Leslie Whitaker Hunter, BA MA

• Matriculated: 1905, at New College

• Born: 1 April 1886

• Died: 13 August 1916

• Regiment: Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

• Grave/Memorial: Pozières British Cemetery, Ovillers-La Boisselle: Special Memorial 21

Family background

b. 1 April 1886 in Hampstead as the elder son (of four children) of Leslie Hunter (1841–1919) and May Hunter (née Whitaker) (c.1850–1934) (m. 1879). At the time of the 1881 and 1891 Censuses, the family was living at 16, Alexander Road, South Hampstead (three servants); at the 1901 Census it had moved to 131, King Henry’s Road, Hampstead (two servants); and at the 1911 Census it had moved to 15, Kitson Road, Barnes, London SW15 (one servant).

 

Parents and antecedents

Although Hunter’s father was a solicitor, his paternal grandfather James Hunter (1808–1883) was a millwright, engineer and co-owner of Hunter and English of Bow, a firm that made steam engines from 1791 to 1921.

Hunter’s mother was the daughter of Thomas Whitaker (1821–1904) one of the founders in 1849 of Garret, Whitaker, Grimwood and Co., a brewery in Camden Town until 1899, when it was registered as Camden Brewery Co. Ltd. of which Whitaker was at one time chairman.

 

Siblings and their families

Brother of:

(1) Dorothy Mary (1882–1957);

(2) Sara Maud M. (1889–1974);

(3) Arthur Percival (later MBE) (1891–1970).

Neither of Hunter’s sisters appears to have married, but before the war his brother Arthur worked as a clerk with the London North-Western Railway. A member of the Territorial Army, he landed in France with the 1/28^th (County of London) Battalion, the London Regiment (Territorial Force) (Artists Rifles) on 28 October 1914. He rose to the rank of Lance-Sergeant, but when he was made a Railway Transport Officer (RTO), he was graded on the General List as a Staff Lieutenant, 2^nd class, on 21 September 1915. Nearly two years later he was promoted Captain (London Gazette, no. 29,323, 12 October 1915, p. 10,025; no. 30,181, 13 July 1917, p. 7,055), and at some juncture, probably when he first became a RTO, he was transferred to the Royal Engineers. In June 1919 he became Deputy Assistant Director of Railway Traffic with the rank of Temporary Major, and when he relinquished his commission on 23 September 1919 he was made up to Major (London Gazette, no. 31,657, 25 November 1919, p. 14,622; no. 31,881, 28 April 1920, p. 4,960). He left the Army on 1 August 1921 and in February 1923 was appointed Captain in the Intelligence Corps, possibly in the Reserve (London Gazette, no. 32,794, 9 February 1923, p. 997). By 1930 he was District Control Manager of the London Midland and Scottish Railway Co. Ltd. and based in Bedfordshire. He does not seem to have married and died in York.

 

Education and professional life

Hunter attended Mr S.C. Newton’s Loudown House Preparatory School, St John’s Wood, London NW (defunct) from 1894 to 1898, and then Winchester College from 1898 to August 1905, having come second in the entrance scholarship exam. In the course of a brilliant career at Winchester, he won just about every Classics prize on offer and many others: the King’s Medal for Latin Verse (1902), the Modern Language Prize (1903), the Goddard Scholarship (1903), the King’s Medal for English Essay (1904), the Hawkins English Literature Prize (1904), the Moore-Stevens Divinity Prize (1904), the Warden and Fellows’ Prizes for Greek Prose (1904), and Greek Iambics (1904) with a translation from Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Merope’, the King’s Gold Medal for speaking Latin Prose, the King’s Silver Medals for Latin Essay (1905) and Latin Speech (1905), and the Warden and Fellows’ Prize for English Essay (1905) with an essay on ‘The Greek Influence in English Poetry’. In 1905, he was also proxime accessit for the King’s Gold Medal for English Verse, and in June of that year he wrote a Latin poem to Dr Edmond Warre (1837–1920), on the occasion of his approaching retirement as Headmaster of Eton College (1884–1905), to which Warre replied in kind. The King’s Medals were established in 1795 by the Prince of Wales, thanks to a suggestion from his personal adviser the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816).

For the Short Half of 1900 the Annals of the 6^th Chamber (i.e. groups of rooms in the College’s ancient buildings where the 70 Scholars still live, work and sleep; in Hunter’s day these were divided up into mixed age groups with each Chamber overseen by one or two prefects) read:

[Hunter] appears to work incessantly, with vigour worthy of better things, but apart from this did nothing at all. Was once seen washing in the evening, & gave a very lame explanation of his strange conduct. Unfortunately broke his wrist playing football, & so deprives us of his company for a considerable time (1 week?).

The 6^th Chamber’s Annals for the Short Half of 1904 contain the following description of him:

This noble individual’s peculiar characteristics were a strong objection to the word ugly, when used […] and a marked tendency to be infra dig. to the Chamber. He kept up the tradition of his office by going up to books at rare and irregular intervals; but he did several tasks, and attended Morning Lines several times. This extraordinary zeal for keeping juniors up to the mark in tidying Ist and IVth was only surpassed by the punctuality with which he distributed battlings; which latter habit evoked as many blessings on his head from the community in general, as the former did curses from the few untidy juniors with whom he “severely dealt”. His most amusing statement was made at a meeting of Debating Society on October 19^th [q.v.] and ran as follows:- “After all, the ordinary language of a Public School, as in Chambers round half-faggot, is hardly fit for publication”. The way he brocked [?] the annalist [the secretary appointed to keep the Annals] was unnecessarily brutal. In spite of severe diseases of the thigh in the last VI Canvas, he attained the honour of VI. Stress.

And the 6^th Chamber’s Annals for the following term say that he

Is still trying to curb his candle-keeper’s ̛ακολασία, to say nothing of his Middle Prefect’s weaknesses. It has not yet, however, broken his heart, which was revived shortly before Thorntons by a house-scarf. Into his all-devouring maw fell English Essay and Latin Prose, and he would no doubt have added Greek Verse to his roll of “amassments”, had he not done so a year ago. Successfully, but without great alacrity, he survived the double ordeal of Steeplechase and Athla, in the former hiring a band of assassins to keep back the fighters for tickets. We must sympathise with him for being only proxime in the Headmaster’s Modern Language Prize. He has beaten all previous records for the reading of Names-callings (best time up to date 51 1/5 secs). Does not agree with the proposition of PoG Wells’, that he should pay for books supplied to his namesake [R.J. Hunter] in Mr. Cook’s house.

Hunter’s interests were primarily scholarly, as can be inferred from his participation in the Debating Society, the Shakspere [sic] Reading Society and the Sixteen Club. He made his début in the Debating Society on 10 February 1904 with a “distinctly promising” extempore speech in which he expressed approval of professional sportsmen who earned their living by personal skill and coaching, but deplored those “who do no coaching, such as cycling and football professionals”. On 19 October 1904, he gave a long “interesting and well expressed speech” in a debate on the modern novel in which

he upheld the right of the novelist to entertain rather than instruct. Charles Kingsley, he said, was often wearisome as a teacher, and Dickens repellent when he played the moralist. Nor were all the great men of the past sound as moralists; witness the tendency of Vanity Fair and the glorification of Becky Sharp. He repelled the attacks on modern heroines instancing the fine character of Corona in Marion Crawford’s Saracinesca, and retorted that many modern creations compared favourably with the insipid heroes of the Waverley Novels.

His remarks about Public School language quoted above seem to have been made in a coda which could have well been omitted and in which he “descend[ed] to the subject of the school story, as told in serial magazines”. Later that term he was elected the Society’s Treasurer, an office which he held for the rest of his time at Winchester, and in that capacity, on 16 November 1904, he gave an “interesting and able speech” as the proposer of a motion disapproving of modern men’s costume. He argued that clothes unsuited to town life should be abolished, that more colour should be introduced into men’s evening attire, and that something should be done to “prevent the ruinous craze among the poor of aping their superiors”, given that clothes had become so expensive since the beginning of the century. On 8 February 1905 he contributed briefly to a debate about the strikes in Russia, making “a valuable contribution to the case against the strikers”; on 8 March he spoke against capital punishment when the overwhelming majority of those present were in favour of it: “The murderer is not irreclaimable. Why should not the decrease of murder, in countries where capital punishment was abolished, be due to abolition, just as much as to social reforms?” Finally, on 22 March, he warned against the growing danger presented by China and Japan.

In Hunter’s last year at Winchester he was elected Vice-President of the Shakspere [sic] Reading Society, where he proved to be a reasonable and “vigorous” actor. He had a good voice, and received an encore for singing Stanford’s setting of Henry Newbolt’s ‘The Old Superb’ at the School concert in the summer term. The same thing happened again when, as a returning Old Boy, he sang ‘Devon, O Devon’, one of Stanford’s Songs of the Sea, at the concert of 4 April 1907. Finally, he was a founder member of the Sixteen Club, established in autumn 1904 for the “reading and discussing of papers on general, literary, and historical subjects”, and on 6 November of that year he presented a paper on “Colet, Erasmus, More: the birth of modern thought in England”. He became Prefect of Chapel (1902–3), Prefect of Library (1903–4) and Prefect of Hall (Aul. Prae., Senior Prefect, i.e. Head Boy) (1904–5).

Although Hunter’s interests were primarily academic and intellectual, he played cricket and football for his House and was in the College XV. But he was not on his “best form”, when his House team played the Winchester version of football (known as “our game”) against Old College on 27 October 1904, and did better against Houses and Commoners on 10 and 12 November. In his final term at Winchester he captained the College 2^nd (cricket) XI when it won against Mr Bather’s XI on 1 June: he himself was run out for 34 having “made some beautiful strokes” and put up a fine stand for the last wicket.

On being awarded a place at New College, Oxford, Hunter was given a Winchester College Exhibition, but he was also elected a Classical Scholar of New College, where he matriculated on 14 October 1905, having been exempted from Responsions. He passed the First Public Examination in the Hilary Terms of 1906 and 1907, when he was awarded a 1^st in Classical Moderations. In the Trinity Term of 1909 he was awarded a 1^st in Literae Humaniores, and he took his BA on 21 October 1909 and his MA in 1912. At Oxford, his academic career was as distinguished as it had been at Winchester. He won all four University prizes for classical composition: the Gaisford Prize for Verse (1906), the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin Verse (1907) with a poem entitled ‘Zenobia’, the Gaisford Prize for Prose (1908), and the Chancellor’s Latin Essay Prize (1910). The Gaisford Prizes at Oxford were founded in 1855 in memory of Dr Thomas Gaisford (1779–1855); for most of its history, the prize was awarded for Classical Greek Verse and Prose, but the prizes are now called the Gaisford Essay Prize and the Gaisford Dissertation Prize. But Hunter’s English Foreword to his prize-winning Latin Essay, published in 1910 as Rus vacuum, shows that he was not just a meticulous young scholar with a recherché taste for texts, but that he possessed a self-ironic and drily satirical wit that makes him seem much older than 24.

The essay, which deals with the alleged decay of traditional country life, is clearly a reflection of contemporary concerns, and its arguments shift between several mouth-pieces. First, there is Pan, who begins by trying “to place the reader in a sufficiently vague and romantic state of mind” and represents “the Sentimentalist view of Country Life, makes bold to deal with the passing of the ‘Little People’ and the decay of Folk Song” and his “sentimentality” gives “a heightened colour to his language”. Then there is Saturnus, “the well-read and well-bred Tory” who “points out and illustrates from Roman History: (a) The importance of the small land-owner; (b) The process of his extinction by the great land-owner.” Ceres comes next and “appears to raise the vexed question of Agriculture v. Pasturage”. The Author himself, who cannot be identified with Hunter tout court, appears in fourth place and counters Ceres by supplying “his own views as to the influence of Free Trade on Agriculture”. The “well-bred Tory” then “deprecates the influence of the School Board on rural life and manners, and deplores the facilities given by travel to the rural Exodus”. But he “fails to see the vital point at issue, i.e. that the discontent of the countryman with old-fashioned country life is an inevitable consequence of modern education and awakening interests. Pallas then “appears as the School Board, but the School Board with a conscience stimulated by Triptolemus, the advocate of better agricultural science and better technical educational [sic] among English Farmers, as the only hope of surviving competition”. A solution “is offered in the shape of Small Holdings, which the more enlightened public sees to be useless without sufficient co-operation”, whereupon the Author, “after an attempt to lift the discussion to an ideal Wordsworthian plane, derides his sentimentality and moves the closure”. Beneath Hunter’s somewhat whimsical jokiness, it is not hard to discern that sense of an ending, that “wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside”, which made A Shropshire Lad (1896), by Hunter’s distinguished fellow classicist A.E. Housman (1859–1936), so popular with the pre-1914 generation and which for so many of them, including Hunter, would become a reality in only a few years’ time.

Hunter got a distinguished mention in the Hertford Scholarship Examination for 1907 – the year when the Scholarship was won by the future English Roman Catholic theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox (1888–1957) (cf. G.M.R. Turbutt and E.H.L. Southwell). In 1907/8 he came seventh in the examination for the Ireland and Craven Scholarship (Ronald Knox came second and a scion of the Toynbee family came eighth). In 1909 he was awarded the Derby Scholarship and the Abbott Scholarship, and in 1910 he won the Passmore Edwards Scholarship. In October 1910 he was elected to an Open Classics Fellowship at Magdalen on the basis of a dissertation (published 1927) on Aeneas Tacitus, the fourth-century BC writer who is one of the earliest writers on the art of war, that consisted of a text, critical apparatus, English translation and Introduction. He was elected Fellow of New College in January 1912 and remained as such until his death. His obituary in the Oxford Magazine notes that “the work [there] was a great delight to him”.

On 22 December 1908, the distinguished German Classical scholar, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), celebrated his 60^th birthday and Hunter, who had almost certainly heard Wilamowitz lecture in Oxford on 3 and 4 June 1908 (when he had, incidentally, spent a night in the four-poster bed in Magdalen’s Fellows’ Guest Room), sent him a 14-line poem in Greek signed “unus ex Oxoniensibus alumnis” that would be not be published until 30 years later, in Ελεγεια [Elegeia]. While an undergraduate, Hunter had been a pupil of the eminent Classicist Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) (Fellow of New College 1888–1909; Honorary Fellow of New College 1909–1957; Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford 1908–36). According to Brian Murdoch, it was probably Murray who encouraged Hunter to send Wilamowitz the poem, in which he hails the German scholar “as the mightiest of the Philhellenes, and dismissed his age, since the muses are ageless”. Wilamowitz was courteous enough to reply to the younger man in elegiac couplets, protesting “that he was afraid of the envy of the Gods after so much praise. He is an old man […], but will welcome death knowing that young men like Hunter would go on ‘paying homage to the Muses’.” “In the event”, Murdoch concludes, “the sentiment would have an ironical twist”.

While at Magdalen, Hunter also wrote the “detailed and learned paper on Greek metrics” that was published in Classical Quarterly in 1913: it is a careful analysis of the textual corruptions in the most ancient manuscript of one of the few works that are known by Aeneas Tacitus. He took his MA on 25 May 1912, at the very same Congregation when another of Magdalen’s promising young academics took his BLitt: Ernst Stadler. On 2 September 1916, J.[or T.]C.B. Painter, an Oxford friend of Hunter’s, wrote a letter to Warren in which he talked about his late friend’s relationship with Magdalen:

He used to say that he could never forget what a wonderful relief & reward it had been to him, after 4 years of hard work & anxiety, to win a Prize Fellowship at Magdalen, & to find his position established & his financial troubles, (which had been serious), at an end. From that moment, he had gone straight on, with a smiling Fortune, until the War came & burst his old life in pieces.

He added, perhaps in explanation, that Hunter had “a curious shyness & roughness about him which gave a false impression of his nature to some people”. Warren, who edited the Oxford Magazine, incorporated this observation into his obituary as follows: “Under a manner sometimes brusque[,] he cherished strong affections and enthusiasms, and he was learning to reveal these more easily to others. His opinions about men and life and books were definite and were his own.”

 

“A mildly eccentric, perhaps initially slightly off-putting, poetically inclined but probably rather old-fashioned, meticulously scholarly classicist who entered the war, faced appalling fire with apparent cheerfulness and fell in a kill-or-be-killed situation.”

 

War service

When war broke out, Hunter was on holiday in Austria, but managed to avoid internment. Although he does not appear to have been a member of an Officers’ Training Corps either at Winchester or Oxford, he enlisted in the 1/4^th Battalion, the Ox. & Bucks Light Infantry (Territorial Force) in 1915, trained at Andover, and was commissioned Second Lieutenant on 6 May 1915. But before Hunter was commissioned, the Battalion had been sent to France, where it landed at Boulogne on 13 March 1915 and became part of 145^th Brigade, 48^th (South Midlands) Division, in May. It then spent a relatively uneventful but highly uncomfortable year and a quarter in France, partly in the trenches between Bailleul and Ploegsteert (17 April–early July 1915) and partly further south in the badly damaged and often heavily waterlogged trenches near Hébuterne (21 July 1915–12 July 1916) . It took few casualties as a result of enemy activity, but on 3 December 1915 it lost four of its men when their rain-sodden dug-out collapsed. The Battalion War Diary recorded: “The men are obliged to move in the open in daylight, as after all one might just as well be shot as drowned in ‘slush’ or buried alive”. By mid-June 1916 it was brigaded with the Bucks Battalion of the Ox. & Bucks Light Infantry, in which E.V.D Birchall was a Company commander. Hunter, who was still in England, was promoted Lieutenant 12 days later. The 1/4^th Battalion took part in its first serious action on 19 July 1916, during the Battle of Delville Wood, when it was ordered to attack at 01.30 hours the area between Ovillers-la-Boisselle and the line west of Pozières. When the attack was held up, the Battalion withdrew to huts at Bouzincourt and thence to bivouacs north-east of Albert without having taken part in any fighting. But when, on 22 July, it was ordered to launch a second attack to the west of Pozières, it captured its objectives and repulsed two counter-attacks before withdrawing to Albert on 24 July.

On 25 July the Battalion moved to Bouzincourt, north-west of Albert, and then, on the following day, it marched via Varennes to billets in the village of Arquèves, some ten miles west of the front line, and on 29 July it finally arrived at “the pretty little village” of Agenville, about 16 miles further west, between Doullens and Abbeville, after “a five or six-hour march under a broiling sun”. The more senior officers could, of course, ride, and Graham Hamilton Greenwell (1896–1988), who should have matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in October 1914 and who had become a Company commander in the Battalion, aged about 20, noted: “I marched for two stages, that is two stages of an hour each, and found it quite hot and unpleasant: it really is a triple blessing being mounted, especially when you get into billets and have to buzz round putting the different Platoons into their billets.” The main reason for the Battalion’s stay at Agenville was to train up a new unit “from the wrecks of the old”, but the billets were clean and comfortable, the French hosts “a very decent lot” who offered “some excellent omelettes”, and Greenwell expressed himself “very well satisfied with life in general” and with his four platoon commanders, all of whom were “really good fellows” and two of whom were members of Oxford colleges.

Hunter, who had arrived in France on 27 July 1916, joined the Battalion at Agenville on 7 August, i.e. two weeks after E.V.D. Birchall had left the front, but as he was not a member of Greenwell’s Company, Greenwell did not record his arrival in his letters home. On 9 August the Battalion retraced its steps east-south-eastwards to the town of Beauval, on 11 August to Varennes, and on 12 August it was back in Bouzincourt again, a “little village” which Greenwell described as “the sort of ante-chamber to the Chamber of Horrors beyond”, being a “scene of intense activity” with “troops of all kinds, lorries, guns and supplies, all going the same way”. The Battalion was bivouacked on arrival in a cornfield, giving Hunter time to write what would be his final letter to his parents:

My dear Father & Mother, I think you would like to know that we are going up into the line tomorrow & shall probably be in for a pretty stiff job before many days are out: though of course no-one can prophecy [sic] as things often change out here at very short notice. Anyhow, I think you’ll have to be prepared for any sort of news, though I hope the news will continue to be good. I don’t think I have anything to say that I haven’t said already either by word or letter. I only hope I shan’t make too much of a fool of myself when it comes to the point; & I could wish that I had a bit longer in which to get to know my Platoon. Otherwise I don’t think I could have been happier in my lot since I joined up. I have been with delightful & sympathetic people all the way through; and I like the lot of people we have got here very much indeed: especially Pickford my Company Commander who is a splendid fellow. The C.O. also seems very nice though I haven’t seen very much of him. […] There is a tremendous lot of movement of supplies up and down the road close to. I got a sight yesterday of a certain Church which has adopted a peculiarity in Architecture since the war began: and was also reminded by it of a certain queen’s blameless consort [Hunter is, of course, referring to the church at Albert ].

 A funny old Frenchwoman came along yesterday and began to curse us for being in the middle of her cornfield. But as we explained we weren’t doing any harm […] she changed her attitude & became very jocular & poked the Colonel in the chest with her stick & called him “Mon Lieutenant”. They are tremendous characters these old ladies. […] Goodbye, & love to you all. I have never felt how happy we have been together so much as in the last three weeks.

Then, at 03.00 hours on 13 August, the Battalion was suddenly ordered to relieve two battalions of the 12^th Division – the 7^th (Service) Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, and the 9^th (Service) Battalion, the Essex Regiment (cf. R.G.H. Copeman) – who were occupying the important German trench known as Skyline Trench, about 1,500 yards north-east of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, that they had taken with little opposition during the previous night. In a brief letter home, Greenwell described them, “such as they are”, as “full of equipment, filth and bodies”. This former German position was then shelled heavily throughout 13 August, causing particularly heavy casualties in ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies and obliterating the trench by nightfall. The enemy bombardment increased in violence from about 21.00 hours, especially around Battalion HQ, and just before 22.00 hours, two enemy battalions counter-attacked from the front and on the left flank, piercing the British battalion’s centre, which had been weakened by the shelling and by British shells falling short. Greenwell’s Company was forced back, but on the left, Second Lieutenant Charles Ely Rose Sherrington (1897–1973) (later OBE MC) secured the Battalion’s flank by setting up a Lewis Gun position in Ration Trench, and on the right, two platoons from ‘C’ Company managed to hold out in Skyline Trench. A bombing attack was organized from Ration Trench up the communication trench late on 13 August 1916 and was led by Hunter after all the other available officers in his Company had been killed or wounded. Hunter, aged 30, was killed in action during this fighting on this, his first day in the trenches, when he was close to Skyline Trench, where the attack was beaten back. Although Ration Trench was then held as the front line, the action had cost the Battalion six officers and 147 other ranks killed, wounded and missing. In a letter of 14 August, Greenwell wrote of the “awful desolation” left behind by the brief engagement: “I can’t describe the awful destruction and the litter and waste: shattered trenches and dug-outs with equipment, bodies, food, bombs and rifles everywhere.” On 15 August, the 1/4^th Battalion was relieved at 02.00 hours, but not before it had experienced “the most awful hell of shelling I [Greenwell] have ever been in”:

From 11.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. [on 14 August] the Germans shelled like the devil with big stuff; it was a most trying ordeal; I was in a shaft full of filth and flies with my servant, bugler, sergeant-major and a wounded man (with a huge gash in his back and wounded in the leg), a stretcher-bearer and anyone who happened to blow in. The wounded man was very good and cheerful though his arm was nearly off and his lung pierced. We spent the time getting hold of iodine and dressings and trying to patch up his wounds. Finally, the other Battalion came up and I began to pass my men out of the trench back through what is left of the village of Ovillers. The trench was all blown in and littered with filth and bodies. I think that the awful strench is much worse than the shelling. My men told me that this thirty-six hours in the trench was far worse than their attack on July 23^rd. But I had only twenty-two casualties in my Company and two officers wounded.

Greenwell, who was a good eight years younger than Hunter, noted his probable death and its untimeliness in his letters of 14 and 15 August, commenting: “He will be a great loss, as he was a most brilliant man and a splendid officer.” And Murdoch, citing a letter that Captain Percival Pickford (1887–1958; later Major; DSO MC; Headmaster of Paston School, North Walsham, Norfolk from 1922 to 1946), Hunter’s Company commander and the officer in charge of the front line throughout the fighting, wrote to Hunter’s mother, confirms and expands the above account. Although Pickford, “roughly the same age as Hunter and a member of Lincoln College [Oxford]”, had not known Hunter long enough for the two men to be on first-name terms, he had come to appreciate Hunter, “especially in the last twelve hours”, when “we were suddenly rushed up into what is, I think, undoubtedly the hottest trench on the battle front because most coveted by both sides on account of its commanding position, which in itself makes an unfailing target for incessant shelling”. At first, Pickford kept Hunter back in the second line “because it was his first experience of trench fighting” – despite which, Pickford continued, “[Hunter] was perfectly cheerful all day [13 August] in spite of the shelling which was perfectly awful and had caused very heavy casualties in the Company including both my other officers and 2 platoon serjeants, wounded”. But when the enemy counter-attacked in the evening “and got a footing in part of the front trench outnumbering us by quite 10 to 1”, Hunter was the only intact officer left in Pickford’s Company. Consequently, Pickford continued, “there was no alternative left to me but to send him [Hunter] up to attempt bombing out the enemy & getting into touch with some of the company still holding out on the right”. “Hunter”, Murdoch continues, “apparently began to lead his men in the open, but Pickford instructed him instead to go by way of a communication trench.” Then, within 20 yards of the first enemy trench, Hunter “saw a member of the enemy and threw a bomb – the safety pin was afterwards found in his hand – an enemy must have thrown at the same moment & poor Hunter was hit and killed instantly by the bomb”. Although Hunter’s body was recovered when the communication trench was retaken and given a “decent burial – which is so often impossible”, with his greatest friend, J.C.B. Gamlen, reading the burial service, Hunter now has no known grave and is commemorated on Special Memorial 21, Pozières British Cemetery, Ovillers-la-Boisselle.

Murdoch characterizes Hunter as “a mildly eccentric, perhaps initially slightly off-putting, poetically inclined but probably rather old-fashioned, meticulously scholarly classicist who entered the war, faced appalling fire with apparent cheerfulness and fell in a kill-or-be-killed situation”. But Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Stockton (1867–1951), a solicitor in civilian life and the Commanding Officer of the camp at Andover where Hunter had trained, saw him somewhat differently and, in a letter of 19 August 1916 to Hunter’s father, described Hunter as “a man of golden character”, as “the most reliable & capable officer I ever had”, as “a true soldier setting an example to us all”, and as “a gentleman and a soldier” whom it would not be easy to replace. Pickford, too, described Hunter in similarly glowing terms, telling his mother that he showed “great bravery in what must have been for him specially terrifying circumstances”, insisting “that he showed not the slightest sign of being depressed or nervous”, and congratulating himself for securing Hunter for ‘C’ Company “as he was undoubtedly the best officer who has been sent to me lately”.

Gamlen, an alumnus of Balliol College, who had trained with Hunter and obtained permission to join the 1/4^th (Territorial Force) rather than the 1^st (Regular) Battalion of the Ox. and Bucks Light Infantry so that he and his friend might serve in the same unit, later wrote to President Warren that Hunter “had a horror of everything mean and vulgar and unclean. By temperament he was quite unmilitary, but just because any work which he had to do he must do with all his might, he made himself into an excellent soldier.” And President Warren left us the following insight into Hunter’s interests in his obituary in the Oxford Magazine: “He had a passion for music, sang with considerable distinction, and was one of the band of morris-dancers whom R[eginald] J[ohn] E[lliott] Tiddy [1880–1916], gathered together.” Tiddy, it should be said, was the English Tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and also a notable folklorist and dialect specialist, whose extensive work on the ‘Mummer’s Play’ would be published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1923. Although he suffered from poor eyesight and asthma and was a pacifist by inclination, he felt obliged to join the Army and was commissioned Lieutenant in the 2/4^th Battalion (Territorial Force) of Hunter’s Regiment, only to be killed in action near Laventie, ten miles north-east of Béthune, by a chance shell while attempting to rescue a wounded man during the night of 10 August 1916, i.e. three days before Hunter met his death. He is buried in Laventie Military Cemetery, La Gorgue; Grave II.D.20.

Warren’s obituary of Hunter then continues:

Hunter was killed on his first night in the trenches. After being under heavy bombardment all day, he was sent, without any previous experience, but because he was the only subaltern at hand, in charge of a bombing party to retake a trench. Just after he had started, his Captain [i.e. Pickford] found another officer, and told him to run on and take over the party; but Hunter said that the job was his, and refused to surrender to another what he believed was an errand of death. He thought – and it was characteristic of him that he said – that it was a mistake to send him to France; that he could do more useful work in training drafts, and afterwards again as a teacher. But he went none the less willingly. He had doubted his own powers to manage men in training, or to lead them unflurried into action. But he had that excellent modesty which makes a man ready to attempt what needs to be done, though he does not expect to shine in the doing of it; and he learnt in the doing that his mistrust was groundless. Without being the youngest he was the latest to start teaching in it of the four Fellows whom the College has lost; what he was as a scholar he had already shown; what he could be as a teacher and in the life of the College he had only begun to show. Had he returned, he would have made it plain.

When Hunter made his will in July 1916, he left £100 p.a. to Winchester College, with which the Leslie Whitaker Hunter Prize fund was established in January 1917. The Prize was to “take the form of an Essay in Greek or Roman Literature, History, or Religion, or some other subject of classical study, to be competed for by the Scholars and Commoners of the College in such manner as the Headmaster may best determine”. It was first awarded in 1922 and last awarded in 1978, after which the residue funds were probably used to fund another of the Classics Prizes under something called the Consolidated Prize Fund. Hunter left his books to New College, Oxford, but stipulated that any that they did not want should go to Ampleforth College, Yorkshire. In token of his “deep affection for and gratitude to” New College, Oxford, he left its Senior Common Room a plate worth £20; and the residue of his estate of £1,496 9s 5d was left to his father.

 

Bibliography

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

 

Special acknowledgements:

**Brian Murdoch, ‘Leslie Whitaker Hunter (1886–1916): A Name on the War Memorial’, The Magdalen Record (1996), pp. 80–4.

*Greenwell ([2011]), pp. 149–54.

 

Printed sources:

The Wykehamist (1904–07), passim.

L[eslie] W[hitaker] Hunter, ‘Greek Iambics, 1904: Matthew Arnold – Merope: “O Aepytus my son, behold, behold.”’, The Wykehamist, no. 409 (March 1904), p. 75.

L[eslie] W[hitaker] Hunter, ‘Ad Informatorem Etonensium’, The Wykehamist, no. 424 (July 1905), p. 216.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Greek Historical Writing on Apollo: Two Lectures [delivered 3 and 4 June 1908], trans. Gilbert Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908).

[Anon.], ‘New Fellow of Magdalen’, The Times, no. 39,410 (22 October 1910), p. 6.

[Anon.], ‘New College’, The Times, no. 39,798 (18 January 1912), p. 10.

[Anon.], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice: Short Notices: Magdalen College’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 35 (Extra Number) (10 November 1916), p. 16.

[Anon.], ‘New College’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, Extra Number (10 November 1916), pp. 19–20.

Mockler-Ferryman, iii [26] (1 July 1916–30 June 1917), pp. 216–17.

Rendall et al., ii (1921), p. 12 (photo).

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ελεγεία [Elegeia], edited by Wolfgang Buchwald with an introduction by Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1938), especially pp. 31 and 58–9, limited edition of 400. [Reviewed by Alfred Körte in Gnomon, 15 (1939), pp. 46–53].

[Anon.], ‘Major P. Pickford’ [obituary], The Times, no. 54,058 (25 January 1958), p. 10.

McCarthy (1998), p. 71.

Michael Heaney, ‘Tiddy, Reginald John Elliott (1880–1916), Collector of Folk Plays’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 545 (September 2004), pp. 763–4.

 

Archival sources:

New College Archives: SCR/B/Hunter (J.C.B. Gamlen’s letter to Warden Spooner of 1919).

Winchester College Archives: 24947-24948 (6^th Chamber Annals 1900–05).

Letter to his parents of 12 August 1916, The Liddle Collection, Leeds University: GS 0822.

MCA: PR32/C/3/708 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, A Letter relating to L.W. Hunter [1916]).

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

OUA: UR 2/1/57.

WO95/2764.

 

On-line sources:

‘Tiddy, Reginald John Elliott’, Tonbridge School and the Great War: http://tonbridgeatwar.daisy.websds.net/Authenticated/ViewDets.aspx?RecID=371&TableName=ta_factfile (accessed 4 August 2022).

 

Books and editions by Leslie Whitaker Hunter:

Choric Song from Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters [Gaisford Verse Prize Translation], translated into Greek Elegaic Verse by Leslie Whitaker Hunter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1906).

Aineiou Poliorkhetika: [Tacitus] Aeneas on Siegecraft: A Critical Edition, prepared by L.W. Hunter, revised, with some additions, by S.A. Handford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927).

Leslie Whitaker Hunter, Warren Hastings’s defence of his Administration in India: Thucydideo more (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1908).

Rus vacuum, Chancellor’s Prize Latin Essay 1910, recited in the Divinity School June 22^nd 1910 by Leslie Whitaker Hunter B.A. (New College) (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, [n.d.]; London: Simpkin and Marshall, [n.d.]).

Sallustius, ed. L.W. Hunter, De diis et mundo liber (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, London, [1910]), with an Author’s Foreword, pp. i–ii.

 

Academic articles by Leslie Whitaker Hunter: 

–– ‘Aeneas Tacitus and Stichometry’, The Classical Quarterly, 7, no. 4 (October 1913), pp. 256–64.