14 DAY TRIAL // A World War One soldier owes his life to a stack of family photos he kept in his breast pocket, as the wallet in which the pictures were stored stopped a piece of shrapnel from hurting him during a battle.
Private William Taylor was hit in the chest during a battle that killed or injured three quarters of his regiment, but he escaped only with a broken rib and a minor wound thanks to the eight pictures of his loved ones he kept close to his heart during the entire four years of the First World War.
According to Daily Mail, Private Taylor, from Hertford, England, enrolled as a volunteer in the Hertfordshire Regiment, which was part of the Territorial Army, at the age of 23 and went to France in November 1914.
The incident with the stack of photos which took the impact of a shell blast and saved his life happened during the Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, in July 1917.
Taylor's battalion was at Saint Julien at Flanders when they came under heavy shell and machine gun fire. After a shell blast, he was struck by shrapnel, and the projectile perforated the outer layer of his leather wallet and went through seven of the eight photos.
However, the last picture, of his younger sister Lilly, eventually stopped the shrapnel and he escaped with a slight chest wound.
The soldier's amazing story of survival emerged after his 55-year-old grandson Dave Taylor dug the photographs out along with his grandfather's medals for an exhibition designed to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the war.
“Like many others, my grandfather didn’t say very much about the war but he did tell us how these old family photos saved his life. When he left for France in 1914 he took these pictures with him as keepsakes,” his grandson Dave said. “In quiet moments he got them out and looked at them and remembered his family back at home.”
Private Taylor spent the entire war on the frontline and was twice awarded the Military Medal for Bravery. The first time, he received the award for saving a wounded comrade stranded in a shell hole.
“My grandfather was there from the start of the war until the end. How he and others like him survived is down to little quirks of fate like this one. It is an amazing story,” Dave added.
He safely returned home when the war was over and brought with him the collection of photographs, which still bear holes from the shrapnel. Taylor died at the age of 88 in 1979.