Fact file:

  • Matriculated: 1905

  • Born: 22 May 1886

  • Died: 22 January 1916

  • Regiment: Royal Fusiliers

  • Grave/Memorial: Calais Southern Cemetery: B.2.12

Family background

b. 22 May 1886 in Lewisham as the younger son (of two) of Alfred Priest (1853–1932) and Louisa Priest (née Rhodes, 1857–1928) (m. 1884), of 238, Brockley Rd, London SE4. By the time of the 1911 Census, the family had not employed any servants.

 

Carl Rhodes Priest, BA
(Photo courtesy of Magdalen College, Oxford)

 

Parents and antecedents

Priest’s father was the son of a Norfolk builder who became a hot water engineer and then a sanitary inspector. He left £782 in his will.

His mother was the daughter of a council engineer and became a school teacher.

 

Siblings and their families

Priest’s brother Eric (1885–1963) married Gwen Tilbrook (1885–1960) in 1919; one daughter. Eric served in the Honourable Artillery Company, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and was commissioned Pilot Officer (Second Lieutenant) (Observer) in the RAF on 22 June 1918. He saw service in the Middle East starting on 29 April 1915, and was awarded the Air Force Cross. By 1932 he was a Bank Manager for the National Provincial Bank.

 

Education

Priest attended Lewisham Bridge School, Deptford, from c.1894 to 1898 and then Christ’s Hospital from 1898 to 1905, where he was in Middleton A. House.

 

Carl Rhodes Priest (1905) at Christ’s Hospital, i.e. shortly before he matriculated at Magdalen. (Courtesy Clifford Jones, Esq., Archivist, Christ’s Hospital)

 

He matriculated at Magdalen as an Exhibitioner in Mathematics on 14 October 1905 and passed Responsions during Michaelmas Term 1905. He took the First Public Examination in October 1906 (Holy Scripture) and Trinity Term 1907 (Mathematics), when he was awarded a 2nd in Mathematics Moderations, and the minutes of Magdalen’s Tutorial Board for 7 October and 25 November 1909 indicate that he was a member of the College until the start of Michaelmas Term 1909. But he had clearly got into difficulties – which may have been partly connected to his subject of study and partly financial – for the above minutes indicate that his name would be removed from books – i.e. that he would be sent down – but that he would be allowed back in Trinity Term 1910 to take Finals in Natural Sciences provided that he paid off his debts to the College and the Junior Common Room. As things turned out, however, he seems to have gone down for the best part of four years, since President Warren’s notebooks state that on 8 October 1912 Magdalen’s Tutorial Board gave Priest permission “to replace his name on the books and proceed to his degree, subject to the approval of the Mathematical Tutor” and the records in the Oxford University Archives indicate that he took the third subject required by Moderations, Classical Literature, in Michaelmas Term 1912. Then, during the subsequent calendar year, Priest completed the necessary work for a Pass Degree (Groups A1 [Greek and/or Latin Literature/Philosophy], Trinity Term 1913, and B1 [English History], Michaelmas Term 1913), and finally took his BA on 12 March 1914 alongside W.G. Houldsworth. He then became an assistant Mathematics master at St Neot’s School, Eversley, Hook, Hampshire.

 

War service

 

Woodcote Park Camp, south of Epsom, Surrey

 

Priest was not one of those thousands of public school and university men who flocked to the colours during the first few days of the war (cf. T.E.G. Norton, L.D. Cane, V.A. Farrar). Nor was he one of the many young unmarried men between 18 and 30 who applied for one of the two thousand temporary commissions that were offered by the War Office via advertisements in the press on 10 August 1914. Nor, when the Old Public Schools and University Men’s Force was set up with Lord Kitchener’s approval in the first days of September 1914, was he one of the five thousand plus eager recruits who had reported for duty in London and the provinces by 12 September 1914. But on 4 January 1915, Priest enlisted as a Private in the 19th (Service) Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers (2nd Public Schools Battalion), and in all probability reported soon afterwards to the huge camp that had been set up for the four-battalion Public Schools Brigade – as it was now called – in Woodcote Park, just south of Epsom, Surrey. On 10 May 1915, about 100 men from each Battalion left Epsom for Clipstone Camp, near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in order to make preparations for the arrival of the body of the 98th Brigade, in the 33rd Division, seven days later, where it trained for three months. The whole Division moved to Salisbury Plain on 3 August where the individual Battalions were welded together while “individually the men were hardened to conditions approximating to active service as far as possible”.

The Battalion landed at Calais on 14 November 1915, and travelling via Boulogne, Steenbecque, Thiennes and Cantraine in horse-boxes and heavy rain, reached Béthune on 21 December 1915, where it served in the trenches until Christmas Day. After a week in billets in Hingette and Avelette (26–28 December 1915), it was sent to the Cuinchy Support Trench, near the Brickstacks, about six miles east of Béthune near La Bassée, on New Year’s Day 1916. On 2 January 1916, Priest became one of the Battalion’s 28 casualties, when he was wounded by shellfire. He died of wounds received in action, aged 29 and still a Private, on 22 January 1916 in Lahore British General Hospital, Calais. He was buried in Calais Southern Cemetery, Grave B.2.12, with the inscription: “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die” – the final lines of ‘Hallowed Ground’ (1825) by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1777–1844).

 

The Brickstacks at Cuinchy, taken from the north.

 

Calais Southern Cemetery; Grave B.2.12

 

Priest’s list of personal effects at the time of his death

 

Bibliography

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

Printed sources:

[Thomas Herbert Warren], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 34, no.10 (4 February 1916), p. 162.

[Anon.], The History of the Royal Fusiliers “U.P.S.”: University and Public Schools Brigade (Formation and Training) (London: “The Times”, [July] 1917), pp. 13–104.

 

Archival sources:

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 3.

MCA: PR/2/16 (Minutes of the Tutorial Board), pp. 467 and 468.

MCA: PR/2/17 (Minutes of the Tutorial Board), p. 421.

MCA: PR/2/18 (Minutes of the Tutorial Board), p. 87.

OUA: UR 2/1/58.

WO95/2427.