He was the same age as me when I did my first tour of the Falklands........only the unfiorms and equipment change. Alex's unit was also known as the Leeds Rifles, a Territorial Army formation.  Feom wiki Alex’s formation was fed into the later stages of Third Ypres under the command of II ANZAC Corps. On 9 October 1917, 49th and the untried 66th (2nd East Lancashire) Divisions of II ANZAC attacked along two parallel ridges towards the village of Passchendaele. Although recent British attacks had been successful, 49th's 'attempt to advance was marked by one mishap after another'. The artillery preparation was poor, hampered by the mud. The two attacking brigades barely reached their jumping-off line on time, covered with mud from the approach march through the swampy ground, and 'looking like men who had been buried alive and then dug up again'. In trying to advance, they found that the Ravebeke stream – marked as 5 feet wide on their maps – had swollen to 150 feet across. The other brigade failed to cross it, leaving the West Yorkshires of 146 Bde to advance alone. They managed a few hundred yards and then 'they were staggered by shrapnel and heavy machine-gun fire from pill-boxes on the higher ground ahead'. They then encountered a wide belt of uncut barbed wire, followed by the belt of pillboxes, each surrounded by wire, which had to be attacked individually. Finally, the unit faced the main resistance from the rifles and light machine-guns of the Rhinelanders of the German hidden among the hundreds of shell-holes in the front. By 10.00 am the advance had stalled, and in early afternoon, both brigades returned to their starting points. At the end of the day 49th Division had suffered 2585 casualties and had no net gains at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_Rifles#Battalions_in_1st_West_Riding_Division

Nick Suddery