To go straight to the epitaphs Between 25 April 1915 and the 9 January 1916 somewhere in the region of 149,000 men died on the Gallipoli peninsular. While the number of the dead from the British Empire and Commonwealth is generally accepted to be fairly accurate, those from France and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) are […]
Roland Leighton
Like many bereaved parents, Roland’s mother wrote a memoir of her son, but hers was completely unlike any other that was published. Called ‘Boy of My Heart’, it looks exactly like a novel. The dust jacket has an idealised sepia sketch of a handsome young man in uniform, and the hard cover is embossed with […]
Gilbert Talbot
Gilbert Talbot Born 1 September 1891 Killed in action 30 July 1915 Whatever might have happened to others, I am sure that Gilbert would have fulfilled his early promise. Harold Macmillan The Winds of Change 1966 Harold Macmillan, British Conservative Prime Minister 1957-1963, Gilbert’s contemporary at Oxford, had the career that Gilbert wanted and thought […]
Americans who fought and died in the Armies of the British Empire
The United States may only have joined the First World War on 6 April 1917 but many young American men had already given their lives in the allied cause, either crossing the border to enlist in the Canadian army or crossing the Atlantic to serve with British and French forces. Why? We can’t always know […]
Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau
There are three impressive factors about the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau: one, that it existed at all, two, that its files survived, and three, that they have been digitised. These files drill right down into the loss, fear and horror of war and into the care taken to discover the fate […]
Two Sons of The Souls: Hugo and Yvo Charteris
At an isolated crossroads on the busy Stow-on-the-Wold, Tewkesbury Road, there’s an elegant bronze statue of St George piercing the dragon’s breast with his slender lance. Carved on the base are the words: “Men of Stanway For a tomb they have an altar For lamentation memory And for pity praise” Among the eleven names carved […]
John Kipling
John Kipling was Rudyard’s only son, not quite his “best beloved” as that position was always held by his daughter Josephine who had died of pneumonia in 1899 when she was only 6. In fact, John emerges from his father’s biographies as someone who had “not turned out altogether well” (Martin Seymour-Smith), was backward in […]
Foreign Language Inscriptions
Inscriptions come in many different languages: Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Danish, Africaans, Maori and Zulu to name the ones I’ve come across. The language usually reflects the casualty’s country of origin, even if he was no longer living there when he died. The War Graves Commission stipulated that “Inscriptions requiring the use of special alphabets such […]
Laurence Binyon
Robert Laurence Binyon 1869-1943 was a poet and art historian who spent his working life at the British Museum, mainly in the Department of Prints and Drawings. On 21 September 1914 The Times published his lyrical elegy ‘For the Fallen’. The words of the fourth verse are still repeated at remembrance services, and are the […]