when you think how much courage it must have taken a 17 year-old boy to not buckle and fold under the weight of what he was being forced to carry around. Harold Maynard McLane was killed in action on 27th March 1918 during the German Spring Offensive; his body was never recovered and his name is commemorated on the Arras Memorial; he was 20 years old.