Lieutenant Christopher HARTLEY (1905)

210 (1st East Lancashire) Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
Born 22 August 1886 in Burnley, Lancashire
Killed in action 1 September 1917, aged 31
Buried at Ypres Reservoir Cemetery, West Flanders, Belgium.

Christopher Hartley was the elder son of William Harry Hartley, Registrar of the Burnley County Court, and Gertrude, née Ecroyd, of Burnley, Lancashire. He was married, just before leaving for Egypt, to Dorothy Chernocke, née Downes, of Aspley Guise, Bedfordshire – she too travelled to Egypt to do Voluntary Aid Detachment hospital work. His brother was also killed in the war, in May 1918.

He was educated at St Aubyn’s School, Rottingdean, and Harrow School, and came up to Merton in 1905. After taking his degree in 1908, he qualified as a solicitor, joining the firm of Hartley & Pilgrim in Colne, and lived at ‘Hoarstones’ in Fence, Lancashire.

He was given a commission on 26 August 1914, and sailed for Egypt in May 1915, where he served on the Suez Canal, in the desert, and as far as the borders of Sinai and Palestine until February 1917, when he was sent to France and Belgium.

He was killed in action by the bursting of a shell, a few miles east of Ypres, on 1 September 1917. His younger brother, Edmund, was killed the following May.

A fellow officer wrote:

Everyone out here who knew Christopher Hartley thought the world of him. He did not know what fear was.

Biographical details reproduced with kind permission from the Keepers and Governors of Harrow School.