PVT. ARTHUR HOLDSWORTH (A BEDSTUY HERO)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
********************************************************************************************************************************
In 2014, The Brownstone Detectives partnered with the New York City Parks Department to help celebrate the lives of the servicemembers of Bedford-Stuyvesant Heights who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Great War.
We researched these heroes to locate pictures, stories, and their descendants to be brought together for a ceremony that dedicated a new “Victory and Peace” war memorial at Saratoga Park.
This biography tells the story of one of those servicemembers.
PVT. ARTHUR VINCENT HOLDSWORTH
Arthur Vincent Holdsworth looked for all the world like a little boy. Even after he had joined the Army and went to training at Camp Upton on Long Island, he could not escape the blush of youth.
In the picture (right), Pvt. Holdsworth displays that youth, all too surely, along with his inexperience, and maybe just a bit of his great uncertainty for the future. He stands awkwardly erect outside of a barracks, proud in his new uniform, but looking like a schoolboy in his first set of Sunday clothes.
Truth be told, he was still a boy yet – still an innocent. But he would mature quickly and, in a war that defined his age, die just as quickly.
THE WAR
In the grand scheme of things, Pvt. Arthur V. Holdsworth drew the short straw.
Like all infantryman, he was a front line troop in a war that used infantrymen as pawns. Machine gun nests fired upon them, snipers stalked them, field artillery guns fired rounds designed to blow to pieces as many of them as possible.
If he was lucky enough to make it through a single battle without being killed, the likelihood of making it through the next incident dropped significantly.
At least he wasn’t a machine gunner. The average lifespan of a machine gunner on the front was a mere seven seconds.
Holdsworth was with Company B of the 305th Infantry. Along with fellow Stuyvesant Heights resident, Pvt. Edward J. Bell, who was with the 305th Machinegun Batallion, they traveled together throughout France and its various battles possibly without even knowing one another.
Holdsworth, though, not part of a machine-gun crew, would survive just a few more battles longer than Bell would – although his end was likely just as tragic.
Just a month before his death, on 15 August, he had written to his sister, Anna, telling her that he had been in the trenches three times and, at the time, had been resting in preparation for his unit’s return to the trenches.
He told her that he was “feeling fine.”
THE BATTLE
We know little of how Pvt. Holdsworth was killed. All we do know is that it occurred in battle somewhere between the “Vesle Defensive” and the “Advance to the Aisne,” where he was “wounded severely,” and that he died of those wounds soon thereafter.
It is probable that, during an advance against the Germans, Holdsworth was peppered with machinegun fire, or killed by the rounds of enemy artillery or mortars.
“Shelling, during the days and nights of the advance, and particularly after the Regiment had dug itself in, was at times of the most furious density,” said a Major Metcalf, who was with the 305th Infantry.
“The German batteries would seem to let loose in all their power and shells would fall as fast as hundreds of guns, heavily concentrated, could drive them.”
On 7 September, Pvt. Holdsworth was fatally injured in action. He survived a mere week, dying from the wounds incurred in combat. His date of death is recorded as 14 September 1918.
HOME LIFE
Before entering the U.S. Army at the age of 22, Arthur Holdsworth had been a “drug clerk” at McKesson & Robbins, a pharmacy located at 91 Fulton Street. The blue-eyed, brown-haired youth was of medium height, medium build, and was unmarried.
Arthur was one of 12 Holdsworth children. His father and mother, Joseph and Sarah (McGuire) Holdsworth, had passed before he had come into his adulthood, and so the whole baker’s dozen of brothers and sisters had circled the wagons sometime in the early 1900s and had taken care of their own.
Just before the war, Holdsworth was living in an apartment at 802 Hancock Street. He moved out of that apartment house when he joined the Army, as he began using the address of his sister, Anna Woodward, 884 Gates Avenue, as his physical address.
It was at 884 Gates where Anna, according to Holdsworth’s military abstract, who ended up drawing the short straw for the family, received the news of her brother’s death.
Holdsworth was buried in France but was later reinterred at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens, New York, where he rests today.
(To learn about the history of the “Victory & Peace” memorial, click HERE.)
———————————————————————————————————————–
Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
