[2] Born in York and having grown up in Scalby,[3] Rowntree was educated at Bootham School,[4] and began to study medicine at King's College, Cambridge in 1913.
On the outbreak of the First World War Rowntree volunteered for the Friends' Ambulance Unit in 1914,[2] being deployed in October to Dunkirk and Belgium as an orderly and driver.
He also wrote that men in the hospital sheds were in straw beds "thick with dirt, blood and septic dressings" from their previous occupants.
[4] Despite his family's pacifist beliefs, he later decided to fight as a soldier (declining to register as a conscientious objector under the Military Service Act 1916),[4] telling his mother in a letter that he had been "feeling a call".
He was then commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Royal Field Artillery in 1917[4] and was killed in the Ypres Salient on 25 November 1917, several weeks after the Battle of Passchendaele had ended.