Leslie (originally Winchester on birth certificate) Russell Alcock Gatehouse BA

• Matriculated: 1904

• Born: 3 January 1886

• Died: 3 October 1926

• Regiment: The King’s (Liverpool) Regiment

• Grave/Memorial: St Andrew’s Church graveyard, St Andrew’s Road, Lower Bebington, Wirral

Family background

b. 3 January 1886 at “Ronaldsay”, Village Road, Oxton, Birkenhead, Cheshire, as the only son (of two children) of Richard George Gatehouse (1858–1939) and Rose Stewart Lindsay Gatehouse (née Pelly) (b. 1858 in Canada, d. 1929). At the time of the 1891 Census the family was living at 1 Grosvenor Place, Claughton-cum-Grange, on the outskirts of Birkenhead (three servants), at the time of the 1901 Census at 19 Heath Road, Lower Bebington, Cheshire (six servants), and at the time of the 1911 Census at Abbot’s Grange, Bebington (four servants).

 

Parents and antecedents

Gatehouse’s father was the only son of Charles Gatehouse (1823–1908), who was born in Chichester as the son of a brewer. By the time of the 1851 Census Charles Gatehouse was living in Cheetham, Manchester, and working as a brewer, and by 1861 he was a licensed victualler (and brewer) in Birkenhead, where he lived until his death. He was involved in the civic life of Birkenhead and was elected at various times as a Guardian, a Commissioner and a Councillor; he was also the People’s Churchwarden of St Anne’s Church and President of the Albert Industrial Schools.

Gatehouse’s father matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford in 1877 and took his BA in 1882 and his MA in 1883. He rowed for the College VIII and was a keen rifle shot, and after leaving Oxford he joined his father’s company which then traded under the name of “Gatehouse and Son”. By 1891 the Company held the licences for 17 hotels/public houses in the Birkenhead area and in 1896 it was re-formed as a public company – the West Cheshire Brewery Co. – while retaining the Directors of Gatehouse and Son. Gatehouse’s father was one of its three Directors and succeeded his father as Managing Director until 1927, when the West Cheshire Brewery Company became part of Threlfalls Brewery, a Liverpool/Salford Company that was founded in 1861 and became the largest brewery in north-west England and the eighth largest brewery in Britain until it was taken over by Whitbread in 1967. Charles Gatehouse left £33,000 and Richard George left £296,000.

Gatehouse’s mother was the older daughter (second of four children) of Augustus Edward Pelly (b. 1823 in Pernambuco, Brazil, d. 1907), the third son of a Gloucestershire clergyman and a distant cousin of Sir John Henry Pelly (1777–1852), 1^st Baronet, the Governor of the Bank of England from 1841 to 1842 and the Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) from 1822 to 1852. In 1838, Augustus Edward sailed from London to Quebec on the West Indiaman Prince George (1806–c.1863) and worked as an assistant clerk with the HBC in Montreal, Saskatchewan and British Columbia until the autumn of 1845, when he returned to Britain on leave. During his leave he became engaged to Anne Rose Clouston (1831–74), the daughter of Robert Clouston (dates unknown), the HBC agent in Stromness, the Orkney Islands, where the Clouston family had lived since the end of the sixteenth century. Several members of the family had worked for the HBC, and after Augustus Edward returned to Canada in 1848, Anne Rose joined him there in 1849, when they were married at York Factory, the HBC’s main trading post on the Hudson Bay.

Augustus Edward finally became the HBC’s Chief Trader in the Red River district of Manitoba until 1853, when he was put in charge of Fort Colvile, Oregon, a major trading centre on the Columbia River that the HBC had built in 1825 when this part of Oregon still belonged to Britain. In 1855 Augustus Edward finally retired from the HBC and by the time of the 1861 Census he and his family were living in Montreal, where he was in partnership with a man called Lupton, manufacturing washing crystals. In 1871 and 1881 Augustus Edward and his family were living in Britain, where he worked as cashier for a general merchant in Birkenhead, and by 1891, now a widower, he had retired to Wandsworth, London SW11. According to the 1901 Census, he was a patient in St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

 

Siblings and their families

Gatehouse had a sister, Rosalind (Rose) (1892–1957), who in 1924 married John Noel Pelly (1888–1945); they had one son and one daughter.

John Nel Pelly was the grandson of Sir John Henry Pelly (see above), and therefore his wife’s distant cousin on her mother’s side. John Noel sat a competitive examination for a cadetship in the Royal Navy in 1903, came 36th out of the 69 awarded places, and was commissioned Sub-Lieutenant on 30 May 1908 (London Gazette, no. 28,213, 8 January 1909, p. 232). He was promoted Lieutenant RN on 31 December 1910 (LG, no. 28,452, 2 January 1911, p. 5), and Commander on 30 June 1925 (LG, no. 33,063, 3 July 1925, p. 4,452), and he retired at his own request in June 1934 with the rank of Captain RN. But he was recalled to the Navy at the beginning of World War Two and appointed Commanding Officer of HMS King Alfred, a shore-based training establishment for Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officers in Hove, Sussex. He was made a CBE in 1942 but collapsed and died while on duty on 6 June 1945. An obituarist wrote that he was “the ideal man to bend a strict service outlook with that of a civilian, upon which the success of the whole scheme of officer production in war-time so very largely depends.”

 

Education

From c.1893 to 1899 Gatehouse attended Mostyn House Preparatory School, Parkgate, Neston, Cheshire (cf. H.D. Vernon). This school was founded in 1852 in the village of Tarvin, West Cheshire, by the Revd E.H. Price (b. c.1823 in Italy, d. after 1864), and moved in 1858 to Parkgate, where it was run by the Grenfell family until its closure in 2010. It was sometimes known as “Grenfell’s School”, after the Revd 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. Gatehouse then attended Eton from 1899 to 1904, where he was a member of the Oppidan Wall team (1902–03) and the mixed Wall team (1903). He also rowed in the College VIII (1903–04), was in the field XI (1903), and won the School Sculling (1904).

Gatehouse passed Responsions in September 1904 and matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 18 October 1904, where his potential as an oarsman had already attracted attention four days previously and he had been “tubbed with a view to a trial in the four”. So on the day of his matriculation he took over from G.C.B. James at stroke in Magdalen’s trial crew for the Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC) coxless Fours, with James at No. 2. But the Magdalen IV lacked a regular coach and was on several occasions without a coach of any description while training for the race. Consequently, James Douglas Stobart (1884–1970; Magdalen 1902–05) – Magdalen’s Secretary of the Boat Club for 1904/05 – concluded that “we had to do the best we could”, because, he added, “we were rather an uneven sort of crew & very much missed an experienced stroke, for altho’ Gatehouse did pretty well, he had of course never filled that position before, & in build & weight [13 stone 11½ pounds] is hardly suited for it”. Over the next two weeks or so, while the Magdalen crew were training, Stobart’s comments on the quality of their rowing veered between the uncompromisingly negative and the grudgingly positive. On 28 October he wrote in the Secretary’s Notebook: “Very bad row without any semblance of length or rhythm”; on 29 October: “Bad cross wind which upset the rowing & steering considerably”; on 31 October: “We never fell together or got properly going till we were thro’ the Gut, where we seemed to settle down, & rowed in quite respectably”; and on 1 November: “Two ½ mins when we put in 21 & 23 strokes with a great effort & scramble”. Finally, on 4 November, Magdalen’s first day of racing, when the Magdalen IV was competing against University College, the eventual winners of the coxless Fours that year, Stobart wrote:

Going off at 37 we held our own for a time, till just before Weir’s Bridge we ran into the bank. We got out again at once but had lost fully a length which we never recovered. We were 1½ lengths to the bad at the Gut. Up the Green Bank we lengthened out & began to draw up a little, but as the effort died out University came up fast, & rowing well together up the barges finally won by 3 lengths.

Nevertheless, he concluded: although “it is a satisfaction to know that [Magdalen] rowed better in the races than was expected from our practice forms […] we were considerably handicapped by very indifferent steering”.

Despite this poor assessment of Gatehouse’s ability as the stroke of a coxless Four, in December 1904 he was one of the two Magdalenses to be given a place in the University’s Trial VIII – though he never rowed in the Blue Boat itself. And although he rowed in neither of Magdalen’s two Torpid boats in February 1905, on 24 May 1905 he rowed at No. 4 as the heaviest member of the crew in the Magdalen VIII that included James and E.H.L. Southwell and regained the Headship of the River after a gap of five years by bumping New College. While training for that race during the first half of May 1905, the Magdalen VIII was far from perfect, and Stobart left detailed comments on his view of the training sessions, some of which are even less complimentary than his comments cited above. On 15 May: “Rotten”; on 16 May: “Exceedingly slovenly performance. It lack[ed] life, leg drive & swing”; on 17 May: “Exceedingly slovenly performance again, & a most unsatisfactory row for we were again very slow over the first part of the course. After passing the Gut we seemed to wake up a bit & rowed well up the Green Bank, but from the boat house in it was a dismal bucket, & no-one seemed properly rowed out at the finish owing to saving themselves at the start”; on 18 May: “Mr Tew coached and by dint of a few home truths seemed to wake the crew up & instil some idea of rhythm into us, & by making us row a faster stroke, showed us that we could”. But matters improved over the next five days and Stobart’s account of the crucial race on 24 May reads as follows:

The first night New College started Head of the River with Magdalen 2nd. Magdalen got away well, rowing 39 strokes in the first minute but gained very little at first on New College; till in the straight bit before the Gut we were called upon to “give her ten”. The crew answered well &, having settled down a bit by then, began to row long and hard & immediately commenced to gain. The advantaged [sic] was considerably increased coming out of the Gut owing to superior coxing on our part, but at the Green Bank New College began to draw slightly away. It was a despairing effort however, for just before the crossing Magdalen again began to draw up fast & our Cox taking a beautiful course, we effected our bump just opposite the boat house & went Head of the River [for the first time since 1900].

As Gatehouse was in the successful VIII, he must have played a major part in the bacchanalian Bump Supper that took place in Magdalen on 31 May 1905 and is described so graphically by G.M.R. Turbutt in his Diary. Commenting on the individual members of the crew of the winning VIII, Magdalen’s Captain of Boats 1904/05 – James Herbert Morrell (1882–1965; Magdalen 1901–05) – wrote of Gatehouse:

He has unusual difficulties to contend with, as he is not the ideal build for an oar, being very strong but having a short body & therefore only able to move thro’ a small arc. He has a quick, smart beginning but rather a clumsy finish & [a] slow recovery. He raced very much above his practice form, besides perhaps saving the crew in steadying No. 5 when it was of the utmost importance that everyone should keep his head.

Despite these shortcomings, Gatehouse was elected Captain of the Magdalen College Boat Club (MCBC) for 1905/06, and on 9 October, he, together with Stobart – who had been offered a post in London that he was obliged to accept and was replaced by Charles Leslie Garton, the older brother of Herbert Westlake Garton and Edward Clive Garton – began training for the OUBC coxless Fours, which were scheduled to take place on 2, 3 and 4 November. In the end, Magdalen won “a most exciting and well-fought race [against New College] by ¾ length” thanks to a crew consisting entirely of Etonians. Although Gatehouse did not subsequently participate in the Torpid races of February 1906, in March 1906 he began training for Eights Week of Trinity Term 1906, when he rowed with R.P. Stanhope, J.L. Johnston, A.G. Kirby and Southwell in a crew which the Coach described as “featureless” but which held off the formidable New College VIII for five nights and so retained the Headship of the River on 23 May. On 7, 8 and 9 June Gatehouse rowed with Kirby in the OUBC Pairs but lost to a Pair from Merton and Christ Church.

Then, after a couple of substitutions during practice, Gatehouse rowed for the second time with Stanhope, Johnston, Kirby and Southwell when, on 3 July 1906, it competed for the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley but lost to a Belgian crew in the first round of the heats by 1¼ lengths in front of a huge crowd (see Southwell for more details). This crew was one of the two Magdalen VIIIs that would lose five of its nine men killed in action in World War One. At the end of Gatehouse’s year as Captain, Stobart, the Club’s Secretary, would characterize Gatehouse’s captaincy as follows:

14 st. 3 lb. An oarsman of immense strength but inconvenient build. He has always found it difficult to get length forward and swing; but in spite of his physical disadvantages he rows a stroke which is very effective, and backs up stroke excellently. A firstrate [sic] captain who has done very much for the boat club.

C.L. Garton became Magdalen’s Captain of Boats for the Academic Year 1906/07, with Southwell as the Secretary of the MCBC. Garton began his year of office, as he put it in the Secretary’s Book:

under as auspicious circumstances as have attended the College rowing. Not only was the entire eight […] still in residence, but the freshmen included the Eton Captain of Boats and Coxswain, both of whom are expected to do great things. Thus it was certainly anticipated that the Fours Challenge Cup would not leave Magdalen. That it should be retained in the peculiar way in which it was destined to be, was not expected at the commencement of training, least of all by those who figured in the so-called “first crew”; but it was a tremendous triumph for Magdalen rowing, and caused great satisfaction to everyone.

The practice crew for the coxless Fours on October 31 and 1 and 2 November was the same crew that had won the event in 1905. Although they began by finding it easy to “get together”, their chances of winning were spoilt by Gatehouse falling ill on the day before the races and being replaced by Johnston. “Luckily”, Southwell continued, “[Johnston] was fairly fit, having played football for the College; but as he had done no rowing since Henley[,] he could hardly be expected to do himself justice.”

In December 1906, Gatehouse played for the Oxford Old Etonians’ team in the annual field game – a cross between rugby and soccer that is played by all Etonians during their first three years in the College – against the Cambridge Old Etonians, and besides himself, three others of the team of eleven would lose their lives in the war, among them C.T. Mills and C.A. Gold. Finally, in late May 1907, Gatehouse rowed at No. 4 in the crew that competed in the Summer Eights but was beaten by Christ Church for the Headship of the River and came Second. Southwell offered the following comments on Magdalen’s defeat:

[Christ Church] were undoubtedly a very fast crew, and went faster the further they went; and, lastly, when once Head they were not much troubled by us. The fact remains, however, and it is worth pointing out, that we did try too many experiments; most probably we made a wrong decision in the end owing to the deceitful following wind […]; and that anyhow a crew must make up its mind early.

Gatehouse did not, however, take part in the subsequent races at Henley.

Gatehouse sat his First Public Examination in Trinity Term 1905 and October 1905 and then read for a Pass Degree over three terms from 1905 to 1907 (Groups A1 [Greek and/or Latin Literature/Philosophy], B3 [Elements of Political Economy], and B4 [Law]). He finally took his BA on 27 October 1910, the year in which he became a Director of his family’s brewing company; he was described as such on his death certificate.

 

Wife and children

In 1914 Gatehouse married Cicely Knox (1885–1957). Their two daughters were Mary Cicely Gatehouse (1915–90; b. in Keene, New Hampshire, USA) and Nancy Catherine Gatehouse (1922–2011).

Cicely was the daughter of the Revd Canon Andrew Knox (1849–1915), LL.D. Canon Knox studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and took his BA in 1871, his MA in 1877, his LL.B in 1878 and his LL.D in 1879. He was ordained deacon in 1872 and priest in 1873 and then served as Curate of St Mary Hunslet, Leeds, from 1872 to 1876 and then Vicar of St Anne’s, Birkenhead, from 1876 to 1881, a parish with a population of 7,000 and a net income of £320 p.a. “He was prominently identified with public affairs in the district, and was held in high esteem by the inhabitants, without regard to party or denomination.”

Leslie Russell and Cicely’s daughter Mary Cicely married first (in 1942) Anthony North Hickley (born 10 March in London, died 5 September 1972 at Glencalvie, Scotland), a solicitor and first-class cricketer. Mary married second (date unknown, possibly in the USA) Robert Schumann (b. 1918 in Philadelphia, d. 1997 in New Mexico). Their younger daughter Nancy Catherine (1922–2011) married (1954) Thomas Robert William Longmore (b. 1925), a member of the Nigerian Administration 1948–60 and a practising solicitor 1964–90.

From 1911 to 1918, Gatehouse and his family lived at Abbot’s Grange, Bebington, Cheshire, and from 1919 at Brynhir, Parkgate, near Birkenhead, Cheshire. At the time of his death he was living at Ruby Vale, Thornton Hough, Cheshire. By November 1926 Cicely and their two daughters were living with her sister Nancy at Sutton End, Pulborough, Sussex.

 

War service

Gatehouse applied for a Territorial Commission on 31 March 1911 and was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the 1/10^th (Scottish) Battalion, the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment (Territorial Force) with effect from 20 May 1911 (London Gazette, no. 28,496, 19 May 1911, p. 3,822). He was promoted Lieutenant on 18 September 1912 (LG, no. 28,661, 8 November 1912, p. 8,206) and made an aide-de camp soon after the outbreak of war (LG, no. 28,892, 4 September 1914, p. 7,015). But although his Battalion landed at Le Havre on 2 November 1914 as part of 9^th Brigade, in the 3^rd Division, Gatehouse was not with it as he had had his appendix removed on 1 October 1914 and did not leave England until 4 December 1914. He then spent six months with his Battalion in the trenches, but for the last three months of this period he suffered from colitis, accompanied by fever and nervous depression, and had to spend a period in hospital in France before being sent back to England on 27 May 1915, arriving at Dover on 31 May. On 8 June 1915 Gatehouse was granted a period of sick leave; he was promoted Captain with effect from 28 September 1915 (LG, no. 29,598, 26 May 1916, p. 5,308); and on 5 October 1915 a civilian doctor gave the opinion that he was “totally unfit for active service” and that he would, at best, be able to cope only with light work. Although on 7 October 1915 an Army Medical Board at Liverpool also judged him unfit for active service because of “long-standing colitis aggravated by conditions of active service”, on 4 April 1916 an Army Medical Board in Blackpool judged him fit for General Service and he returned to France, where, on 6 January 1916, his Battalion had been transferred to 166^th Brigade, in the 55^th Division.

On 9 April 1918, near Givenchy, he was wounded in the chest by a shell fragment which penetrated his diaphragm, entered his left chest, and would eventually affect his lungs by causing chronic shortage of breath and debility. The surgeons who operated on him in the Casualty Clearing Station were unable to remove the foreign body and sent Gatehouse to No. 24 General Hospital at Étaples, where he spent the next six weeks with no better results and where, on 10 May 1918, he was visited by his wife and mother. He embarked for England on 22 May 1918 and was taken to the 3^rd London Hospital in Wandsworth, south-west London, where the foreign body was finally removed. Not long before he was wounded, Gatehouse applied for promotion to Major, but on 26 June 1918, Lieutenant-Colonel Munro, the Commanding Officer of 166^th Brigade, wrote a letter in which he declared that he did not consider Gatehouse a suitable officer to command a Company and refused his application on the grounds that his “knowledge of military subjects was poor, and his lack of initiative was marked”. Indeed, the letter stated that if Gatehouse had remained with the Battalion, he would have been relieved of his command. No-one seems to have realized that his “lack of suitability” might have been connected with physical and psychological conditions which antedated his mobilization and had worsened under the impact of the trenches, but about which he preferred to keep silent for fear of “letting the side down.”

Gatehouse resigned his commission on 29 January 1919 and was discharged two days later. But his operations had left him with three large scars on his left back and broncho-pneumonia in his left lung, with the result that he suffered from weight loss and was incapable of sustained exertion of any kind. Indeed, at one point his left lung was almost functionless. Over the next six years, Gatehouse underwent a further series of operations for his condition, the last of which, a sequestrectomy, took place at Carlisle on 12 September 1926. After undergoing the operation he suffered from febrile influenza for six days, which gave rise to hyperpyrexia (“ultra-high temperature”) for four days, and he died on 3 October 1926 at the North of England Nursing Home, 19 Warwick Square, Carlisle, aged 40. He left £51,097 3s. 9d. and his widow received a pension of £140 p.a., plus an allowance of £36 p.a. for each of their two children, but because he had not been on active service during any part of the three years leading up to his death, his family was granted no remission of death duties. As the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s remit extends only from 4 August 1914 to 31 August 1921, it has no record of Gatehouse’s grave, but we now know that he is buried in plot B244 of the graveyard at St Andrew’s Church, St Andrew’s Road, Lower Bebington, The Wirral, Cheshire, and is commemorated on a memorial tablet inside the church itself. At the request of his family, his name was added to Magdalen’s War Memorial in 1928.

Unfortunately his gravestone was removed in the 1960s, making it impossible now to identify the exact location of plot B244, but in 1968 a register of memorial inscriptions was produced by the local Society of Genealogists and his reads: “In proud and loving Memory of Leslie Russell Alcock Gatehouse, born January 3 1885, died October 3 1926 from wounds received at Civenchy, April 9 1918”. The misspelling of Givenchy is probably due to meteorological damage since the graveyard is very close to the sea.

 

Bibliography

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

Special acknowledgements:

The Editors would particularly like to thank Mr Michael O’Brien for locating the whereabouts of Gatehouse’s grave and for supplying us with a picture of the plaque inside the Church.

They would also like to make it clear that while researching this biography, they did not know of Nigel McCrery’s excellent book Hear the Boat Sing (The History Press: Stroud, 2017), which provides detailed accounts of the lives of 42 Oxford and Cambridge Rowing Blues who were killed in action during World War One or died because of the war. As eight of these were Magdalenses or connected with Magdalen through a close relative, we and Mr McCrery have been following similar research paths and so made use of the same resources. But whereas Mr McCrery has focussed more on the finer points of rowing, we have focussed more on family and social history and the two projects complement each other well.

 

Printed sources:

 [Anon.], [Death notice of the Revd Dr Andrew Knox], Staffordshire Sentinel, no. 2,582 (13 October 1881), p. 4.

 

Archival sources:

MCA: 04/A1/1 (MCBC, Crews and Blues: Secretary’s Notebook [1888–1907]), pp. 384, 386, 394–5, 408–24, 428, 434, 457–9, 461, 477–86.

MCA: PR2/21 (President Warren’s Notebooks), p. 193.

MCA: PR2/22 (President Warren’s Notebooks), p. 12.

MCA: PR32/C/3/515–519 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters relating to L.R.A. Gatehouse [1904–19]).

OUA: UR 2/1/54.

WO374/26662.