On this day in 1918... Henry Pembroke Innes
Portsmouth has always been home to a wealth of creatives and artists, including an illustrator located very close to the Cathedral, Henry Pembroke Innes, who died on 27 May, in 1918.
Henry was born to James and Grace Innes in 1878 in London, and studied at art college there. During his time in Portsmouth he was a prolific artist and illustrator. Later James and Grace Innes ran the Dolphin Hotel in the High Street, and their son Henry appears to have lived there with them.
In 1909 he had married his wife Winifred at East Preston in Sussex, and by the 1911 census the couple were at the Dolphin with their son Malcolm, who had been born a few months earlier. A second son was born just after the start of the war. In the 1911 census, Henry was described as an artist and portrait painter; it seems that he also managed the hotel, as the licence was transferred from H.P. Innes to his wife in 1916.
Henry had volunteered for the Devonshire Regiment shortly after the outbreak of the Great War, and he was killed on 27th May 1918, aged 39. He was buried where he fell, and there is no known grave, but he is commemorated on the Soissons Memorial, as well as outside Portsmouth Cathedral, opposite the Dolphin Hotel.
He was a prolific artist and illustrator, and the website History in Portsmouth, notes there cannot be many who lost their lives in the Great War, whose memorial can be seen from the front door of the house they left to enlist - Henry Innes is one of them.