Name
Sidney Olney
Conflict
First World War
Date of Death / Age
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Private
22449
Royal Irish Fusiliers
5th Bn.
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
Headstone Inscription
Not Researched
UK & Other Memorials
Pirton School Memorial
Biography
Sidney appears on the School War Memorial, confirming that he attended the school. Parish records suggest only one man of this name who could have served, and he was born in Finsbury Park in about 1894, and was the son of Sarah Olney. This information was is derived from census records before 1911. He would have been about twenty at the outbreak of war. Other records show that Sarah was married to Thomas Olney, who was a railway labourer; as such he would have worked away from Pirton and this could explain his absence from some census records. More recently Ian Saggers, Sidney’s great nephew, was able to confirm that Sidney was indeed the son of Tom and Sarah (née Jarvis).
In all it would appear that two brothers served and survived – refer to Joseph Frank Olney for more family details.
Before the war, Sidney used to work for Thomas Franklin as a ploughman. He enlisted in November 1914 and served as Private 19156 in the “A” Section of the 2nd Battalion, Bedfordshire Regiment. He went to France in June 1915 and, within a month had been wounded in the right arm and was in hospital. His parents received the news by letter on July 12th. Following hospital treatment, recovery and leave, he went to Salonika.
The North Herts Mail of October 12th 1916 reported that he had transferred to the Royal Irish Fusiliers and had written to his mother saying that they ‘wish to be remembered to all’. He had written from St Paul's Hospital in Malta, where he was recovering from enteric fever; a tropical infection, enteric fevers include typhoid and paratyphoid fevers and gastroenteritis. It is not surprising that he became ill as, in the Salonika campaign, for every casualty of battle three died of malaria, influenza or other diseases. He must have then gone to Egypt, as newspaper reports in April 1918 mention another wound, received there on March 10th. One of those reports confirms that Sidney was the younger brother of Joseph Frank and the second son of Mr and Mrs Thomas Olney of Andrew’s Cottages (the three cottages at the bottom of the High Street).
By 1918, he was recorded as Private 22449, 5th Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers, with his home address the same as his brother Joseph Frank’s, 2 Andrew’s Cottages.
Sidney returned from the war to marry and settle in Ickleford where he raised a family, and is survived by two grandchildren.
Acknowledgments
Text from the book ‘The Pride of Pirton’ by Jonty Wild, Tony French & Chris Ryan used with author's permission
