Private Ambrose Townsley

Private Ambrose Townsley, 10th ( Service ) Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers. ( The Coldstream Memorial shows his Regiment as The Kings Own Scottish Borderers. It maybe that he had originally enlisted in the K.O.S.B. and was later transferred into the Fusiliers ). He was killed in action in Belgium on 20th September 1917, aged 20. during the Third Battle of Ypres. He had been born in Coldstream and was married to Mrs Margaret  Townsley of 31 Chapel Street, Berwick-Upon-Tweed and is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial, Zonnebeke, Belgium. He had enlisted in early 1915, aged just 17 and in a letter home to his father the Chaplain wrote ” your son showed splendid courage and devotion that day “.His father Thomas Townsley lived in Leet Street, Coldstream and Ambrose was the third of his sons to fall. The photographs try to depict the desolation of the Flanders battlefield where the incessant shelling had destroyed the Flanders drainage systems.

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