SECOND LIEUTENANT HAROLD GOSTWYCK MAY
DORSETSHIRE REGIMENT
27TH MARCH 1915 AGE 27
BURIED: BOULOGNE EASTERN CEMETERY, FRANCE
Vivat Shirburnia - long live Sherborne the centuries-old independent school in Dorset where Harold Gostwyck May had been a pupil from 1902 to 1907, and briefly, in the autumn of 1914, a master. The inscription was chosen by his father, Richard Cooke May, a stockbroker, who lived at Sherborne, 77 Woodside Green, Croyden, Surrey.
May joined the army soon after the outbreak of war and was commissioned into the Dorsetshire Regiment. He had been out in France for less than three months when he was wounded in a German attack at St Eloi on 14 March. In a letter from his hospital bed to the headmaster of Sherborne, Nowell Smith, May recounted what happened.
"Suddenly the most awful hail of shrapnel came over the the crest of the dugouts. A whole battery fired high velocity shrapnel for over an hour - down came the trees, up came tons of earth. The men scurried up into the trench pretty quick and one shell burst alongside me and sent me toppling down the hill into a pond at the bottom ... it felt like being hit on the thigh at footer, though of course the shell made a beastly mess of the leg."
'Vivat Shirburnia, Sherborne School and the Great War 1914-1918' pp 44-5
Patrick Francis, 2014
After nightfall stretcher bearers carried him to the Battalion dressing station, from there he was taken to a Casualty Clearing Station in Poperinghe and then by train to a base hospital in Boulogne. Once here it was decided that his leg needed to be operated on but May failed to survive and died on 27 March.
There are details and a photograph of May on the Sherborne School Archives website.