School
AN O.L.
HE BECAME
A PROFITABLE MEMBER
OF THE KING AND COMMONWEALTH
SERGEANT FRANK NICHOLLS KNIGHT
On 1 November 1918 Frank Knight came home on leave from France to stay with his mother's brother at Severn Street in Leicester. Nine days later he was dead. The cause of his death: pneumonia following influenza. He was buried in Leicester's Welford Road Cemetery after a full military funeral that included buglers and a firing party.
Knight's family lived in Australia, where they had gone in 1912 when he was 17. He had been born in Witherley in Leicestershire and grown up in Rugby, Warwickshire where his father, Isaac Knight, ran the Queen's Head pub. Knight attended Lawrence Sherriff School in Rugby. This makes him an Old Laurentian, an O.L. as it says on his inscription.
Knight, a draughtsman, enlisted in Melbourne in March 1916. It would appear that he spent some time training to be a machine gunner and then training machine gunners at the Machine Gun Training Centre in Grantham, Lincolnshire. In January 1918 he went to France, from where he came on leave on 1 November 1918 to die two days before the end of the war.
I find the the syntax of his inscription rather curious: 'He became a profitable member of the King and Commonwealth'. It has rather a seventeenth-century ring to it. However, by Commonwealth Isaac Knight wasn't referring to the kingless government of England following the civil war, nor to the British Commonwealth of Nations but to the Commonwealth of Australia the country's official name following the federation of the six self-governing colonies on 1 January 1901. Isaac Knight was stating that his son was both a valuable subject of His Majesty King George V and a useful member of the Commonwealth of Australia.
This inscription will feature as part of the Global War Graves Leicester project, which aims "to explore and bring to light how the 298 First World War casualties came to be buried in the cemetery, how their identities were negotiated in death; and how even the British burials alongside them also had connections throughout and beyond the UK. The purpose of this research will be to challenge and expand our understandings of the relationship between local and global in terms of Leicester and the First World War".
VIVAT SHIRBURNIA
SECOND LIEUTENANT HAROLD GOSTWYCK MAY
Vivat Shirburnia - long live Sherborne the centuries-old independent school in Dorset where Harold Gostwyck May had been a pupil from 1902 to 1907, and briefly, in the autumn of 1914, a master. The inscription was chosen by his father, Richard Cooke May, a stockbroker, who lived at Sherborne, 77 Woodside Green, Croyden, Surrey.
May joined the army soon after the outbreak of war and was commissioned into the Dorsetshire Regiment. He had been out in France for less than three months when he was wounded in a German attack at St Eloi on 14 March. In a letter from his hospital bed to the headmaster of Sherborne, Nowell Smith, May recounted what happened.
"Suddenly the most awful hail of shrapnel came over the the crest of the dugouts. A whole battery fired high velocity shrapnel for over an hour - down came the trees, up came tons of earth. The men scurried up into the trench pretty quick and one shell burst alongside me and sent me toppling down the hill into a pond at the bottom ... it felt like being hit on the thigh at footer, though of course the shell made a beastly mess of the leg."
'Vivat Shirburnia, Sherborne School and the Great War 1914-1918' pp 44-5
Patrick Francis, 2014
After nightfall stretcher bearers carried him to the Battalion dressing station, from there he was taken to a Casualty Clearing Station in Poperinghe and then by train to a base hospital in Boulogne. Once here it was decided that his leg needed to be operated on but May failed to survive and died on 27 March.
There are details and a photograph of May on the Sherborne School Archives website.
"SONNY"
EVER LOVING MEMORY
FLOREAT ETONA
SECOND LIEUTENANT PATRICK ARTHUR DUDLEY JACKSON
Patrick Jackson, "Sonny", was the only son of Lt Colonel and Mrs Cecil Jackson. According to the brass plaque fixed to his original wooden grave marker, which hangs in St Michael's Church, Thornton, Buckinghamshire, Jackson was commissioned into the army straight from school in 1914, and first went to the Western Front in 1915. School was Eton, as the final line of his inscription makes clear: Floreat Etona, may Eton flourish. This was a familiar greeting or valediction among Etonians as the obituary of another Etonian, John Byron Noel, makes clear: "'Floreat Etona' were the last words he wrote to one of his greatest friends the day he started for France."
CAPTAIN OF ST PAUL'S SCHOOL
SCHOLAR-ELECT OF
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
LIEUTENANT DENIS OLIVER BARNETT
Denis Barnett won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford which in the normal course of events he would have taken up in October 1914. Instead of which he enlisted in the Artists Rifles on the outbreak of war and went to France with his regiment in October 1914. In January 1915 he received a commission in the Leinster Regiment and died of wounds received at Hooge that July.
The diary of a fellow officer, Captain Frank Hitchcock, gives the details:
15th August: Barnett got a bullet through the stomach when he was guiding a working party of 1st North Staffords along the Menin Road ...
16th August: Barnett died of his wounds. The Doctor told us that he stuck his wound splendidly and that men who were only hit in the arms and legs were groaning all around him in the dressing station. Barnett had a presentiment that he would get killed, and told us so when we got orders for Hooge ... "
Quoted from Leinster Regiment Journal 10 July 2009
As his inscription makes clear, Barnett was at St Paul's where he was something of a superstar. He played in the 1st XV for three seasons and was Captain of School for two years. An obituary in The Pauline, the school magazine, gives something of his quality:
"Fine brains, powerful physique, complete moral and physical courage, unfailing good humour, charming frankness of manner and absolute straightness ... ".
Denis Oliver Barnett: In Happy Memory: his letters from France and Flanders, October 1914-August 1915 was privately printed in 1915.
KILLED AT LOOS AETAT 22
ST PAUL'S SCHOOL R.M. ACADEMY
FRANCE AUGUST 1914
PRO PATRIA
LIEUTENANT JOHN BATHO
These few words encompass twenty-two-year old John Batho's brief life. However, he has an extensive obituary in Volume 2 of the Marquis du Ruvigny's Roll of Honour. Whilst people tend only speak well of the dead, one of the letters quoted was written on 1 January 1915, whilst he was still alive. Lt Colonel Arthur Daly, in a letter to another senior officer wrote: "I have two wonderful sapper subalterns called ... and Batho. They have only got about 18 months' service each and are perfect heroes, both of them, and work night and day without sparing themselves, and no know fear: always cheery and always full of resource. I should like their people to know what splendid boys they have got, and how proud they ought to be of them."
Nine months later, on the night of the 26/27 September, he was shot by a sniper whilst supervising work just 100 yards from the German front line. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station three days later. In a letter to his parents on behalf of the section Sergeant McQuiston wrote, "We all loved him and would follow him anywhere, full of confidence when he was leading us. We shall never find one better, but we are living in hopes of getting one half as good."
DEO DANTE DEDI
CAPTAIN GUY FRANCIS HADLAM KEENLYSIDE
Guy Keenlyside was an old boy of Charterhouse School and this is the school motto - Deo dante dedi: God having given I give. Charterhouse built a Chapel as its war memorial and inscribed on the Foundation Stone are the words, Deo dante dedurunt: God having given they gave.
Keenlyside, a professional soldier, was wounded on 26 October 1914 during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. He died in a base hospital in Boulogne three days later.