CAPTAIN FRANK WOOLFE HALDINSTEIN
ROYAL ENGINEEERS
7TH MARCH 1917 AGE 22
BURIED: BRAY MILITARY CEMETERY, SOMME, FRANCE
Frank Haldenstein was the son of the wealthy boot and shoe manufacturer, Alfred Isaac Haldinstein, of Bally and Haldinstein, Norwich. His grandfather, his father's father, had emigrated from Prussia in the 1840s and married Rosa Soman, the daughter of David Soman, who had fled France during the French Revolution. He was educated at Norwich Grammar School and Christ Church, Oxford . Here he befriended the socialist politician and economist Harold Laski, who wrote in the preface to his 1919 book, 'Authority in the Modern' State, that:
"This book would have gone to my friend Frank Haldinstein ... but his name has been added to the list on which the Oxford of my generation will write with undying pride.
When I look back on certain magic nights at Oxford and re-read these pages in the light of their memory, I realise how halting they are compared to the things they would have said. But I take it that for them the one justification of this conflict would have been the thought that we who are left are trying in some sort to understand the problems of the state they died to make free. To have known them was an education in liberty."