A young soldier who was killed just a week after his arrival in France during World War One has finally been buried more than a century later.
L/Cpl Claude Stanley Dell, from Scarborough, served in the 5th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment after joining up alongside his brothers at the start of the war.
He was killed in action on 25 April 1915 on the Ypres Salient Battlefields in Belgium after his arrival in Boulogne on 17 April, and his remains were found in 2021 during work to build a rainwater cistern in Hazeweidestraat, St Juliaan.
On Tuesday, he was buried with full military honours at Poelcapelle British Cemetery in the presence of both his military family and his great-niece Judith.
According to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), an archaeological excavation was undertaken by the Flanders Heritage Agency when Dell’s remains were found.
Artefacts recovered alongside them showed them to be those of a soldier who had served in the 5th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment.
The MoD’s Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre (JCCC) launched an investigation to name him, which identified 20 men from the regiment missing in the area.
Living descendants of the missing men were traced one by one, until eventually DNA testing proved that the remains were Dell’s
