Lance Corporal Harry Billing

Harry Billing, aged 20 - 1/5 the Battalion, The South Staffordshire Regiment – was one of seven Leek men to die on the first day of the Battle of the Somme – 1st July 1916 - the worst single day for the town in terms of casualties in any war.

He was the eldest of five children and the son of a senior executive at the Leek and Moorlands Building Society (now Britannia).  The family lived in a large house in Buxton Road and Harry worked at Parr’s bank, St. Edward Street.

Harry is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, Somme, France. The memorial displays the names of some 75,000 officers and men who fell on the fields of the Somme between 1916 and 1918 and who have no known grave.

Cpl George Scott MM of the Leek Battery recalls:-

“My first trip back into the front lines observation posts I will never forget, because all the North Staffords who had died still lay out in no mans land in heaps just as they had fallen on the 1st July the previous year. What is more, upon looking through the glasses, we could see that the barbed wire was festooned with the bodies of the men of the North Staffs Battalions.”

Harry is commemorated on the Nicholson Memorial in Leek. The memorial (known locally by Leekensians as “The Monument” or “Sir Arthur’s Wristwatch”) was built by Sir Arthur Nicholson to commemorate the death of his son Basil Lee and the fallen from the First World War. It was unveiled in 1925 four years before Sir Arthur’s death in 1929. It now stands tribute to the fallen of Leek and the surrounding area from both World Wars.

To read more about the Leek me who went to war and the Nicolson Memorial click here