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68996 11th Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers
William Hartley was born in Battersea, London in 1886. By 1891 his mother Emma Hartley (née Smalls) was a widow and was living in Deptford while her son and his brother Harry and sister Emily were with her parents at 18 Cross Street in Sudbury. His mother was employed as an umbrella machinist and by 1901 was back in Sudbury living at 19 Cross Street with her family.
At the age of 14 William was employed as a telegraph messenger and later became a postman. It is believed he married in 1911, after the war his widow remarried and moved to Ingatestone, Essex.
William enlisted in Sudbury and served with the Royal Army Medical Corps (121368) before transferring to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. It is not known when he transferred to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the 11th Battalion formed part of 67th Brigade, 22nd Division and in November 1915 the Division was sent to Salonika where it remained for the rest of the war.
The 22nd Division suffered 7,728 casualties, killed, missing or wounded in the war but also many troops were casualties of malaria, dysentery and other diseases rife in the Salonika theatre.
William died aged 32 on 26 June 1918 and lies buried in Karasouli Military Cemetery, Greece. A Cross of Remembrance was laid by his grave on my behalf in August 2014. He was awarded the British War Medal and Victory Medal.
William is also remembered on the Trinity Congregational Church Memorial which was moved to the United Reformed Church, School Street when Trinity closed. The United Reformed Church closed in 2017 and it is proposed that the memorials from both churches will be relocated to the Sudbury Cemetery Chapel.
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