Notes
The Bradford Grammar School website (see References) states: 'Harry Huby was a talented mathematician who as a result of the war never had the opportunity to fully develop his talents. He was born in Yeadon in 1897. His father bore the unusual Biblical Greek name
Philemon. Like his four brothers he became a stone mason employed by his father, John Huby, who was a building contractor as well as a mason. By 1901 the family occupied several houses on Victoria Terrace, Yeadon, which had been built by the family firm. In 1895 Philemon married Mary Hudson whose father Samuel was a joiner and doubtless an associate of his father. They had only one child, Harry, who was born on 13th June 1897. His first school is not known, and the new secondary school for Yeadon and Guiseley did not open until 1910. At the age of eleven, in September 1908 Harry entered Bradford Grammar School in form Third Classical Lower. He showed great promise in Latin and Greek, and also in Maths and Science, or which he won the Division prize in 1911. In the Remove Science and
Mathematical Form he was awarded the Henry Maufe prize for Physics, and two years later he won an Open Mathematical Exhibition at Jesus College, Oxford.
The Roll of Honour for form Sixth Mathematical lists the names of twenty-four boys who served in the armed forces, of whom twenty-three had places at Oxford or Cambridge and six were killed. Harry Huby never took up his place at Jesus as he was conscripted in March 1916, three months before his nineteenth birthday. He had been in the School O.T.C. but he was not selected for a commission, and he served as a private soldier in the reserve battalion of the local territorial unit, the 2/6th West Riding. This battalion went to France in January 1917 as part of 186th Infantry Brigade in the 62nd West Riding Division. Whether Huby went with the battalion at that time, or he joined them with a replacement draft for casualties later, is not known. If he went to France in January, then he survived the disastrous 3rd May attack at Bullecourt when the battalion suffered casualties of 267 men.
The 20th of November was the opening day of the British attack on the Hindenburg Line at Cambrai. This was the first mass attack by tanks, almost 400 of which were to spearhead the attack and make a passage through the barbed wire entanglements. This meant that complete secrecy could be achieved as no preliminary bombardment was necessary. The 62nd division made an advance of 7000 yards. Huby’s brigade were in reserve. When the fortified village of Havrincourt was taken by mid-morning, they leap-frogged the leading brigades and in the words of the 2/6th West Ridings’ War Diary, ‘swept forward’. Their ‘attack was a complete success.’ They took 167 Germans prisoner, and captured two batteries of
artillery. Casualties were light, over three days eleven killed, four missing and 61 wounded, mainly from machine-gun bullets. Huby was one of those unfortunates who lost their lives. His body was not found so he was commemorated on the Louverval Memorial, and his name is also on the memorial at St. Andrews Church, Yeadon.'