The men staff and students of the Goldsmiths’ Training Department 1907. William Thomas Young is the lecturer sitting centre of the front row, 7th from left and right.
One day in the middle of July 1917 a telegram boy delivered the message to Mrs Hilda Young that her husband, Lieutenant William Thomas Young, had been killed in action.
It is impossible to imagine the shock and grief of such news; particularly when she was caring for their infant daughter, Diana, born just over a year before.
He had been blown up by shell fire on the 12th of July while serving with number 12 Heavy Battery, the Royal Garrison Artillery during the battle of Passchendaele.
It was also the first day the German Army had deployed mustard gas.
He was 36-years-old and had been hailed as one of the country’s most promising scholars of English Literature.
He had been lecturer in English at the University of London, Goldsmiths’ College since September 1906 and he was also Joint Editor of the prestigious Cambridge Anthologies.
Goldsmiths’ women students and staff 1905-7. Three of the men, including the Warden, William Loring and Vice Principal Thomas Raymont still managed to ‘inveigle’ themselves into the frame. You can see them standing at the back to the far left and right.
Three of his books, poetry during the age of Shakespeare, the poetry of Robert Browning, and a ‘Primer of English Literature’ had been published by Cambridge University Press and formed the core of the English syllabus in schools and colleges throughout the country.