Herbert Douglas Vernon

• Matriculated: 1912

• Born: 4 January 1893

• Died: 15 September 1916

• Regiment: Grenadier Guards

• Grave/Memorial: Thiepval Memorial: Pier and Face 8D

Family background

b. 4 January 1893 at Waterloo Park, Waterloo, near Liverpool, as the second son (of four children) of (John) Herbert Vernon (from 1919 Sir John, 2nd Baronet Vernon of Shotwick Park, Cheshire) (1858–1933) and Elizabeth (later Lady Elizabeth) Vernon (née Bagnall) (1859–1947) (m. 1889). At the time of the 1901 Census the family was living at “Brentwood”, Waterloo, Lancashire (three servants); at the time of the 1911 Census it had clearly prospered and was living at Eastham House, Eastham, Cheshire (six servants).

Parents and antecedents

Vernon’s family came across to England with William the Conqueror. John Vernon (1803–87), Herbert Douglas’s great-grandfather, moved with his family from Cheshire to set up a corn mill in Fole, Staffordshire, some four miles from Uttoxeter. He left £1030 18s. 6d. His son William Vernon (from 1914 Sir William, 1st Baronet) (1835–1919), Herbert Douglas’s grandfather, became a partner with his father in the mill. At the time of the 1861 Census they employed two men and two boys and traded under the name William Vernon and Co. Millers and Corn Dealers. The partnership was dissolved in 1862 and the business was carried out by John Vernon alone (London Gazette, no. 22,622, 2 May 1862, p. 2,316), but within the decade he had retired.

William set himself up as a miller in Fole and in 1871 employed five men and an apprentice; in 1881 he employed eight men. In the 1880s William was joined by his three sons, including John Herbert. The mill in Fole nearly burnt down in 1894 and was rebuilt in 1897. In 1905 W. Vernon & Sons, Millers, built the Millennium Mills in Victoria Dock, on the Thames. The mill was named after their most successful prize-winning Millennium flour which “used the best wheats of the world”. Soon they had mills in Cardiff and Cambridge, too, and were merged with Spillers in 1927 to form Spillers Ltd. In the New Year’s Honours list of 1914 William was made a baronet. On the anniversary of the death of Samuel Johnson (1709–84) Sir William made a provisional offer of £1,000 for the demolition of the property standing close to Dr Johnson’s penance spot in Uttoxeter in order to erect a memorial to commemorate the event. This was where in 1780 Johnson stood for several hours in the rain to atone for refusing to help his father in his youth. Sir William was keen on education and was much involved in local schools; he was appointed a life governor of Liverpool University. On his death he left £324,388 12s. 11d.

Vernon’s father became President of the Liverpool Corn Exchange and High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1926. While Sheriff he revived the old custom of escorting His Majesty’s Judges to Chester Assizes with a bodyguard of javelin men. On his death he left £41,064 4s. 10d.

Vernon’s mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of John Bagnall (c.1828–69), a farmer of 160 acres in Checkley, Staffordshire.

Siblings and their families

Brother of:

(1) (William) Norman Herbert (later MA and, from 1933, the 3rd Baronet) (1890–1967); married (1921) Caroline Janet Robertson-Macdonald (1893–1973); two children;

(2) Humphrey Bagnall (later MA, MC) (1895–1979); married (1938) Sibyl Mason Hutchinson (1904–2002); two children;

(3) Nina Elizabeth Margaret (1898–1988), unmarried;

(4) John Stafford (1900–70); married (1933) Beryl Eileen Turner (1906–73), no children.

All four sons were educated at Charterhouse and Magdalen.

Vernon’s elder brother, (William) Norman Herbert, was at Magdalen from 1909 to 1912 (BA, Pass Degree; MA 1919). He was Managing Director of Spillers Ltd from 1929 to 1949 and was awarded the Coronation Medal in 1937. He became Director of Flour Milling at the Ministry of Food from 1939 to 1941, and a Director of Allied Bakeries from 1952 to 1957. He was decorated with the award of Knight, Order of the White Rose of Finland.

Humphrey Bagnall was at Magdalen from October 1914 to March 1915, when he sat the Preliminary Examination in Classics. He then left to join the 1st Battalion, the Grenadier Guards, and was wounded in the right shoulder on 7 March 1917 after being in France for exactly three months. He spent time in No. 2 Red Cross Hospital, Rouen, returned to his Battalion, but was wounded for a second time and won the MC (London Gazette, no. 31119, 10 January 1919, p. 648). He was one of the few pre-war students to return to Magdalen after the war (1919–21; BA and MA 1921) and from 1920 to 1921 he was the President of Magdalen’s Junior Common Room. In 1925 he was appointed to the Board of the family company, Vernon and Sons Ltd; in 1931 he became General Manager of Spillers (North-West); in 1947 he was invited to join the Board of Spillers; in 1952 he was appointed Joint Managing Director of Spillers; and in 1953 he was nominated President of the National Association of British and Irish Millers (nominated for the second time in 1961). In 1951 he became High Sheriff of Cheshire.

John Stafford was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards on 10 March 1919, but read Natural Sciences at Magdalen from 1920 to 1921. He does not seem to have taken the BA and in the 1966 College Record he described himself as a “Flour Miller” – indicating perhaps that he joined the family firm. In April 2006 Bonham’s auctioned three photograph albums “belonging to John Stafford Vernon, including Magdalen College 1920’s, trip to Egypt 1920’s, locomotives and boats bearing [the] name ‘Stafford Vernon’, events at Eastham House, Mediterranean cruise SS Atlantis 1931”.

 

Education

From 1907 to 1912 Vernon attended Mostyn House Preparatory School, Parkgate, Neston, Cheshire – sometimes known as “Grenfell’s School”, after the Reverend Algernon Sidney Grenfell (1836–87), who was its headmaster from 1864 to 1883 and the father of Sir Wilfred Grenfell (1865–1940), the pioneering medical missionary in Newfoundland and Labrador (cf. L.R.A. Gatehouse). The school was founded in 1852 in the village of Tarvin, west Cheshire, by the Reverend E.H. Price (b. c.1823 in Italy, d. after 1864). In 1858 it moved to Parkgate, where it was run by the Grenfell family until its closure in 2010. Vernon then, despite Mostyn House’s close connections with Shrewsbury School, attended Charterhouse. Here he played for the First football XI and the Second cricket XI; he became the Head Monitor of Saunderites House, and he served in the School Fire Brigade.

He matriculated as a Commoner at Magdalen on 15 October 1912, having passed Responsions in Trinity Term 1912. He passed the First Public Examination (Holy Scripture) in October 1913, and then began to read for a Pass Degree (Group C3 [The Elements of Physics], Trinity Term 1913) before taking the Preliminary Examination in Natural Sciences (Chemistry, Mechanics and Physics) in 1913 and 1914. But at the end of Trinity Term 1914 he left without a degree. During his time at Magdalen, he played soccer for the University as a freshman and against Cambridge in 1913 and 1914. His Headmaster (Frank Fletcher) wrote of him posthumously:

If I could put into words the opinion I have of him it would seem an exaggeration to those who did not know him, though others who knew him well might call it inadequate. By sheer straightness and simplicity of character and an extraordinary rightness of judgment (which impressed even strangers who talked with him) he attained a popularity which he never sought and an influence which much abler men might envy. At Charterhouse he was an epoch-making Head-monitor [Senior Prefect], whose influence will last as long as any Saunderites [members of his House] of his period are alive. At Oxford the same simplicity of character won him friends among dons and undergraduates. Out in France his coolness in danger made itself felt by the men under him and inspired them with confidence, while those who knew him more intimately were impressed by his high character and simple religious faith. […] Throughout it all he preserved in the best sense of the words the heart of a child up to the moment when at the call of a sudden bullet he “answered his name and stood in the presence of the Master”. … He passed from the OUOTC to the Territorials. Neither wealth nor athletic distinction nor social success spoiled the simplicity and strength of his character.

War service

Vernon had been a Private in the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps until 2 November 1914, and on 11 November 1914 he began his military service in the 1/7th Battalion (Territorial Force), The King’s (Liverpool) Regiment, where he was immediately commissioned as Second Lieutenant (London Gazette, no. 28,969, 10 November 1914, p. 9,143) and then rapidly promoted Lieutenant on 30 January 1915 (LG, no. 29,618, 9 June 1916, p. 5,741) . The 1/7th Battalion arrived at Le Havre on 8 March 1915, but without Vernon, for by then he was considering making an application to join the pool of Guards officers that was called the Special Reserve. His application went in on 15 March 1915 and in April 1915 he was transferred to the Grenadier Guards as a 2nd Lieutenant (LG, no. 29,118, 2 April 1915, p. 3,254). We do not know exactly when he arrived in France (probably in July 1915), but by 26 September 1915 he was in 3 Company of the 3rd Battalion, the Grenadier Guards (see R.P. Stanhope, E.G. Worsley, F.W.T. Clerke and J.F. Worsley), which was about to take part in the Battle of Loos (25 September–14 October 1915).

The Guards Division was in position by nightfall on 26 September. But Stanhope’s Battalion spent the first two days of the battle in Reserve and the night of 26/27 September in extreme discomfort, waiting in an icy wind and pouring rain to help take over the line from the 15th (Scottish), 21st and 24th Divisions, which had suffered devastating losses on 25 September. On 27 September the 3rd Battalion was one of the two Battalions in support when the 2nd Guards Brigade attacked Chalk Pit Wood, just to the south of Hulluch, across roughly three-quarters of a mile of open countryside. But in mid-afternoon, Vernon’s 3 Company was kept back yet again when the other three Companies of the 3rd Battalion were brought into the Battle to assault the German line between Puits 14bis (Shaft 14b) in the north and the well-fortified redoubt on Hill 70 in the south. Whereas the attacking Companies of the 3rd Battalion were subject to extremely heavy machine-gun fire from the Bois Hugo, just behind Puits 14bis, and it lost 229 of its officers and other ranks killed, wounded or missing without achieving anything of significance, Vernon’s 3 Company was spared the worst of the casualties. It seems probable that after this débâcle, Vernon returned to England to train as a machine-gunner, for he returned to France on 21 December 1915 and was sent to the Machine-Gun Company of his old Battalion.

Although the Battalion War Diary makes no mention of Vernon’s arrival around Christmas 1915, we know that the Battalion was in billets at La Gorgue from 17 to 31 January 1916 and that by 25 February it was back in line west of Poperinghe, in the even quieter Ypres Sector, well to the north. The Battalion spent the first six months of 1916 in and out of the line in this general area, and because the trenches were in such a bad state, its routine consisted of five days in the front line, three days in Camp B cleaning up, and another five days in support in the battered town of Ypres itself. The War Diary recorded at the time that the trenches were

in a terrible state after the bombardment [to which they had been subjected during the First and Second Battles of Ypres]. The principal difficulty was that water stood in all the shell holes and the drains, of which there were very few, were blown in & the whole ground cut up. Another great disadvantage was that all the wooden revetments had been torn up & buried beneath the parapets and parados which made the work of clearing away the debris exceedingly slow.

Moreover, because of snipers and the fear of an artillery bombardment, “not a spadeful could or can be lifted in the daytime and all work done at night has to be disguised as far as possible”.

But in mid-July 1916, like the rest of the Guards Division, the 3rd Battalion began to move to the Somme, newly equipped with steel helmets; on 10 August 1916 the Guards Division began to take over trenches to the south of Hébuterne; the move was completed by 14 August; and from late August until 9 September Vernon’s Battalion trained for the coming Battle of Flers-Courcelette. E.G. Worsley landed in France on 12 August 1916 and joined the 3rd Battalion on 27 August, when it was in billets at Morlincourt and practising the newly prescribed techniques of open fighting, whose principles the 3rd Battalion War Diary described as follows:

The basis on which the formations were founded was that it was necessary to move all supporting troops simultaneously with those detailed for the actual assault in order to avoid the enemies’ [sic] barrage. Accordingly the Brigade was formed up in nine waves (a wave being a carrying party) at 50 yards distance and at zero time all waves advanced together under cover of (1) a standing barrage on the enemies’ [sic] front line, (2) a creeping barrage starting 100 yds in front of the assault and moving forward at 50 yds per minute. When the creeping barrage reached the standing barrage, both lifted to 200 yards beyond the German front line. The leading waves passed over the front line and formed up behind the barrage. Standing barrage was then put down on to the second line. The front trench was cleared by the new waves.

On 9 September, the Battalion moved to Happy Valley, a track that led from the direction of Albert up to Bazentin-le-Petit, Mametz Wood and ultimately High Wood (see J.B. Hichens). The Valley had been captured from the Germans on 14 July 1916 and was hidden from the Germans by the valley’s sides, but because they shelled it regularly, it was also known as Death Valley. On 13 September 1916 the 3rd Battalion marched to Carnoy, and at 21.00 hours on 14 September they began to march by Companies via Trônes Wood and Guillemont to the assembly point behind the front line east of Ginchy, which the 3rd Battalion’s war diarist drily described as labouring “under every disadvantage except that it was not shelled by the enemy”. Ginchy, two miles south of Flers, is situated on a high plateau running northwards for 2,000 yards, and then eastwards in a long spur for nearly 4,000 yards. The village of Lesboeufs is a mile-and-a-half south of the village of Gueudecourt and stands on the northern end of the spur, with the village of Morval on its southern end. Morval is two miles from Lesboeufs, two miles north-east of Ginchy, and commands a good view in every direction. Another spur juts out from the plateau for a mile in a south-easterly direction and then falls sharply into the Combles Valley towards Falfemont Farm (see W.L. Vince): Bouleaux Wood, a mile to the west of Combles, is on the crest of the spur, with Leuze Wood in front of it and lower down. The British extreme right at Leuze Wood was 2,000 yards from Morval and in between there lay a broad, deep branch of the main valley that is overlooked by Morval and flanked at its head and by the high ground east of the valley that looks down into it. The Guards Division was positioned opposite this area, with the 6th Division on its right and the 56th (1/1st London) Division on its left, and was tasked with taking Lesboeufs, an undertaking that was possible only if the two adjacent divisions were able to clear the two flanks and take Morval and Bouleaux respectively.

When the Battle of Flers-Courcelette opened on 15 September 1916 within this difficult tactical situation, the Guards Division was assembled in the trenches that ran north-east from the heavily defended Farlemont Farm to the village of Ginchy. The 2nd Guards Brigade was to the right of the 1st Guards Brigade (cf. Clerke), and within the 500-yards-long front that was assigned to it, Worsley’s Battalion was the Right Front Battalion and the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards was the Left Front Battalion of the 2nd Guards Brigade, with the 1st Battalion of the Scots Guards immediately behind them as the Right Support Battalion next to the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards as the Left Support Battalion. Each of the four Battalions was formed up in four waves, with No. 4 Company and Stanhope’s No. 3 Company in the front, and No. 2 Company and No. 1 Company behind them respectively, and a gap of 50 yards between each platoon. The attack by the Guards Division was supposed to be supported by 11 tanks, but only six arrived, and of these, two took no part in the battle, three got lost, and one ditched (see H.R. Bell, who commanded one of them). Worsley’s 3rd Battalion was in position by 03.00 hours and the men were issued with rum and sandwiches. Then, at 06.00 hours, the artillery of 6th Division fired 40 large-calibre shells, and at 06.20 hours the Guards began their attack on the two German strong-points known as the Triangle and the Serpentine under a creeping barrage. But the ground around Ginchy was “a battered mass of irregular ridges and shell-holes, which overlapped and stretched away into the early morning mist”, making it very difficult to establish a clear line of advance, especially since there were no landmarks. In contrast, the German machine-gunners had an unimpeded field of fire and the War Diary of the 3rd Battalion provides the following account of what happened next:

Our Left Front company [No. 4 Company] was met by machine-gun fire as soon as it got up & lost Captain Mackenzie [its Commanding Officer] and Mr Asquith [Lieutenant Raymond Asquith (1878–1916), the Prime Minister’s son] at once. […] The last remaining officer of the Coy also fell within 200 yds of our own trenches.

But the Right Front Company (Stanhope’s No. 3 Company) got off “much more fortunately & did not seem to lose until a considerable way out”. They managed to capture “a line of shell holes held by Germans 250 yards out” and killed everyone there, even though this simply “impaired the cohesion of the assault”, and although their Commanding Officer and most of their officers had been killed or wounded, the survivors succeeded in taking the first objective, the Green Line, 600 yards from the starting-line. But although the intense machine-gun fire made it impossible to go further on the right of the assault, in the centre, where units had become intermingled, a mixed group from various units of the 2nd Guards Brigade pushed forward past the Green Line for 800 yards and got near the second line of German trenches, but then had to fall back to the Green Line for lack of numbers. So by the evening of 15 September, Worsley’s 3rd Battalion held a small frontage that was to the right of the first objective and had to fight off enemy counter-attacks throughout the night of 15/16 September.

The war diarist made the following comment on the day’s events: “It appeared that Les Boeufs would have fallen into our hands without opposition or at any rate with only an ill-organized resistance if more troops could have been pushed on”, and gave the following reasons for the assault’s very limited success: (1) The Battalion’s left flank was/appeared to be in the air as the 1st Battalion had started behind us; (2) its right flank was completely exposed – not least because the 6th Division failed to advance in support of the Guards Division 9 [they had been held up by a German strong-point called The Quadrilateral – RWS]; (3) the closeness of the attacking formation and the irregularity of the assembly trenches caused the waves to become muddled up; and (4) the Brigade tended to split up to the right and the left in order to cover its exposed flanks. The 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers lost heavily during the day’s fighting, but on 16 September it was withdrawn to the Citadel, where 20 per cent of its officers, Company Sergeant-Majors and senior non-commissioned officers had been kept in reserve in case of such a calamitous eventuality. And when, on 20 September, the survivors of the Battalion were withdrawn to bivouacs at Carnoy, the Battalion was reconstituted in a matter of days and moved back to Trônes Wood by 26 September after resting for five days.

Vernon was mortally wounded south-west of Ginchy on 15 September 1916 during the attack on Lesboeufs, aged 23. He and Stanhope died and E.G. Worsley was also mortally wounded less than two miles south of Flers, which is just to the north of Ginchy, where H.W. Garton, E.K. Parsons and E.H.L. Southwell were all killed in action on the same day. Vernon has no known grave. At 09.25 hours on 16 September, 61st Brigade, part of the 20th (Light) Division, succeeded in capturing the previous day’s third objective, a section of the Ginchy–Lesboeufs road, but when, on 26 September, the Guards Division attacked Lesboeufs for the second time and captured it, the 2nd Guards Brigade was kept in reserve.

After the battle, it took Vernon’s parents quite some time to find out whether he was dead or wounded, but on 28 September 1916, the Reverend T. Guy Rogers, the Chaplain of the 2nd Guards Brigade, wrote them a letter in which he said the following:

I loved [your son Douglas] I think best of all the young officers I know and I feel his loss more keenly than I can say. He was so lovable, so full of spirits, so brave and so really good. […] Sometimes we used to have long talks together and I can recall one at Elverdinghe Château where we talked over the deepest things concerning life and death and the hereafter. He used to come regularly to my Communion Services and never lost his keenness. I always thought of him as the very ideal of life and buoyancy and splendid activity – and he had such high ideals for his own life work in the future. Somewhere in the Home of God I am certain that his gifts and capacities will be put to the use for which God intended them. If ever the opportunity should occur I shall come to see you personally for I can never forget Douglas. […] His death was painless, shot through the head, he died – or rather I would prefer to say – entered into life immediately. May God bless the example he set to all of us. Out of 9 officers in the Machine Gun Company, 6 were killed. […] The remaining three were wounded. […] There never was such a happy Mess as the Machine Gun Company Mess, and never a more efficient and devoted set of Officers. It is difficult to see how such a loss can be repaired. There has been no possibility of getting the bodies down from the battlefield but the Pioneers [4th Battalion of the Coldstream Guards] have been all over the ground burying the bodies where they lay, and a service of Committal has been taken on the field. Our Brigade was relieved immediately after the Action and I have[,] I am sorry to say[,] no further particulars. It was in the advance on Les Boeufs forming part of the advance on Martinpuich[,] Flers and the country round near Combles that he fell. His Company covered itself with glory. Be very proud of your boy.

Vernon is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier and Face 8D; and also on a plaque in St Hildeburgh’s Church, Hoylake, Cheshire, that lists all the members of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club who were killed in action in World War One. He left £3,201 12s.

Bibliography

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

Printed sources: 

[Anon.], ‘Town and County Gossip’, Derby Daily Telegraph, no. 10,714 (8 January 1914), p. 4.

[Anon.], ‘Lieutenant H[erbert] Douglas Vernon’ [obituary], The Times, no. 41,286 (30 September 1916), p. 10.

[Anon.], ‘Lieut. H.D. Vernon’ [obituary], The Oxford Chronicle, no. 4,232 (6 October 1916), p. 8.

F[rank] F[letcher], ‘In Memoriam: Herbert Douglas Vernon’, The Carthusian, 12, no. 397 (April 1917), pp. 66–7.

Ponsonby (1920), i, pp. 299–307; ii, pp. 86–107.

[Anon.], ‘Sir Herbert Vernon’ [obituary], The Times, no. 46,470 (14 June 1933), p.16.

[Anon.], ‘Sir Norman Vernon: Flour milling magnate’ [obituary], The Times, no. 56,915 (14 April 1967), p. 12.

Leinster-Mackay (1984), pp. 58, 113, 122, 127, 137–8, 160–1, 326.

McCarthy (1998), pp. 100–1.

Ronald Rompsey, Grenfell of Labrador: A Biography (Reprint) (Montreal: Macgill-Queen’s UP, 2009), pp. 3–14.

Archival sources:

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

MCA: PR/2/18 (President’s Notebooks [1913]), p. 395.

MCA: PR 32/C/3/1161-1162 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letter relating to H.D. Vernon [1914–16]).

OUA UR 2/1/81.

WO95/1360.

WO339/48983.