Ma'Asker Cemetery Grave Remembered - No 8

On this day ninety-three years ago, the 4th March 1933, Able Seaman William G Laurence, at that time serving on HMS Ormonde, died in the General Hospital at RAF Hinaidi from bronchial pneumonia and was buried in the Hinaidi RAF Peace Cemetery (now known as the Ma'Asker Al Raschid RAF Cemetery) in Plot 1 Row D Grave 13. Sadly his headstone is not one of the seventy-seven headstones that have survived out of three hundred burials at the long abandoned cemetery, but here is a photograph of the cemetery taken in 1929 when it was still being tended by the Imperial War Graves Commission (named changed to Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960).

For more information on how the cemetery became abandoned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, visit the Ma'Asker Cemetery Maintenance Timeline page on Steve Buster Johnson's website, the information taken from every CWGC Annual report from 1937 to 2019, or visit the Ma'Asker section for greater detail of the cemetery and its history.

Plot 3 at the Ma'Asker Al Raschid RAF Cemetery (photo c 1929)