Cecil was born in Bayswater, the middle son of William Hurst-Brown, a stockbroker, and his wife Ethel Mary Dredge Newbury Coles.
He was an active sportsman: a double pink whilst at school and then secretary of the University Association Football Club whilst at Christ Church, Oxford. He played cricket whilst at Westminster, gaining a place on the 1st XI and averaging 14.60 and 19.00 in the 1912 and 1913 seasons.
Upon the outbreak of war he left university and joined the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. On 16 December 1914, he was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, and was posted to the 2nd Battalion, which he joined in France on 7th June 1915. He died on 26th September 1915, having been wounded in action the previous day.
His younger brother, 2nd Lieutenant Dudley Hurst-Brown, 129th Battery R.F.A was wounded on 13 June 1915, and died two days later. A family historian said of Cecil’s death that “he was the second of two brothers killed within three months of each other. It sent my wife’s great grandmother [Cecil’s mother, Ethel] insane with grief – she spent the rest of her life in and out of mental hospitals – thus two casualties became three – very sad.”
KennethMurray was a King’s Scholar from 1905 until 1911. He threw himself into every aspect of school life. He was an active sportsman who played on the school’s football and cricket teams as well as competing in fives and athletics competitions for his house. He debated, edited the school magazine, The Elizabethan, in 1910 and shared the prize for Orations in 1911 for his recitation of Song of Deborah. He starred in the Latin Play in 1909 where as Micio ‘he managed the long and trying soliloquy that begins the play with much skill, and he was at all times an excellent foil to Deme’. The chance of a leading role in the 1910 performance was snatched from him when the play was cancelled due to the death of Edward VII.
Murray was elected head to Christ Church, Oxford in July 1911 and made a promising start to his degree, receiving a 1st Class in his Classics Mods. The outbreak of war meant that he failed to finish his qualification, leaving to serve in the 9th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment in December 1914. He went out to the Western Front in August and as killed barely a month later at the Battle of Loos.
Edward Logan was born in Valparaiso, Chile where his father worked as a copper merchant. He arrived at Westminster at the age of 15, and joined Grant’s House.
He achieved fame within the school for his disastrous performance in the Junior Sculls in July 1882. The report in The Elizabethan reads “the most remarkable feature of this race was Logan’s course, from a Surrey station into the Middlesex bank; Hawkins, who remained for some time in obscurity, suddenly forged ahead at the corner, and won, while Crews, rowing very pluckily, passed Logan, when stranded, thus securing the second place.”
In 1888, six years after leaving school, he joined the Cheshire Militia, rising steadily through the ranks over the following decades. In the Boer war, he served as a Captain with the Mounted Infantry and was mentioned twice in dispatches. On the 22nd January 1896, he married Hilda Emma Frances Duckworth, a widow, in Rossett, Denbighshire.
He was awarded the Queen’s Medal (three clasps), the King’s Medal (two clasps) and, on 24th March 1901, he received a Distinguished Service Order Medal for the “gallant leading of the advanced guard.” At the end of the Boer War, Logan left the army to join the South African Constabulary, where he rose to Commandant of Middleburg, Transvall.
He returned to England in 1907, and lived with his wife at Christleton Bank, Cheshire. He re-joined the army, where he became commanding officer of the 3rd batt. Cheshires in Birkenhead. At the outbreak of war, he was soon put in command of the 5th Durham Light Infantry and sent to France — to the Battle of Loos — in September 1915.
Lieutenant Colonel Logan was killed in action on the 25th September, along with his younger brother. According to the Cheshire Observer, attendance at the service in his honour was “striking testimony to the high esteem and warm regard in which he was held”.
Throughout the rest of the war, his widow organised support for the Cheshire Regiment from the people of Christleton.
Winfield Bonser was born in Singapore and was admitted to as a Queen’s Scholar in January 1900. In his second term, he competed as a member of the College tug-of-war team, weighing 10st 3lb. He also took part in Cricket and Football, and was a member of the Debating Society.
As a Scholar, Bonser was amongst the Westminster pupils invited to the Coronation of King Edward VII on 9th August 1902, where he would have joined in the tradition of shouting “Vivat Rex!” The Coronation Song Book for the service describes how “these vociferous exclamations have been incorporatedÔǪ in a somewhat novel manner, as the Westminster boys, stationed aloft, sing their enthusiastic manifestations of loyalty”. The Captain of the King’s Scholars at the time, G.T. Boag, was unimpressed with such novelty, reporting in The Captain’s Book that “the acclamations for some unearthly reason were set to music and stuck into the midst of an anthem.”
After leaving the School, Bonser was admitted as a pensioner to Christ’s College Cambridge in October 1904, and became a scholar in November 1906. He achieved a 1st Class in the Classical Tripos, and went on to train as a barrister. He was called to the bar at Inner Temple on 28th June 1911. On the outbreak of war, he joined the Inns of Court OTC, and received a commission in the Rifle Brigade in September 1914.
Over the course of the next six months, Bonser rose through the ranks, becoming a Captain the following March. In July 1915, he went out to the western front, landing in Boulogne.
The day before Bonser died, the battalion moved out of their billets in Laventie. He was killed in action at Fauquissart, near Estaires, on the first day of the Battle of Loos.
Alfred Miles joined his elder brother Cyril up Grant’s in September 1908. He seemed set to follow in his brother’s footsteps as a gifted sportsman, winning the Junior Gymnastic Competition in his second term at the school, and reaching the semi-finals for the under-16 100 yards later in the year. He sat the Challenge in June, and was elected to a non-resident King’s Scholarship.
In March 1909, there was an outbreak of measles at the school, and Alfred was one of those who succumbed to the illness. In the boredom of convalescence, he turned to causing mischief. His head of house, Lawrence Tanner, wrote in his diary on Monday April 5th 1909: “ÔǪsome Grantites had been throwing water on to Rigaudites playing in a yard tie, from one of the upper windows. It turned out to be the ‘measlers’ Radford and Miles.”
Throughout his time at the school, Alfred was an active member of the Debating Society and prone to “rhetorical outbursts”. The society’s debate on Civilisation on 8th of February 1912 was reported in The Elizabethan:
Mr. A.C.V. Miles, in the course of some Hobsonian and irrelevantremarks, informed the Societythat the had picked up Civilisation in the streets (according to our reporter), and that he had also found itgrowingon walls, rotten trees, dry sponges, and precipitous abysses.
Alfred took part in the OTC, and was promoted to the rank of Sergeant in his final year of school. After year of being articled to his father, a solicitor of Hampstead, he enlisted in the 1st Battalion Artists’ Rifles in August 1914. By April 1915, Alfred was a 2nd Lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion Welsh Regiment. He was sent out to the Western front in October 1914, where his brother Cyril joined him the following March.
It was near Vermelles, France, and while he was acting as a Brigade Wiring Officer, that Alfred was killed on 24th August 1915.
Sir Herbert Archer Croft painted posthumously in 1921 by William Carter. Courtesy of The National Trust, Croft Castle.
Sir Archer Croft was at the School as a boarder in Rigaud’s from April 1882 to Christmas 1884. The Times printed the following notice upon his death:
Captain Sir H. Archer Croft, Bart., 1st Herefordshire Regiment, reported missing on August 10 in Gallipoli, and now believed to have died of his wounds, was born on September 5, 1868. The eldest son of the late Sir Herbert Croft, 9th Bart., of Lugwardine Court, Hereford, and Georgiana Lady Croft, he was educated at Westminster, and joined the 4th King’s Shropshire Light Infantry with a view to entering the Grenadier Guards, but he went out to Australia instead to manage some family property there, sheep farming.
Within three days of the declaration of war he enlisted as a private in the 1st Herefordshire Regiment (T.), offering to raise a company of 150 men, which he did within a week, personally recruiting 100 himself. He was gazetted second lieutenant two weeks later, and Captain in November, 1914.
Sir Archer was a Deputy Lieutenant and Justice of the Peace for Herefordshire, High Sheriff in 1911, and a member of Herefordshire County Council. He gave a great deal of his time to public work in his county, especially in connection with the Herefordshire General Hospital.
As the tenth baronet (creation 1671) of Croft Castle, Hereford, Sir Archer was the head of one of the few families in England who can trace a direct male descent from a time before the Conquest, being descended from Bernard de Croft, who lived in the time of Edward the Confessor. In Domesday Book this same Bernard is mentioned as holding the lands of Croft, which his descendants inherited until the close of the eighteenth century, when the property was sold. Since the days of the Crusades, when Sir Jasper Croft was created a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre by Godfrey of Boulogne at the taking of Jerusalem, A.D. 1100, the Crofts have continuously served their king and country as soldiers. Members of the family have fought in most of the English wars, notably, at the Battle of Agincourt, in the Wars of the Roses, in which the Crofts were prominent Yorkists, in the Civil Wars, in which they were staunch Royalists, in the various campaigns in Scotland, France, and Flanders, and more recently at Quatre Bras, where the seventh baronet was wounded and mentioned in dispatches when serving as a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards.
Charles Walker was born in Gravesend, Kent and arrived up Rigaud’s in 1905 at the age of 16. He was a half-boarder, and managed to earn himself a tanning in Play 1907 for “ragging [fighting] in the changing room”.
He opted to focus his studies on maths and science, as opposed to the Classics, but it is unknown where he went after leaving the school at Easter 1908.
Charles was 25 when he was made a temporary Lieutenant of the newly formed 10th Service Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment on the 21st of November 1914. He was made an adjutant and attached to the 8th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, which then became part of the 127th Brigade, 42nd East Lancashire Division the following May.
On the 6th of May 1915, Charles was one of the 14,224 who landed at Cape Helles, Gallipoli, where he would have seen action in the attempts to capture the heights around the village of Krithia.
The Battle of Krithia Vinyard, which took place over 6th to the 13th of August 1915. This was an attempt not only to capture ground, but also to divert attention away from Suvla Bay, where a large British landing was to be attempted.
Charles was killed in action on the second day of this battle.
6th Battalion, Manchester Regiment advancing over open terrain during the Third Battle of Krithia, Gallipoli from the Imperial War Museum’s Collection
During his time at the school, Worthington was a member of the Scientific Society and shortly before he left the school in December 1914, he read a paper to the society on ‘Insects and Disease’, which he “illustrated with a series of personal drawings”.
He was also in the Officer Training Corps and, in the February after leaving school, he sat the Sandhurst Examination. He took a high place on the lists and was sent to Northern India in April 1915 to the newly re-opened Cadet College in Quetta. Worthington was one of the first batch of 100 cadets to undertake a six month course to train to be a British Officer in the Indian Army.
The cadets’ working day was between 6am and 11pm, and included an intensive introduction to infantry and cavalry tactics, field engineering, map reading, musketry, sanitation and language instruction in Hindustani, along with drill and physical training.
Worthington was taking part in a routine Bathing Parade in a lake near Quetta on the 22nd of July, when he was accidentally drowned. The Commandant of the College wrote: “your son showed every prospect of becoming a good and useful officer. He was a most popular lad, and we are all most deeply grieved at the loss of a most promising young life on the threshold of its career.”
Rupert Edward Gascoyne-Cecil was in Ashburnham House from 1908 until 1913. On the outbreak of war he joined the 4th Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment. By May 1915 he was transferred to the 1st Battalion and went out to the Western Front, arriving on 19th. He was wounded on 28th May but had recovered sufficiently to rejoin the regiment 3 weeks later.
On the morning of July 11th 1915 the German forces exploded a mine between two trenches creating a large crater and then continued to shell heavily. On hearing the explosion Rupert tried get to the fire trench of which he was in charge, but was hit by a fragment of shell and died instantly. He was buried close to the Ypres-Cominis line, in the Brigade headquarters cemetery.
His commanding officer wrote “He was only with us a short time, but had endeared himself to all who knew him by his cheerfulness and soldierly qualities”.
Captain Curtis noted “he was always beloved by all his fellow officers, and above all his men, who had great respect for him. We shall feel the loss which the regiment has sustained by his death but we are proud, he was doing his duty so nobly when he was killed. A good many men were stunned and confused by the explosion, but 2nd Lieutenant Cecil remained cool and met his death going to his post”.
A memorial service was held at St Etheldreda’s Church, Hatfield. It was conducted by Cecils’ close friend G.K.A. Bell (OW), then chaplin to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He gave a brief address from the chancel steps:
“We have come together as a family of friends to remember one for whom they could have but a single thought, one whose life was gentle and pure, whose lovable nature drew all hearts to him, and who gave his life for his friend. He died at his post of duty in a foreign land; he was taken before he was tainted with sin. He gave his body in service of his country, but his pure soul to his Captain whom he both loved and served well”.
Rupert enjoyed bell ringing so his parents decided to use the money left on his death towards two new bells to be placed in the tower of St. Etheldreda. They were dedicated in August 1929 by his father, the Bishop of Exeter (Lord William Gascoyne Cecil).
