Second Lieutenant John Young Alexander Line was born in 1895 and came to Laxton House, in January 1910. He played cricket for the XI in the summer of 1914 and won an Exhibition in History to Downing College Cambridge, where his father had also been an undergraduate. He played rugby and rowed for his college but towards the end of his first term, he joined up, taking a commission with his local North Staffordshire Regiment.
He arrived in France in July 1915 and died on 13th March 1916, of wounds received the previous day. He was hit by a sniper, near the old battle site of Neuve Chapelle, where five Oundelians had been killed the previous autumn. He was supervising a ‘work party’ which was draining a trench when he was killed. He was the first of thirty-five undergraduates from Downing College to be killed in the war and was just 20 years old.
John Line was an only child and his grieving parents erected a memorial window in the church in Stone, where John’s father had been the vicar and where his son was born. In the top left of the window are the arms and motto of Oundle School, a tribute to the debt his parents felt they owed to Sanderson and his staff.
C Pendrill