SECOND LIEUTENANT HAROLD JAMESON
ROYAL FLYING CORPS
5TH JANUARY 1917 AGE 20
BURIED: LIJSSENTHOEK MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
Harold Jameson was 20 when he died and, according to his parents' entry in the Cemetery Register, he had been serving in France since 10 August 1914 when he was only 17. During that time he had been awarded the MC, DCM and the French Medaille Militaire. He was shot down over the German lines whilst directing artillery and crash landed in flames. His observor was killed outright and Harold died the next day in a Casualty Clearing Station in Lijssenthoek.
Harold was the brother of the novelist Storm Jameson. She dedicated 'A Richer Dust' (1931), the third novel in her trilogy 'The Triumph of Time', to his memory.
Harold's inscription comes from Shelley's 'Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats', with its comforting words to those who mourn a youthful death:
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.