Private Ernest Hides was born in February 1892 and baptised at Ecclesall Parish Church a month later; the youngest child of Robert, who worked in the printing industry, and Eliza. The family lived on Carterknowle Road for the first years of the twentieth century but was at 143 Crimicar Lane by 1914.

Ernest attended Abbeydale School, then Sheffield School of Art where he completed a City & Guilds course in Typography. By 1911, Ernest was employed as a letterpress printer having served an apprenticeship with Woollens. In 1913, aged 21, he emigrated to Sydney in Australia from London in the SS Orvieto. He found work as a printer in Leichhardt , a district of Sydney.

When war broke out he enlisted at Kensington, New South Wales. He served with the Australian Light Infantry leaving Sydney in October 1914 and arriving in Egypt six weeks later. Hides spent about a month in hospital suffering from pneumonia in May 1915. By the summer of 1915 he was with the ANZAC troops at Gallipoli.

He was killed in action between the 6th and 9th August 1915 and is ‘believed to be’ buried at Johnston Jolly Cemetery (Turkey). The headstone has the inscription: “Till The Day Dawn & The Shadows Flee Away”. He is commemorated on the memorial at Fulwood , on the headstone of his family’s grave in Wardsend Cemetery, Sheffield and on the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. 

By the time the CWGC had recorded the grave, Eliza was a widow living at 41 Brookhouse Hill.

There is an account of Ernest’s life on the Wardsend Cemetery website.