We continue our commemoration of Dorchester men who died on or around D-Day by remembering two men who were not from the Dorsetshire Regiment. Leonard Clifford Elmes served with the Durham Light Infantry and Thomas Henry Baker was in the East Yorkshire Regiment.
Leonard Elmes
Leonard was the youngest of the Dorchester men killed around D-Day. He was 18 when he died on 19th June 1944.
His parents, Charles and Minnie Mabel, of Dorchester, had married in 1927. Leonard was born in August 1925 and was followed six years later by a sister, Valerie. Minnie married on two further occasions, in 1933 and 1953, and had another daughter in 1934, a half-sister for Leonard and Valerie. The family lived at 3, Victoria Terrace, Dorchester.
The Western Gazette reported in 1944 that Leonard had been a sawyer, employed by Messrs. Webb, Major and Co. The firm can be seen in Kelly’s directories at the Dorset History Centre.
Leonard is buried at Tilly-Sur-Seulles War Cemetery.
Thomas Baker
Thomas started life in 1918 in Pontypridd, Wales, his parents Frederick and Alice having married in 1914. At the age of 3 the 1921 Census lists him as living with an uncle, in Merthyr Tydfil. He had five siblings – Joe, Ivy, Ronald, Rosemary and Joan.
The Western Gazette reports Thomas’s later employment as ‘miner’.
We will never know how Thomas met a Dorchester girl, Lilian Alice White, but they married in Sept 1940 and lived at 13, Mill Street, Fordington. In 1944 they had a daughter, Patricia. It is uncertain whether Thomas met his child before he died on 6th June 1944.
Thomas, who had previously been evacuated from Dunkirk, was fatally wounded on the landing beach in N France. He is buried at Bayeux War Cemetery.
Lilian married again in 1946.