SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM MCCONNELL RUTHERFORD
EAST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT
19TH APRIL 1918 AGE 37
BURIED: WIMEREUX COMMUNAL CEMETERY, FRANCE
William Rutherford's brother chose these lines from 'Adonais: an Elegy on the Death of John Keats'. The poem became the source of many First World War epitaphs as hundreds mourned the death of young men who, like the poet John Keats, died before their time: "He hath awakened from the dream of life", "He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night", "He lives he wakes - 'tis Death is dead, not he;", "He is made one with Nature: there is heard his voice in all her music", "He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely".
Rutherford was a teacher at Kingston Grammar School and they have compiled a wonderfully detailed biography of his life and war service. In brief, he was born in Belfast, educated at Belfast Methodist College, Queen's University, New College in Edinburgh and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1912 he took a job teaching a junior class at Kingston Grammar School but when war broke out two years later, despite the fact that he disliked war, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He worked as a hospital orderly in Alexandria, where the wounded from the Gallipoli and Palestine campaigns were brought, and in October 1916 applied for a commission. Gazetted into the East Yorkshire Regiment in May 1917, he was severely wounded in the thigh during the heavy fighting around Hazebrouck 11-13 April, and died in hospital in Wimereux on the 19th.