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KW1 5SG - Breadalbane Hall former cinema

Private Billy Clarke came a long way to Wick, only to die in Flanders on 31st July 1916. A gifted musician, born in Canning Town, the son of a Jamaican immigrant, he must have been one of the few black soldiers in the 8th Seaforth Highlanders. Billy arrived with a music-hall act and stayed to become the Wick cinema pianist, becoming enough of a celebrity that the local newspaper charted his fate - shot in the head and never regaining consciousness. Billy was probably wounded in a trench raid in the Loos sector where troops experimentally dropped propaganda pamphlets boasting of British success on the Somme. His death is a reminder that during the big push, men were still dying on the supposedly ‘quiet’ sectors of the Western front. Alan Hendry who researched Billy’s life and local historian Harry Gray tell his story to Louise Yeoman.