He was one of the first intake of KES pupils in September 1905, an Akroyd Scholar, and Hastings Exhibitioner. After a brilliant first year at Queen's College, Oxford, he was commissioned into the York and Lancs in 1915 and found himself in 1917 leading his platoon in an assault on the German front line of trenches. Wounded in the chest during the attack, he stayed on to organise his defensive area before going back to the rear. He was shot dead by a sniper crossing no mans land on his way back to an aid post. He would have been one of the foremost mathematicians of his day and who knows what positions he would have held in later life. In 1921 his mother and sister established a memorial mathematics prize, ‘The W. P. Taylor Prize’, to be awarded annually to the best mathematician in the school. It is still awarded to this day and is his enduring memorial.