Alan Gordon Harper, MA BSc

• Matriculated: 1906

• Born: 5 January 1889

• Died: 1 July 1917

• Regiment: Royal Field Artillery

• Grave/Memorial: Dickebusch (Dikkebus) New British Military Cemy (Extension); Grave 3.A.40.

Family background

b. 5 January 1889 in Bromley, Kent, as the second (middle) son of Peter Harper (1859–1950) and Catharine Ann Harper (1857–1919) (née Newson; m. 1886). At the time of the 1891 Census, the family was living at Lindon Lodge, Holwood Road, Bromley, Kent (one servant); at the time of the 1901 Census at 1 High Close, Bromley (two servants), and at the 1911 Census at 1 High Street, Bromley (one servant). When Peter Harper retired the family moved to Craigmohr, Aboyne, Aberdeenshire.

 

Parents and antecedents

Harper’s paternal grandfather was Francis Harper (b. 1826, d. after1891), a timber superintendent living in Aboyne, Aberdeenshire. Harper’s father was in the newspaper business, starting on the staff of the Aberdeen Free Press. At 21 he was editor of the Boston Mercury and from there went to work in London on the St James Gazette. He left the editorial side and went into advertising and was the first advertising manager of the Daily Express. He then started an advertising agency, which he carried on until his retirement. In 1894, he edited Robert Henry Lovell, Seed Thoughts from Sermons (Bromley). The family were devout Presbyterians.

Harper’s mother was the daughter of William Newson (1831–95), a London upholsterer.

 

Siblings and their families

Brother of:

(1) Kenneth Gordon (1888–1954); married first (1913) Zoë Eileen Moran (1889–1972); three sons; second Isabel Douglas Banham (née Mckenzie) (1903–82) in Devon in 1946. (There are good reasons to suppose that the Kenneth G. Harper who married Isabel Banham was Kenneth Gordon Harper – inter alia, that he had retired to Devon – and that he and Zoë were divorced.)

(2) Cecil Gordon (1893–1975); married (1924) Iris Mary Frances Gordon (1899–1976); one daughter.

Kenneth Gordon attended Dulwich College from 1900 to 1906, where he was in the Classical Sixth and the Scholarship Class, and in 1906 he was awarded a Scholarship in Classics to Wadham College, Oxford. In 1907 he matriculated at Oxford where he was awarded a 2nd in Classical Moderations (1909) and a 2nd in Greats (1911). He was active in the College Literary and Debating Societies, played rugby for the College, was a member of the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps, and got a Half Blue for swimming. After graduation, he became a member of the Indian Civil Service and by 1914 he was stationed at Saharanpur, in the United Provinces. His first wife was the daughter of a Colonel whom he got to know in India. During World War One he remained in India but was a Trooper in the part-time India Defence Force and from 1918 to 1919 he was a Second Lieutenant in the Indian Army Reserve of Officers. From 1921 to 1922, while on leave from India, he was back at Wadham College acquiring Bar qualifications and a BCL, which he took together with an MA in 1924: he was called to the Bar as a member of Lincoln’s Inn in 1927. On returning to India in 1923, he became a Sessions Judge in Benares and by 1925 he was giving his place of residence as Allahabad. He retired in 1936 as a District Judge in Oude and he and his family moved first to Cheltenham and then to Exmouth, where he became Secretary of the Golf Club. During World War Two he was a Sergeant in the Exmouth Special Constabulary (1939) and a Billeting Officer for Exmouth (1939–41). But once the German air raids ceased, he got a job as a representative of the Regional Commissioner for the South-West at the regional headquarters in Bristol of the Ministry of Home Security, where he was mainly concerned with making preparations against a German invasion of Britain. In a letter of 23 November 1944 to McCulloch Christison (1880–1972), who was a pupil at Dulwich from 1893 to 1898 and Secretary of its Alumni Association from 1906 to 1967, he wrote:

Then, after an interval of running Courses for Discussion Group leaders and similar activities, which were not congenial and which I have no pride in remembering, I was put in local charge of the evacuation of the people from the south-west battle-training area for American troops, and after D-Day I have been engaged in putting them back again and getting life in the area re-started. It is a fascinating job, no boss, lots of improvisation, and absolutely no red tape.

In 1945 he became a Senior Administrative Assistant in the headquarters of the South-West Civil Defence Region, and in January 1946 he was awarded an OBE for that work. His second wife, Isabel, was the widow of Frederick Charles Banham (1877–1944), a merchant who left her £8,285.

Cecil Gordon was educated at St Andrew’s School, Bromley (1903–05) and then Dulwich College (1905–11), where he was in the Science Remove. In January 1912 he began to study Medicine at King’s College, London, until his studies were interrupted by the war. From April 1909 to September 1914 he was in the Officers’ Training Corps, and by the outbreak of war he was in the Reserve of Officers. In September 1914 he was given a temporary commission in the 10th (Reserve) Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders (London Gazette, no. 28,926, 6 October 1914, p. 7,923), and he was promoted Temporary Lieutenant on 17 February 1915 (LG, no. 29,058, 2 February 1915, p. 1,185). He landed in France with the 10th Battalion on 8 July 1915 and was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Regular Army on 4 October 1916 (Lieutenant 4 April 1919). He then served on the Western Front until he was severely wounded on 31 July 1917 near Frezenberg, during the Third Battle of Ypres, but he survived and returned to the Reserve of Officers in August 1919. In 1920 he resumed his study of Medicine at the Middlesex Hospital and qualified as a medical practitioner in 1925 with the degrees of MRCS and LRCP. Although in 1943 he was still registered as a GP in Liverpool, he had been called up into the Pioneer Corps as a Company Commander on the outbreak of war in 1939. He took his Company into France in November 1939 and brought them back via St Malo by the last boat before St Malo fell in June 1940. Although his Company consisted largely of non-combatants, including a good number of old soldiers, he armed them during the retreat to the coast with rifles that other troops had thrown away, and organized them into an armed force that was deployed in the rearguard defence of St Malo. In 1941 he was transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps and sent to Burma, where he became the Medical Officer of a battery in action until he was invalided out. In 1959 he was registered in Woolgoolwa, New South Wales, and he died there in 1975. His wife was the daughter of a naval officer from New Zealand, and a State Registered Nurse.

 

Education and professional life

Harper was educated privately in Bromley until he was 11, but from 1900 to 1908 he attended Dulwich College, where he was in the Scholarship Class. He matriculated at Magdalen as a Demy (Scholar) in Natural Science on 14 October 1908, having been exempted from most of Responsions because he possessed the London National Certificate; nevertheless he had to take the paper in Logic in September 1908. He passed the Natural Sciences Preliminary Examination (Chemistry and Mechanics and Physics) in Michaelmas Term 1908 and the First Public Examination in Hilary Term 1909. He was awarded a 2nd in Natural Sciences (Botany) in Trinity Term 1911, one year earlier than normal, and after taking his BA (Honours) on 16 December 1911, he spent most of the rest of the academic year 1911–12 at the University of Bonn in order to “get into the way of the thorough and painstaking methods of research there practised”. At the end of the academic year 1911–12, i.e. in Trinity Term 1912, he took Group C6 (The Elements of Rural Economy) and so, in June 1913, he was awarded the Oxford Diploma in Agriculture (with Distinction). Although a committed scientific researcher – President Warren recorded that he came up to Magdalen “with that rare possession, a mind already made up, [stating:] ‘I have not decided what career I shall choose, but of course it will be the one in which Botany is the main subject required’” – Harper was also “a useful all-round athlete”. He was a good boxer and cross-country runner; he obtained a Half Blue for swimming (1912); and he was described posthumously as someone who enjoyed water polo, rowing, punting, tennis and golf.

From September to the end of December 1912 Harper acted as the Assistant Lecturer (Demonstrator) to Professor Reginald W. Phillips, MA, DSc, FLS (1854–1926/27), late of St John’s College, Cambridge, who had been the Professor of Biology and Lecturer in Botany at Bangor University since 1888 and 1884 respectively. From January to December 1913 Harper did similar work for Professor (later Sir William) Somerville (1860–1932), the Sibthorpian Professor of Rural Economy in Oxford’s School of Rural Economy from 1906 to 1923 and a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. Although Harper’s growing amount of published work dealt mainly with forestry problems, such as the formation of autumn wood in conifers, and the shoots and needles of the pine tree, he was particularly interested in the defoliation of the larch by the saw-fly and published a substantial and very well researched scientific paper on the subject in October 1913. When this publication “attracted a great deal of notice in scientific circles of the time”, he was invited to present his findings to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831), of which he was a member, and “to his amazement and delight his reception there was of the most cordial and encouraging character”. It was this work, too, that got him his BSc (awarded in February 1914), and later on in the same year he was also awarded his MA, although he would not receive these two postgraduate degrees until 17 February 1917, when he took them in absentia. So when, in autumn 1914, Harper applied for Magdalen’s Edward Chapman Memorial Prize, he submitted five research papers, three of which had already been published (see the asterisked items in the Bibliography below), and it was on the basis of these that the distinguished botanist Professor Sydney Howard Vines (1888–1919), Sherardian Professor at Oxford from 1888 to 1919 and President of the Linnean Society of London from 1900 to 1904, recommended him for the prize on 20 October 1914.

From January to December 1914 Harper was employed as Acting Professor of Botany at the Presidency College, Madras (founded in 1826 and affiliated to the University of Madras when it was established in 1857), while Professor William Tyson (1851–1920), the Director of the Madras Botanical Garden, was away on leave. While Harper was in this post, he effected important changes in the curriculum and organization of the Department, “generally waking things up”. Moreover, following the integrated pattern of life that he had initiated in Bangor and being interested in “Natural History in all its branches”, he combined his scientific studies with the pleasures of holidays in the open. Just as he had gone on walking tours in Scotland, fishing and searching for plants on the Cairngorms, and looking for rare mosses in north Wales, so his most interesting and fruitful tour in the Indian subcontinent was in the highlands of southern India when, starting from Tellichery on the Malabar Coast, he travelled to Mercara and Mysore. During this trip he persuaded local people who were good at climbing to ascend tall trees and bring down flowers and fruits for him that had been known hitherto to Oxford foresters only via timber specimens.

An obituarist tells us that Harper:

was greatly attracted by the earnestness of his Indian students, comparing them to the Welsh in their love of learning for its own sake; and they, on the other hand, were equally attracted to him by his readiness to help them over their difficulties and by the ease of approach which he encouraged.

So, understanding his worth as a teacher and researcher, the Indian Education Office offered Harper various inducements to stay in India, and by summer 1914 “a fine educational trip to the Himalayas” was in prospect as one of them. But although “his inclinations were for Oxford and the studious life”, the outbreak of war confronted him with the conflicting calls of duty and pleasure, especially since his father was urging him to stay in India for a while longer. But Harper’s sense of duty finally won, and once he felt able to terminate his agreement with Madras, he felt obliged to return to England and join up. So on 21 October 1914, the day when the slightly older G.M.R. Turbutt was killed near Ypres, he wrote to his father:

If I had been free, I would have been away before now. But don’t think I do not sympathise with your desire to keep me out of it. I can understand that danger to another is harder to bear than danger to one’s self. But danger is not a factor with which I or any man of my age reckons. The world can get on all right with a botanical professor the less. And when the men come home and you cheer them from the windows, you would give a good deal for me to have earnt the same honour as they and their dead. […] If I were useless and untrained, I would not feel so bad; but I know as much about it as Cecil, and I am harder now than I have ever been before. Suppose Cecil gets killed, or others I know – and I hear that regiments get cut up because we were short of men – how do you think I should feel shooting duck or tiger in India? No, it is up to me to help to clear Belgium of its invaders. I feel it a matter of national honour to send the best men we have for a work like that. In the old days it was always the gentlemen who fought, especially in such a cause. Don’t think I am forgetting my duty to you; but remember how many of our men, if we are to fight properly, will have to be married men and only sons. Even supposing Cecil and I were both killed, you would still have another left. That would justify me in taking whatever risk there may be. I am not a breadwinner nor a father. I shall be sad to give up my trip to the Himalayas. It will be the greatest sacrifice I have ever made, but it seems to be a choice between selfish pleasure and the honour of one who has been generously brought up.

About a week later Harper wrote another letter, in which, writing of the “chances of war”, he says:

It is a gamble for very high stakes. On the one hand is enjoyment of comfort together, please God; on the other, honour and pride such as you won’t have a chance of feeling again. The comfort will bring you some sense of shame in the future, while the honour can at the worst mean that a son has died creditably. … Don’t make the sacrifice any harder than it need be. Why don’t you rather say you will disown me if I do not come home at the earliest possible opportunity?

Two or three weeks later the fateful decision had been made and it had been arranged that he should return to England before the year was out.

Military and war service

While in Madras, Harper had served as a Trooper in the Motor-Cycle Section of the Southern Provinces Mounted Rifles (Volunteers). But no sooner had he got off the boat-train in England in early January than he went straight to the War Office, and a week or so later, with a General as his sponsor, began training as an artillery officer at the Royal Military College (Woolwich). On 3 February 1915 he was commissioned Acting Second Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery (RFA) (London Gazette, no. 29,060, 5 February 1915, p. 1,216); his commission was confirmed on 9 February 1915 when he was posted to No. 3 Battery in the Reserve Brigade, RFA; and he was confirmed in the rank of Temporary Second Lieutenant on 27 July 1915. While training at Woolwich, he gained the top marks in the examinations of the 18-pounder classes and was regarded as a very capable officer who should go far. After landing in France in July 1915, he seems to have served with the Divisional Artillery of the 5th Division (where he received his first wound or injury), and also with that of the 2nd and 7th Divisions. But by autumn 1915 he was serving with the 87th Trench Mortar Battery that was attached to the 152nd Infantry Brigade in the 51st (Highland) Division (which had landed in France between 30 April and 3 May 1915). On 15 October 1915, Harper’s father wrote a long letter to the zoologist and historian of science Robert (William) Theodore Gunther (1869–1940; Magdalen’s Scientific Fellow 1896–1928), who had taken a particular interest in his son’s progress, in which he described his son’s military career to date:

After his course of training for the R.F.A. at Woolwich, he was sent to Exeter and then Okehampton for field firing; then he came up to Aldershot, where he was charged with the duty of winding up the affairs of his Division when it went out to the war. This done, he went to its HQ at Glasgow, where a few weeks were wasted waiting for orders. When these came, he had to report himself at Southampton, where he sailed for [Le] Havre, where he went through a course of instruction in the management of mortars, and ultimately he found himself in the firing line in charge of a half-battery of these weapons. After a week or two, he was detailed to leave his Division and proceed with his mortars to another part of the line, for some special work, where he still is. His first dug-outs were alive with rats and mice, while hawks and owls preyed on these from above. But where he is now no rats or mice are to be seen, except dead in the mouths of a family of the wildest cats he has ever known: these keep the vermin down. It is getting very cold out there at night now, especially at “stand-to” at dawn, but lately he has enjoyed the luxury of a swim in the deeper part of a mill lead […]. He has been successful, too, in cozening a horse out of his divisional commander, for on joining the mortar battery his horse was taken from him, so that he is now happier by reason of that. But he longs for the field battery work, as he fancies that in the case of an attack there will be more chance of doing things with a field battery than with mortars. He keeps very fit, although I should not wonder if his nerves have got a bit frayed after having been so long in the firing line without relief. But his is a comparatively quiet part of the line (Albert way, I believe) though it is expected that things will happen, as he puts it, there soon.

Harper came home on leave between 5 and 17 November 1915 and by the end of 1915 was commanding his own Trench Mortar Batttery. He was promoted Lieutenant in January 1916 (London Gazette, no. 29,498, 6 March 1916, p. 2,450). He was given another ten days’ leave from around 29 April to 8 May 1916.

During the Battle of the Somme Harper became the Divisional Trench Mortar Officer (Heavy) of the 51st (Highland) Division until he sprained his ankle in late July during the fighting at Delville Wood, near Longueval, as a result of which he was sent back to England to convalesce for a month or two. On 15 August 1916 he wrote in a letter to Gunther: “The most interesting place in the world just now is by the Somme and I’m sorry to be out of it altogether, though it’s very pleasant to have a rest”, and after a flying visit to Oxford during his convalescence he wrote to Warren:

I hardly knew I cared for Oxford so much or had been so happy there. I suppose one’s sense of true perspective gets a better chance when one stands back a little as it were, and sees Oxford from outside […]. The most interesting place just now is the Somme.

On his return to France in about September 1916, his reputation for capability and gallantry caused him to be appointed to ‘A’ Battery in the 187th Brigade, RFA, part of the 41st Division, as the officer in charge of Brigade trench mortars, and in this capacity he spent the best part of a year in the Ypres Salient near Dickebusch, Sint Elooi and La Clytte. In late March or early April 1917, Harper was sent on a course of instruction at the 2nd Army School of Gunnery “somewhere in France”, where he was known as “The Happy Warrior”, an appropriate soubriquet given what he had written in a letter of February 1917:

If I’m to be killed in this war – and it’s no use worrying about it – I hope it will not be in an observation post, nor on a fatigue party, nor by a shell smashing into my dug-out; I’d sooner go on a warm morning in a stiff battle in the midst of my guns, with my men steady as rocks around me.

His professional joie de vivre must have been intensified by the gunnery course, since once again he passed out top, performing especially well in that part of the course which related to the 18-pounder field gun. The report on his performance reads:

A keen and energetic young officer, very painstaking in his work, made the most of his course and did exceedingly well, gaining the top marks of the 18pdr. classes in his examinations. A very capable officer, and should go far.

Not long before his death, Harper wrote a thoughtful, confused and confusing little piece in which he attempted to make some sense of a visit to the ruined city of Ypres that he had made on 31 December 1916. It was published in the Oxford Magazine on 23 November 1917 and is reproduced below just before the Bibliography.

On 11 April 1917 he was the Commanding Officer of a field battery, but on 1 June 1917, the first day of the bombardment that preceded the successful assault on Messines Ridge, he was killed in action, aged 28, beside one of his guns at Brasserie, in front of the Étang de Dickebusch (Dikkebus). Unfortunately, the relevant War Diary for June 1917 is missing, but according to Harper’s Commanding Officer, Major Graeme Farren Raper (b. 1884 in Mountable, Rajputstan, India, d. 1975):

[his] battery was in the open and well in front; when they opened fire they were so hotly shelled by the enemy in reply that the guns had to be left for a while. In half-an-hour they returned and resumed firing, but were again compelled to withdraw. After another short interval they again advanced and re-commenced firing, and Harper was at once hit and instantaneously killed. […] He was a most efficient and fearless officer, and held the esteem and affection of his brother officers as well as the men of the battery. His loss will be very severely felt.

Harper is buried in Dickebusch (Dikkebus) New British Military Cemetery (Extension), Grave 3.A.40; the inscription reads: “The dearly beloved son of Mr. & Mrs. Peter Harper, Bromley, Kent”. According to Gunther, the cross that originally marked his grave was originally inscribed with the following lines from John McCrea’s well-known poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (written 3 May 1915; first published in Punch on 8 December 1915):

“Take up our quarrel with the foe,

To you from falling hands we throw

The torch.  Be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who died,

We shall not sleep,

Though poppies grow.”

Harper is commemorated on the Memorial in St Columba’s Church, Alfred Street, Oxford (originally the Presbyterian Chaplaincy that was founded in 1908: the Church was dedicated in 1915). After Harper’s death, his brother Cecil received “a large mass of letters from all corners of the world” that were “indicative not only of his professional achievements, but [of] much of the character that lay behind [them], and the esteem in which he was held for himself by many different types of people”. So Cecil compiled a selection of excerpts and sent it to Dulwich College for their archives. Several senior members of Oxford University sent in such letters of condolence: “I looked forward to seeing him back in scientific work in Oxford, and if ever a career of useful work lay open to anyone that was his case.” “It would have been quite easy for him to have stayed in India, or even, if he had returned home, to seek useful – scientific – work which would have involved no personal risk. But he deliberately chose the dangerous course, counting the cost. It is the example of such men as he which will be the best inspiration for the rest of their lives of those who knew them and who survive the war.”

Professor Somerville told Harper’s parents that:

There is no one among our younger men whose loss I feel more deeply. His was a full life: his devotion to duty was an inspiration to all who worked with him, and we know that, had he been able to come back to us, he would have been just the kind of man whom we shall most need after the war.

Somerville was even more fulsome with his praise in the obituary that he wrote for the Oxford Magazine:

His death deprives us of one of our most efficient young botanists. His ability, conscientiousness, and the wide experience he had gained in travel equipped him in a remarkable degree for that work of scientific reconstruction in forestry and agriculture to which he must presently have been called.

Sir William (originally Wilhelm Philipp Daniel) Schlich (1840–1925), a German-born forester who had worked extensively for the British in India and written the standard pre-1914 textbook on forestry, called Harper’s death “a great loss to Science, in which he had taken firm steps toward[s] becoming famous”. An Indian student wrote from Madras:

In addition to his thorough grasp of the subject, he had a rare facility of imparting his knowledge to others – which is rare among Indian professors. […] He made an ideal professor for an Indian college; just the sort of Englishman whom the Indian student is longing for.

A friend of Harper’s wrote to his parents:

His was no ordinary sacrifice. With every prospect of an honourable and distinguished career opening out before him, he deliberately placed himself, fully knowing the risks, at the post of danger in defence of his country, and has fallen most gallantly and most honourably. Even in the poignancy of your grief you must feel an honest pride in having reared such a worthy son, and though you have lost him in one way, his memory will be a glorious possession which no one can take away from you.

Another friend in the Army who had known Harper well said:

Whatever the outer surface may have been, his heart was like a rock; and it was that that many men recoiled from to their undoing, and others of us almost clung to to our great benefit. […] His uncompromising bluntness was unattractive to many of his fellows, but there were those of us who were able to insist on penetrating the outer shell, and find a most unusual charm under it all. And above all, his manner to all the men under him was always the reverse of his habitual bluntness to his immediate fellows. If I had been one of his men, I would have followed him anywhere.

And President Warren recorded that “military training and habit of command removed the diffidence of manner” that had masked Harper’s “great strength of character”, adding that “the power he possessed of seeing the best in his men aroused in him a heartfelt and paternal affection for them”. On 13 June 1917, his mother wrote to Mrs Gunther:

We have indeed lost one of the best of sons, so tender & thoughtful & considerate. Looking back over his life, we have no regrets, he never gave us any cause for anxiety, but many, many reasons for thankfulness – that we had such a son. It is so very hard to understand why he should have been taken from us unless it be that he was ready for higher service, & God had need of him – In our hearts – & home, there will ever [be] the vacant place, & our sense of loss is overwhelming.

A Memorial Service was held in Bromley’s Trinity Presbyterian Church on Sunday, 11 June 1917, and the Minister of that Church from 1911 to 1945, the Reverend Frederick William Armstrong (b. c.1876 in Belfast, d. 1963), gave a long memorial address that was remarkably free from jingoism and the rhetoric of heroism and was appended verbatim to the obituary for Harper which appeared in the Bromley & District Times on the following Saturday:

These are days when we have grown sadly familiar with death. From time to time we see in the daily Press long lists of the fallen. We glance at them with vague regret, failing (perhaps mercifully failing) to read them in terms of suffering and sorrow, to see behind the curt official notice the myriad human tragedies. It is only when death enters some familiar circle, and from that centre grief sends out its ever-widening wave, that we realise for a moment the agony of our times. To-day in this congregation we are sorrowing over the death of our fellow member, Alan Harper. We all have recognised his fine qualities of mind and spirit, his fair record, and still fairer promise. It was in this church [that] he made his profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Into its common life he entered heartily and loyally in his school and college days, and he was one of a goodly company of young men, now scattered far and wide, in whose progress the congregation took a common interest and a common pride. We can appreciate, therefore, in some measure what his death must mean to those in his home. None who knew him in that sphere can fail to have been impressed by his beautiful filial piety, his eager and tender and watchful devotion to his father and mother. To them he was friend and companion as well as son. His chief concern was to show them in a hundred ways how grateful he was for the labour of love that had spent itself to fit him for an honourable and useful career, and how he treasured the memory of it as a sacred joy and inspiration. If love’s debts can ever be repaid, few sons have requited them more fully or more willingly. To them and to the brothers who were knit with him in happy comradeship he has left the precious heritage of an unclouded memory. We think, too, of the loss to his university. Had he been spared to return from the war, it seems likely [that] he would have been called upon to resume his task of scientific research and lecturing there, and we can be sure [that] he would have justified the high hopes of his teachers and colleagues; for he thought little of material gain, or even of academic distinction. He did his work for the joy of doing it, and with the satisfaction of adding to the common good. And we must think, too, of the loss to the country. If our true wealth be measured by the amount of chivalrous and honourable young life in the community, Alan Harper can ill be spared for the work of reconstruction that is now opening out on the social horizon. His was a vigorous, acute, and independent mind, slow and patient in deliberation, but resolute and unwavering in the course once chosen. His religion was free from the taint of conventionality. The beliefs he held were not mere opinions, but living convictions wrought out in the discipline of obedience to his ideals. He has left behind him, among other papers, a brief essay written in the trenches, which is at once a revelation of his view of life and an index to his character. In this sketch, to which he has given the title ‘The Fourth Man’, he refers to an analysis he had read of the various types of men who were drawn to the war, and of the motives that inspired them. There was, first, the “sportsman”, the man attracted by the element of risk and adventure. Then there was the “patriot”, the man who was stirred by the call of the country. The third was the “moderate patriot”, the man for whom the posters were designed, who needed to be roused by the spur of public opinion. But he goes on to say [that] this analysis is not complete. There is a fourth type, the man who is impelled to go because he is convinced that in this way he can fulfil the meaning of his life, viz., the development of character, the man who realises that to gain one’s life one must lose it. It was to this category he felt [that] he himself belonged, one of the many “students in arms” who are fascinated by the life of the soul as much as by the movements of history. His life story, so full of interest and promise, has been abruptly broken off, but we know that, like the story of all sincere seekers after light, it will go forward to new chapters under the care of the Divine Artist, for it is written, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled” [Matthew 5: 6].

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The Storied Present.

By the Late Lieutenant A. G. Harper, R.F.A.

On the last day of the year I walked into Ypres through the Lille Gate. It wasn’t the first time I had wandered there, off duty, attracted by mixed feelings of curiosity, sentiment, pathos, and homage. It is an absorbing thing to follow out history in courses of stone and broken walls. Two years ago the anniversary had found me conjuring up the past in imagination, at Delhi and Lucknow, a glorious past that burnt a fitting enthusiasm into a pilgrim hastening home to take his part in present warfare.

Recent ruins are common enough in France and Flanders, battered villages and poor little farms, some of which, still marked on the map, are scarcely traceable on the ground. Towards the trenches, and between them, run the old roads, now disused and eerie to walk on, their bordering trees becoming more and more gaunt and wrecked until they disappear entirely as they approach the front lines. Here is a broken château, a few roses surviving in a corner of its grass-grown garden, with great shell-holes filled with clear water and green slime, and a little group of wooden crosses standing close beside an old bank. Here is a rusty plough with tall dry grasses thick around it, like that one close to the telegraph pole that marked an old road in “no man’s land”. Desolation everywhere; but the marvel is not so much in the destruction as in the traces that remain. It seems to be impossible by shell-fire to wipe a wood entirely off the map. It is as impossible to hide a ruined city.

It will be a pity if Ypres is rebuilt. Surrounded by its broad moat and solid walls, it would form a fitting memorial lest men forget too soon. At least the centre of the town, with the remains of the Cloth Hall and Cathedral, might be preserved as ruins. Birds are flying round the remains of a tower, and a thrush is trying his first notes close at hand. The fallen bricks are crumbling into a powdery earth, and the centre of the city seems to be asleep. It is the burst and broken houses, not those that have been utterly destroyed, that stare most pitifully: the litter of household goods, the rag of a curtain flapping from the remainder of a window-frame, a broken sewing-machine, the scattered remains of a spring bed, mixed with the fallen beams and scraps of plaster. From a little battered and forsaken church all the woodwork has been removed. The floor is strewn with empty tins, traces of a soldier’s meal. On the farther side of the square stand awaiting half a dozen motor ambulances. On the nearer side are motor lorries being loaded with bricks to serve as foundations for stable lines in muddy fields miles away. Overhead are a few puffs of smoke from anti-aircraft shells, and through the middle streets marches a platoon of infantry. Suddenly there comes a noise not unlike water under the prow of a boat, and then the indescribable “crump” of a single bursting shell in the outskirts, the ground-swell after the storm.

 

I wonder what the German soldier thinks about Ypres to-day when he glances across our salient to its broken tower. I wonder what he thinks about Arras, and the white stump of masonry that was once the famous belfry, or the great stone cross above the front of the roofless cathedral, a landmark for miles around. I wonder what he thinks about Rheims, and the thousand razed villages between Ostend and the Vosges. To us they are reminders of a reparation to be surely exacted. Their contemplation cannot bring the Germans much satisfaction. It is we who have the right to feel proud of the ruins and their silent witness to human devotion. If tourists go to Ypres after the War, they might well remove their hats in reverence to the memory of those men who have marched through those streets before them.

 

There is a rare fascination about a walled city. It may be the romance of antiquity, or the glamour of history, or just the quaintness of the crowded houses. But the greatest charm is usually about the gates and walls. Like the eyes of a quiet man, the portals of his soul, the city’s gates provide access to the remote seclusion within. Their very names awake imagination. The Cashmir [sic] Gate at Delhi – can’t you see the caravans and cavalcades and runners with tidings of peace and war passing there centuries before it was stormed in the Mutiny? Useless now, old walls and gates keep their records of days when men would dare greatly for a great wrong or a great right. The walls of Ypres were no defence against the long-range guns of modern warfare. But the Germans themselves never got within a mile of the gates. The true glory of Ypres haunts the ground outside, ploughed up by shells and mines and countermines, poisoned with gas, waterlogged, and soaked in blood. Ghosts will wander there still whenever men will visit it to catch a glimpse of the triumph of manhood and faith and of the glory of God. But our generation has been brought face to face with death – and life. We have been called from dreams to deeds.

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Bibliography

For the books and archives referred to here in short form, refer to the Slow Dusk Bibliography and Archival Sources.

NB After the outbreak of war, the German surname of Magdalen’s scientific Fellow Robert Günther is sometimes spelt with a ‘u’ instead of a ‘ü’. There is no consistency about this and where the name appears below, we have followed the spelling in the printed source. The German form is retained in the Quarterly Journal of Forestry (QJF) as late as 1918 in order to stress the international nature of scientific endeavour.

Printed sources:

[Anon.], ‘Officers of the Nth Artillery School, “somewhere in France”’ [group photo including Harper, who cannot be identified], The Tatler, no. 827 (2 May 1917), p. 23.

[Anon.], ‘Lieutenant Alan Gordon Harper, R.F.A’ [obituary], The Times, no. 41,499 (8 June 1917), p. 4.

[Anon.], ‘For King & Country: Lieut. A.G. Harper, R.F.A.’ [obituary], Bromley and District Times, no. 1,868 (15 June 1917), p. 5.

[Thomas Herbert Warren], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 35, no. 23 (15 June 1917), pp. 312–13.

[Anon.], ‘Scholar and Gallant Soldier’ [obituary with photo], The Daily Graphic, no. 8,586 (15 June 1917), p. 8 (vol. CX, p. 764).

The Late Lieutenant A.G. Harper, R.F.A., ‘The Storied Present’ [report written by Harper in his dug-out near Ypres shortly before he was killed in action], The Oxford Magazine, 36, no. 6 (23 November 1917), p. 81.

R.T. G[ünther], ‘The Late Lieut. A.G. Harper, M.C.’, Quarterly Journal of Forestry [QJF], 12, no. 1 (January 1918), pp. 61–2.

[Anon.], ‘Lieutenant Alan Gordon Harper’ [obituary], Dulwich College Roll of Honour (London: J.J. Keliher & Co. Ltd [The Marshalsea Press], 1923), p. 110.

Gunther (1924), pp. 440–2, 468, 471.

[Anon.] ‘Death of Mr Peter Harper at Aboyne’ [obituary], Aberdeen Press and Journal, no. 29,862 (16 September 1950), p. 6.

[Anon.], ‘Kenneth Gordon Harper’ [obituary], The Alleynian, 82, no. 560 (March 1954), p. 93.

Dancocks (1988), pp. 250–1.

Archival sources:

Letter of 23 November 1944 from Kenneth Gordon Harper to McCulloch Christison at Dulwich College (Dulwich College Archives).

MCA: P233/2/C2/3 (A bound set of letters to Robert Gunther from pupils and others [1900–20]). These include material relating to A.G. Harper, whom Gunther knew well).

MCA: PR32/C/3/620-621 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters relating to A.G. Harper [1917]).

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 2.

OUA: UR 2/1/66.

WO95/2652.

Scientific articles by Alan Harper:

Published:

‘The Beech (Die Rotbuche), by A. Schwappach’ [book review], QJF, 6, no. 3 (July 1912), pp. 254–6.

‘An Introduction to Plant Geography, by M.E. Hardy’ [book review], QJF, 7, no. 3 (July 1913), pp. 206–7.

*‘Defoliation: its Effects upon the Growth and Structure of the Wood of Larix’,  Annals of Botany, 27, no. 108 (October 1913), pp. 621–42.

‘Microscopic Investigation of Trees Defoliated by the Large Larch Sawfly (Nematus erichsoni)’, QJF, 8, no. 1 (January 1914), pp. 30–3 + 2 plates.

‘Plant Life, by J. Bretland Farmer’ [book review], QJF, 8, ibid., p. 50.

‘The Large Larch Sawfly (Nematus Erichsoni)’, ibid., p. 71.

*‘Protomorphic Shoots In The Genus Pinus’, QJF, 8, no. 2 (April 1914), pp. 101–6.

*[With Professor William Somerville], ‘Experiments on Eccentric Growth of Ash’, QJF, 8, no. 3 (July 1914), pp. 218–29.

Unpublished Typescripts:

‘Fusion of Needles in Pinus: Studies in the Formation of Autumn Wood in Conifers’, (1914). No further details known.

‘Studies in the Formation of Autumn Wood in Conifers’ (1914). No further details known.