Harry Warren was the son of Amelia Deacon, and thus a member of one of East Ilsley’s oldest families.  Amelia was a daughter of Joseph and Charlotte Deacon.  She had left the village to work in service, first in London and then in Hertfordshire.  There she met and married her husband George Warren, a brush maker from St Albans.  The Warrens moved to London, where Harry was born in 1876, the second of their three sons.  By 1911 Amelia had returned with her husband to East Ilsley, where they lived in Abingdon Road. 

In 1891 Harry was working for a printer, but he later joined the Royal Fusiliers, probably serving in India, and perhaps South Africa.  After completing his term of service, he was placed on the National Reserve.  He married Annie Goodchild from Ashampstead in 1913, and their daughter Beatrice was born the following year.  They lived in Aldworth, in one of the cottages near the Four Points.

Soon after the outbreak of war, Harry was called up from the Reserve.  He was almost forty.  Attesting at Reading, he was posted to his former regiment.  He died of wounds on 24 Feb 1915, just six weeks after his arrival in France.  His battalion had been in trenches near Kruisstraat to the south of Ypres.  It seems likely that Harry was wounded there and moved up to a casualty clearing station at Poperinghe, where he died.  From the war diary: