SECOND LIEUTENANT PERCY O'DONNELL
ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
6TH MAY 1916 AGE 31
BURIED: LIJSSENTHOEK MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
The O'Donnells were a prosperous Roman Catholic farming family from Fethard, County Tipperary, Ireland. Their eldest son, Percy, who gave his profession as 'bank official', enlisted on 17 August 1915. He was comissioned into the Royal Field Artillery on 1 September 1915 and left for France on 18 November, arriving in the fighting lines on the 24th. He was wounded six months later at 'Clapham Junction' in the Stirling Castle Sector of the Ypres Salient, and died of his wounds, "compact skull injury" in No. 10 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek at 9.45 pm on 6 May 1916.
The O'Donnells lived at Bannixtown House, mispelt in the inscription as Banixtown, where in addition to farming they bred horses.
Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, where O'Donnell is buried, is one of the great witnesses to the tragedy of the Great War. The town, a few miles behind the front line and close to the Poperinghe-Hazebrouck railway, was the site of four big Field Hospitals and four Casualty Clearing Stations with a total of almost 4,000 beds bewtween them. Nearly 10,000 patients, soldiers wounded in the fighting, are buried in the cemetery. The town has developed a Visitor Centre and website for which they have collected, and are collecting, personal information about those who died. Much of my information on Percy O'Donnell comes from this site. Particularly poignant is a a list of personal effects returned to his family, amongst which is a protractor - he was an artillery officer - a chapelet, identified further as a rosary, and some flowers "1 of wax, smashed."