SECOND LIEUTENANT DONALD LYLE WHITMARSH
HAMPSHIRE REGIMENT
22ND AUGUST 1917 AGE 32
BURIED: TYNE COT CEMETERY, BELGIUM
If you think that the words sound familiar it's not because they form a popular headstone inscription but because the last five words appear on Lutyen's Stone of Remembrance, which can be found in almost every War Grave Commission cemetery, only left out when the cemetery was too small to take it. Anxious not to upset any of the religious denominations among the soldiers of the Empire, and in this case in deference to the Hindus, the Commission omitted the words 'Their bodies are buried in peace'. Hindus cremate their dead.
This was not a consideration for the Mr W J Thomas of Myrtle Cottage, Westbere who chose this inscription for Donald Whitmarsh. For a long time I couldn't work out why WJ Thomas should have chosen his inscription, who was he. Whitmarsh appeared to have parents and a wife. But the Whitmarsh family had fragmented following the parents' divorce in 1887 when Mrs Whitmarsh had confessed that her two youngest children, which would include Donald, were her lover's. Following the divorce, Mrs Whitmarsh went to New Zealand and it seems that her sister-in-law, Alice, brought up the children. Donald married Margaret Guglielmo in July 1915, but when he was killed, just over two years later, it was his eldest sister, also Margaret, who was named as his next-of-kin. And WJ Thomas was her husband, Donald's brother-in-law.
Donald Whitmarsh served with the 12th Battalion Hampshire Regiment but at the time of his death was attached to the 2nd Battalion. He was killed in action on 22 August, a day that saw heavy fighting all along the Langemarck sector as the British attempted to push forward against fierce German resistance. His body was discovered in an unmarked grave early in 1921 and identified by the name on his shirt.