Pte 36949 Daniel Sloan

The only Daniel Sloan born in England or Wales in 1881 +/-2 years was born in Chorlton district, Manchester, in the March quarter of 1881 to mother maiden name Collins. Some records show the surname as Sloane. 

 

John Henry Sloane married Emily Collins in 1872 in Ulverston District, Lancashire.  They had three children, all born in Manchester; Daniel had an older brother John, born in 1878, and a younger sister Eleanor, born in 1884.  His parents were both born in the Isle of Man, his father in Peel and his mother in Douglas.  His father had come to England before the age of 18, and in 1871 was a hairdresser’s apprentice in Park Road, Toxteth, Liverpool.  

 

The 1881 census finds the family at 2 Cross Place, Ardwick.  His father, 28, is a hairdresser and barber, his mother is 33, John is 3, and Daniel 2 months old.  Also in the household are his uncle Daniel Collins, 31, a hairdresser’s assistant, and Mary Jane Sloane, 26, a domestic servant, both born in the Isle of Man. 

 

By 1891 they have moved to Ashton under Lyne, and are living at 109 Stamford Street, with three children.  His father is still working as a hairdresser, John is 13, Daniel 9, and Eleanor 6, all at school.

 

The family appears to have returned to the Isle of Man as death records show:  John Henry Sloane of 4 Duke Lane, Douglas, died on 07th August 1893, aged 41, Emily Sloan less than a month later, on 01st September 1893, living at 3 Duke Lane. Daniel would have been 12 years old.  It is not known what happened to the children after their parents’ deaths, but they must have had relatives in the Isle of Man.  (John married in about 1898 and the 1901 census finds him with his wife and two children, Eleanor and Daniel, in Barrack Street.)

 

 

At some point Daniel moved to Liverpool, as records show he enlisted in Liverpool, at age 18, on 19th March 1900 as Private 7007, 3rd Battalion South Lancashire Regiment, giving his address as 106 Kempston Street.  He states he has lived in Liverpool for the past 12 months at least, and is employed as a shoemaker with Mr. Cave, Holt Road. He is described as being 5’ 4 and a quarter inches tall, weighing 107 lbs, with a fresh complexion, blue eyes, and dark brown hair, and a scar on his left shoulder. He gives his religion as Roman Catholic.

 

His service record notes “embodied 9th August 1900”.  Daniel served during the Boer War, earning the Queen’s South Africa Medal with Cape Colony and Orange Free State clasps, and receiving a War Gratuity of £5.

 

He was discharged, time expired, on 18th March 1906.

 

Daniel has not been found on the 1911 census, or identified on crew or passenger lists.  His brother John (signed Sloane), 33, a house painter, is living at 9 Duke Lane.

 

But in 1912 Daniel Sloan, age 30, a shoemaker, was admitted on 05th January 1912 as a patient in Mill Road Hospital, with cellulitis of the neck (a potentially serious bacterial skin infection).  He was admitted from Everton parish, his address 41 Everton Brow, next of kin his brother John, at 42 Circular Road, Douglas, Isle of Man.  Daniel was discharged on 02nd March 1912 at his own request.  (41 Everton Brow was a men’s boarding house; Daniel is not listed at this address in 1911.)

 

Daniel was living in Liverpool when he enlisted, joining the 20th Battalion of The King's Liverpool Regiment as Private 36949. The amount of the War Gratuity suggests that he enlisted in about March 1916.

He was killed in action on 09th April 1917, aged 36. This was the opening day of the Battle of Arras. 

17^th,  19^th & 20th  Battalion at the  Battle of Arras 09^th April 1917

Everard Wyrall records the events of the day  in Volume 2 of his History of the King's Regiment (Liverpool).

The 89^th Brigade formed up for the attack with the 19^th King's on the right and the 20^th King’s on the left. The 17^th King’s supplied the “mopping up" parties and he 2nd Bedfords were in close support.

It was just after 3pm when the advance began “According to scheduled time the waves advanced in good style and with determination; everyone was cheerful and in the best of spirits”

That advance is described by others as magnificent. From the OP’s the observing officers saw a wonderful sight – long lines of men advancing steadily up a long and gradual slope towards the enemy’ front line. Then suddenly they disappeared. The observers quite pardonably, imagined that the German front line had fallen into the hands of the assaulting troops and that the latter were on the way to the enemy’s support line. Alas something very different had happened. When the advancing troops had reached the summit of the long slope up which they advanced the ground suddenly dipped before the German front line , and when the observing officers thought they  were already in the Bosche lines they had not, as a matter of fact, even reached the wire. What the observers took to be the front line was really the support line; the front line could not be seen  - it lay just behind the crest of that slight rise in the ground.

The attacking waves of the 19^th King’s got within 100 yards of the German wire but were then held up. They were faced by three belts of entanglements, practically untouched by our artillery, and nothing could be done but to dig in or else take shelter in the many shell- shell-with which “No Man’s Land" was pitted. By this time the battalion’s losses were very heavy, and when darkness fell “A" and “B" Companies (about 140 in all) lay in shell-holes, two or three hundred yards north east of St. Martin, but just south of the Cojeul River, and “C" and “D" Companies (140 all ranks) were along the river bank, but on the northern side about 150 yards north east of St. Martin.

The first waves of the 20^th King’ advanced at 3.7pm. At 4pm Lieut Beaumont, commanding “A" Company, reported that he had had some forty casualties in passing through the enemy’s barrage. The next message, timed 4.40pm, stated that the position of the battalion at that period was on a crest in front of the enemy’s wire and about 100 yards from it. On the right the 21^st Division was observed to have penetrated the enemy’s front line, but in the left the right Battalion of the 21^st Brigade (the Wilts) was on the St. Martin- Neuville Vitasse road; the left flank of the 20^th King's was, therefore, “ in the air”.

Urgent messages were sent up from Battalion Headquarters to “push on, keeping in touch with right” But little else could be accomplished until those formidable belts of wire had been cut sufficiently to allow the rapid passage of the attacking troops, headed by their bombers.

At 9:30 that night 89^th Brigade Headquarters ordered both the 19^th and 20^th Battalions to withdraw, the former to the two sunken roads running south east from St. Martin, the latter to north west of St. Martin; the guns had been ordered to cut the enemy’s wire during the night in preparation for another attack during the 10^th April.

Of the 17^th King’s  - the “moppers up" – there is little to relate. There was nothing to “mop up" so that they did not function. Yet they had shared all the perils of the advance, and when  after they had fallen back and at midnight held the following positions, “B", “C", and “D" Companies in and around the sunken road north of Boiry-Becquerelle and “A" Company in trenches west of Henin, they lost 2 officers and 16 other ranks killed, and 3 officers and 48 other ranks wounded.

Daniel's body was not recovered from the battlefield or was subsequently lost as his name is on the Arras Memorial in France. 

The ARRAS MEMORIAL commemorates almost 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand who died in the Arras sector between the spring of 1916 and 7 August 1918, the eve of the Advance to Victory, and have no known grave. The most conspicuous events of this period were the Arras offensive of April-May 1917, and the German attack in the spring of 1918. Canadian and Australian servicemen killed in these operations are commemorated by memorials at Vimy and Villers-Bretonneux. A separate memorial remembers those killed in the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Both cemetery and memorial were designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with sculpture by Sir William Reid Dick. The memorial was unveiled by Lord Trenchard, Marshal of the Royal Air Force on the 31 July 1932 (originally it had been scheduled for 15 May, but due to the sudden death of French President Doumer, as a mark of respect, the ceremony was postponed until July).

 

Daniel’s name appeared in the list of Wounded published on 16th May 1917 in the Liverpool Post & Mercury. 

 

 

The following notice appeared in the Isle of Man Times on 07th July 1917:

 

 

The following notice appeared in the Isle of Man Times on 07th July 1917:

Five Killed: Eight Wounded: One Missing.

We again record the death in action of five soldiers of Manx birth or residence — ... and D. Sloan (Douglas).

 

His Army effects and a War Gratuity of £3-10s went to his brother John.  No pension card has been found, indicating that Daniel had no dependents.