Cyril Humphries Leary was born on 9th July 1895, son of William Robert Leary, of Abbey Road, Bourne, a hairdresser and tobacconist who ran a shop in South Street, and his wife Margaret Ann Leary. He was educated at the Bourne Council School [now the Abbey Primary Academy] and in the summer of 1910 he sat for the preliminary certificate examination for pupil teacherships and was among the two successful candidates from the school.

This entitled him to free tuition at a secondary school, railway fares, books and an allowance of £1 a year for general expenses. Leary's success was particularly notable because the examination was open to the whole of Kesteven county [then one of the three divisions in Lincolnshire] and only ten were selected.

As a result, he went to Stamford School from 1910-13 before enrolling for further education at St Mark's College, Chelsea.

During his time at Stamford he was a keen sportsman, playing cricket and football for the school and was captain of the 1st XI. He also turned out for the cricket and football clubs at Bourne and sang in the choir at the Abbey Church.

Leary was also active in amateur dramatics from an early age and first appeared on stage in January 1910 when he was only fourteen, in a church Sunday School concert at the Drill Hall in North Street playing character parts in various sketches. He later joined a concert party known as the Bourne Pierrots and in April 1912 took part in a production at the Eastgate schoolroom in Bourne to raise funds for the Hereward Boys' Football Club which was then facing closure because of a deficit in funds. He and three other club members, Clifford Walker, Ernest Woolley and Stephen Grummitt, appeared in a farce called "Courting under difficulties" which caused much laughter from an appreciative audience.

Leary enlisted for military service at Lincoln and became a private (No: 512480) with the 3rd London Field Ambulance (Territorial Force), of the Royal Army Medical Corps but contracted influenza during the 1918 pandemic and died in hospital at Brighton from pneumonia on November 5th, aged 23, just a few days before the Armistice.

His body was brought back to be buried in Bourne after a funeral service at the Abbey Church conducted by the vicar, the Rev Harry Cotton Smith. The Stamford Mercury reported on Friday 15th November that the service was conducted "with impressive simplicity" and the organist, Mr Hare, played Blest are the departed (Louis Sphor), the Funeral March by Tchaikovsky and Chanson Triste (William Wolstenholme).

The service was fully choral and attended by a large gathering of sympathetic friends and afterwards the coffin was borne to the graveside in the town cemetery by members of the 2nd Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment. His grave is now marked with a family headstone rather than a regulation memorial supplied by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Leary’s name appears on the town's War Memorial in the list of servicemen who died in the conflict, on the Roll of Honour in the Abbey Church and he is also commemorated in the chapel at Stamford School.

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