Fact file:

  • Matriculated: 1905

  • Born: 28 May 1887

  • Died: 17 January 1916

  • Regiment: Welsh Regiment

  • Grave/Memorial: Le Touret Military Cemetery: III.C.29

Family background

b. 28 May 1887 as the eldest son of Thomas Davidson Davies (1849–1917) and Elinor Lucy Davies (née Thomas) (1858–1927) (m. 1886), 9, Albert Rd, Clifton, Bristol; Pitch and Pay, Stoke Bishop, Bristol. At the time of the 1901 Census, the family employed four servants. By the time of her death, Elinor Lucy was living at Clive House, College Hill, Shrewsbury, a small but picturesque cottage that belonged to her son John Christopher and where he, too, died in 1949.

 

Parents and antecedents

His father was an assistant Mathematics master, first at Trinity College, Glenalmond (where he was Sub-Warden), Perth and Kinross (cf. H.H. Smith), and then at Clifton College, where he became Head of Maths, being, according to President Warren, “certainly one of the best teachers and most efficient men on the staff”. His family were originally farmers in Wales, but his grandfather made a lot of money as a soap manufacturer in Bristol and bought the extensive Pitch and Pay estate in 1858.

Davies’s mother was a first cousin of Magdalen’s President Warren, since Davies’s grandfather, Charles Thomas (1822–1909), was the brother of Cecile Thomas (1818–1910), Warren’s mother; Charles Thomas was also the brother of Sarah Thomas (1817–1897) the grandmother of C.H.G. Martin.

This means that Martin and Davies were second cousins.

Siblings and their families

Brother of:

(1) John Christopher (1889–1949);

(2) Honor (1894–96);

(3) Ralfe Davidson (1897–1970), who married (1929) Sheila Densham (1901–85), three children;

(4) Thomas Edward (b. 1899, died in infancy).

John Christopher matriculated at New College, Oxford, in 1907 with a view to becoming a doctor. He was awarded a 2nd in Physiology in 1911 and then studied for his 2nd BM and the BCh at one of the London teaching hospitals (probably Westminster). On 30 January 1914 he qualified as a doctor and at about the same time he was awarded the MRCS and the LRCP by the University of London. He was commissioned Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps on 23 August 1915 and arrived in France on 17 November 1915, where he served with one of the three Welsh Field Ambulances (1st, 2nd and 3rd) that were attached to the 43rd (Wessex) Division, and rose to the rank of Captain. By March 1919 he seems to have been practising as a doctor in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, and from 1919 until 1947 he practised as a GP in Shrewsbury. He left £42,358 14s. 3d.

Ralfe Davidson served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers during World War One, matriculated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1920, where he studied Mechanical Engineering, was the Salomons Engineering Scholar 1921–22, and graduated BA with a 1st in 1922. He then returned to the Army, was promoted Captain in 1925, and served overseas until he resigned his commission in 1932. He took his MA and was admitted as a research student later in the same year, in 1933 he was the Officer Commanding of the Cambridge University Officers’ Training Corps’s Engineering Unit, and he was approved for the degree of PhD in 1935 on the strength of a thesis entitled The Transverse Oscillation of Railway Vehicles. He was elected a Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1937, and was appointed as University Demonstrator in Engineering 1935–43, Lecturer in Engineering 1943–54 and Reader in Engineering 1954–63. He was an excellent tutor and lecturer, and a respected member of both his College, where he was Director of Studies in Engineering 1937–63 and Vice-Master 1961–63, and of the Engineering Faculty, where he held the post of Secretary to the Faculty Board 1945–49.

 

Education and professional life

Davies attended Packwood Haugh Preparatory School, Hockley Heath, Warwickshire (founded 1892, moved in 1940 to Ruyton XI Towns, Shropshire, and in 1941 to Park Bank, Shrewsbury, Shrophire), from c.1894 to 1901 (cf. H.R. Russell). From 1901 to 1904 he was a Collins Exhibitioner at Rugby School and was awarded a General Exhibition on leaving. According to President Warren, who was himself a product of Clifton College, Davies had “[…] a distinguished career. Prizes he disliked, and would not work for them. But he took a rare number of distinctions in the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate Examinations.” He was elected a Demy in Classics at Magdalen in December 1904, when he was only 17, and matriculated there on 17 October 1905, having been exempted from Responsions as he had an Oxford & Cambridge Certificate. He passed the First Public Examination in the Hilary Terms of 1906 and 1907, when he was awarded a 2nd in Classical Moderations. In Trinity Term 1909 he was awarded a 2nd in Literae Humaniores and he took his BA on 7 October 1909. At Oxford, too, Warren continued, “he took his own line, nonchalant and indifferent as to University Honours and courses, but impressing both dons and contemporaries with his ability”. Another obituarist records that he gained popularity at Magdalen as “a witty talker”, contributed to the Pall Mall and Westminster, rode in the Oxford cavalry, and wrote “an unusually promising cycle of love sonnets”.

But Warren also tells us that when the time and desire came, “he once more stretched his powers and got in high with ease into the ICS” (the Indian Civil Service) – he was 23rd on the list (1909). He chose Burma deliberately as offering more colour and adventure, and in December 1910 became an Assistant Commissioner working for the Burma Commission in Upper Burma. A second obituarist wrote:

Trained at Sagaing[,] he held successively the subdivisions of Yamethin, Thazi, and Nyaunglebin, and gained a unique knowledge of local history and legend at the last two. A stolid official entering his camp would often have viewed with surprise the litter on his table – a battered Baudelaire near a splendid Kammawaza, Lucian and the Greek Anthology mingled with a Konbaung Set, Yazawin or the poems of U Kyaw. […] A pronounced mystic, Mr. Davies possessed the rare gift of sympathy with the Burmese national genius.

An older colleague told his parents something similar:

We all of us like the Burman, but with most of us it is merely lip-worship. We take no interest in him outside our official work and know nothing of his social life[,] religion & customs or even of his language beyond the bare minimum necessary for our work. Hugh did take this interest and his knowledge of these things was not merely unusual[,] it was well nigh phenomenal for so young an officer. His house was a centre of district life in a manner unique among white officers, who are usually met only on business and avoided elsewhere. Monks, old jungle scholars came trooping up. Twice the Buddhist Primate of Mandalay wrote to him[,] a thing I never heard of before or since, and when he went to Nyaunglebin, 130 miles away, some of the Thazi people used to go down and see him at times notably monks on points of scholarship. […] His life was unique. His servants were not servants: they were retainers and his tours were progresses with a royal touch. His Burman groom was a mine of legendary lore.

Not long before his death, Davies confirmed these opinions by what he said in a letter that he wrote to a friend in Burma:

Dear Burma! I am longing every day to be there, to hear the pagoda bells and smell the bazaar. God! You don’t know what a pull the place has on you. […] Write me a long letter and let it simply stink of ngapi. Whatever happens I am coming back to Burma after the war.

He was, Warren summarized, “a very uncommon man, of singular ability and force”.

 

Charles Hugh Davies, BA and Madoc
(Photo courtesy of Magdalen College, Oxford)

 

War service

Davies spent an uncertain amount of time in Rugby School Officers’ Training Corps, the Oxford University Volunteer Rifles and the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps, and while in Burma he also served in the Burma Railways Volunteer Company. So when war came, Davies determined to serve not as a civilian but in the field, and it was in vain that the authorities tried to stop him from doing so. When, in June 1915, he returned to England for a short period of leave, the India Office hesitated to give him permission to join the Army. Nevertheless, on 21 June 1915 he attested and became a Private in the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) in the Territorial Forces, where he refused to become a Non-Commissioned Officer in order to reach the front more quickly. He was transferred to the Regiment’s 1st Battalion on 19 September 1915 and disembarked in France on 22 September as one of the two men who constituted the ninth draft of reinforcements.

The 1st Battalion of the HAC had been in France since 20 September 1914, suffered particularly badly from the rigours of a Belgian winter, and experienced action at various places within the Ypres Salient, so that by the end of September 1915 it had lost nearly 600 men killed, wounded and missing and numbered only 150 Other Ranks. Davies joined either ‘C’ (no. 3) or ‘D’ (no. 4) Company on 7 October 1915, when the Battalion was in the line near Steenvoorde, about 11 miles north of Hazebrouck and just inside the French border with Belgium. After a relatively quiet couple of weeks, the Battalion was finally withdrawn from the front line on 23 October 1915 and Davies remained with it until 25 October and had, as he put it, “the time of his life”. From 26 October 1915 until 25 March 1916 it was stationed at Blendecques, three miles south-east of St-Omer and well behind the front line, where, because most of its members were well educated, it was used as a pool for officers, with drafts being sent at regular intervals to Officer Cadet Schools.  Because of Davies’s prior military experience, he was sent to Cadet School on 10 November 1915 and commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Welsh Regiment on 12 December 1915: seven days later he was posted to its 9th (Service) Battalion, part of 58th Brigade in the 19th Division.

The 9th Battalion of the HAC had arrived in France on 18 July 1915 and seen action in the area just to the north-east of Béthune – probably near Festubert since in August and September it suffered casualties while in the trenches near that much fought-over village. On 25 September, the first day of the Battle of Loos (25 September–13 October 1915), it was involved in the opening attack and lost over 200 men killed, wounded and missing between 06.30 and 06.45 hours. After being reinforced in early October, it spent time in the trenches near Richebourg-St-Vaast, two miles to the north of Festubert, from 24 to 31 October, 7 to 12 November, and 3 to 7 December. The Battalion War Diary does not record when Davies joined it, but his personal files suggest that he did so on 8 January 1916, while the Battalion was in Reserve at Croix Barbet (Barbée), four miles due south of Estaires, and then Les Lobes, to the south of Armentières. From 14 to 19 January the Battalion was back in the trenches where Davies would have got to know the slightly older Second Lieutenant John Francis George Cree, the brother of A.T.C. Cree and C.E.V. Cree, who had left Magdalen a year before Davies matriculated and would survive the war. During what was a relatively quiet period at the front, Davies was killed in action on 17 January 1916, aged 28, shortly after the India Office had granted him extraordinary leave for the duration of the war. Although the Battalion’s sketchy War Diary makes no mention of his death, his Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke, wrote a letter of condolence to Davies’s parents on 18 January in which he said that a piece of bomb had pierced the roof of Davies’s dug-out while he was asleep and hit him in the head: he died of his injuries half-an-hour later. Cooke then added that he had a very high opinion of [Davies] and his abilities as an Officer. He was always willing to sacrifice himself, and ready to fill any dangerous post. He volunteered the day before his death to go out at night on patrol duty, always a risky affair. We shall all of us feel his loss most deeply, both on account of his capacity as a soldier and his kindly qualities as a gentleman.

 

Le Touret Military Cemetery, Richebourg l’Avoué; Grave III.C.29

 

He was first buried on 4 March 1916 in the British Cemetery in the rue du Bois, Béthune, but now lies in Le Touret Military Cemetery, Richebourg l’Avoué, Grave III.C.29; the inscription is: “R.I.P.”. On 30 January 1916 Davies’s mother wrote a letter to President Warren in which she said:

I like to think of the cheerful indifference he shewed [sic] to ease and comfort through these last seven months. […] The last time he came home in Dec[ember] he arrived in the middle of the night & had had no chance to send us a telegram. He did not like to disturb the house & wake us up – so he took his blankets & a haversack into the mangel-room, w[hic]h was open, & slept on the floor – & when I found him in the dining room in the morning he said he had not had such a good billet for months! I hope I shall see Mr Mackworth [A.C.P. Mackworth] again some day. Mr Webb’s letter pleased us – he understood Hugh well did he not.

Davies left £242 7s 8d to a Miss Ma Lee of 3, Lower Kyeiletan St, Kemmendine, Rangoon, Burma, a Burmese national who knew no English. Although Davies’s father tried hard to contact her, nothing had been heard from her by September 1916 and there is no indication in Davies’s personal file as to whether she ever received the benefaction.

 

Bibliography

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

 

Printed sources:

 [Anon.], ‘Second Lieutenant C. Hugh Davies’ [obituary]’, The Times, no. 41,071 (24 January 1916), p. 12.

 [Thomas Herbert Warren], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 34, no. 9 (28 January 1916), p. 145.

[Anon.], [obituary (reprinted from the Rangoon Gazette)], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’, The Oxford Magazine, 34, no. 16 (17 March 1916), p. 266.

[Anon.], Memorials of Rugbeians who fell in the Great War, vol. 3 (1917), unpaginated.

Goold Walker (ed.) (1930), pp. 17–57.

P.E.W.G., ‘Ralfe Davidson Davies 1897–1970’, Christ’s College Magazine, 61, no.1 (May 1971), pp. 8–10.

 

Archival sources:

 MCA: PR32/C/3/351-64 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters relating to C.H. Davies [1905–16]).

 MCA: 876 (III), vol. 1.

OUA: UR 2/1/56.

WO95/90.

WO95/1415.

 WO95/2092.

WO95/3118.

WO339/51223.