Cuthbert Edwards, BA

• Matriculated: 1911

• Born: 6 September 1892

• Died: 17 April 1918

• Regiment: Army Service Corps attached to Royal West Kent Regiment.

• Grave/Memorial: Namps-au-Val British Cemetery: B.11.

Family background

b. 6 September 1892 as the youngest son of Major Eustace Gresley Edwards (1854–1923) and Frances Beale Edwards (née Cooper) (c.1854–1945) (m. 1884). In 1901 the family were living at 20, Clifton Park Road, Clifton, Bristol (with a tutor and one servant) and in 1911 at 61, Clifton Park Road, Clifton, Bristol (one servant).

 

Parents and antecedents

Edwards’s paternal grandfather, the Reverend Edward James Justinian George Edwards (1811–84), had studied at Balliol College, Oxford (BA 1835; MA 1836), and was ordained deacon in 1836 and priest in 1838. In 1841 he became the Vicar of Trentham, Staffordshire, a living with a gross income of £100 p.a. and the cure of 846 souls. He was also the Rural Dean of Trentham, a southern suburb of Stoke-on-Trent, and in 1859 he became a Prebendary of Lichfield Cathedral. In 1868 he was Proctor for the Chapter of Lichfield (re-elected 1874 and 1880), and in 1882 he was appointed as Chaplain to his patron, the 3^rd Duke of Sutherland (1828–92): from 1746 to 1833 Viscount Trentham was one of the subsidiary titles attached to the Duchy.

Edwards’s father was the second son, and after being educated at Marlborough School and the Royal Military College (Woolwich), Eustace Gresley entered the Army in 1873 as a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. He was promoted Captain in 1882, and by 1885, the year in which he inherited freehold properties in Staffordshire and Cheshire from his father, he was stationed on Malta. In 1889 he became Gunnery Instructor for the South-East District of England and was based at Dover, where he and his family lived at “Willersley”, Park Avenue. In January 1890, he was appointed Professor of Artillery, Military Administration, and Military Law at the Royal Military College of Canada, a federal institution that had been established in Kingston, Ontario, in 1876, and he was promoted Major in April 1890. But his Socialist belief in the public ownership of property and the means of production led him to challenge the Conservative politician Sir John Alexander Macdonald (1815–91), Canada’s first Prime Minister and longstanding holder of the premiership (1867–73 and 1878–91), when he called a federal election for 5 March 1891. In order to do this, Edwards resigned from the Royal Military College and offered to make his programme less radical if the local Liberals would adopt him as their candidate – but they refused to do so, and having polled only 29 out of 3,114 votes in the subsequent three-cornered contest, Eustace Gresley retired back to Dover.

However, his political commitment persisted, and on 14 April 1892 he was adopted as the “labour and Socialistic candidate for Dover” for the coming general election of 5 July 1892. This time he lost less dramatically – by 978 votes to the aristocratic Conservative George Wyndham (1863–1913), who had already been MP for Dover for three years and who, as a rising young politician, would become deeply involved in the Irish Question and Under-Secretary for War from 1898 to 1900 during Lord Salisbury’s (1830–1903) third period of office as Prime Minister (1895–1902). Eustace Gresley was succeeded, for a while, as Labour candidate for Dover by James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) who was to become the first Labour Prime Minister. At MacDonald’s adoption meeting some 20 drunken men were sent in to disrupt the proceedings; the police were called but refused to remove the drunks. The following evening at the same venue the Bishop of Manchester was interrupted by “Major Edwards, who was an exceedingly tall man”, standing on a chair singing “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay”. He was forcibly ejected, but had made his point. The family moved to Bristol, where at the time of the 1911 Census Major Edwards was a writing master at Clifton College.

Edwards’s mother was the daughter of Miles Manning Beale-Cooper (1815–73) a solicitor of Great Malvern.

Edwards’s uncle (Eustace Gresley Edwards’s older brother) was Justinian Heathcote Edwards-Heathcote (c.1843–1928). After being educated at Winchester, he joined the 63^rd Foot, later known as the Manchester Regiment, served in Canada and Ireland and rose to the rank of Captain. In 1869 he succeeded to the estates of his maternal uncle, Mr John Edensor Heathcote (1810–69), took over his name and resigned from the Army in 1870. From then on he lived the life of a country gentleman at Apedale Hall, near Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, with special interests in hunting, shooting and salmon fishing. But he also had a developed interest in mining and became Chairman of the Midland Coal, Coke and Iron Company, founded in 1785 and based in Apedale, a rich coalmining area. In 1885 he stood, unsuccessfully, as the Conservative candidate for North-West Staffordshire, but in the following year he won the seat and represented the constituency until 1892. In 1895, his daughter Katherine Maud Edwards-Heathcote (1874–1948) married Sir Oswald Mosley (1873–1928), the 5^th Baronet of Ancoats (judicial separation in c.1901), and they were the parents of Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), the 6^th Baronet of Ancoats and founder of the British Union of Fascists.

 

Siblings

Brother of:

(1) Walter Manöel Edwards, MC (1885–1971);

(2) Margaret (1887–1974);

(3) Kenneth (later DSC) (1891–1943).

Walter Manöel Edwards went to the Royal Military Academy and in 1904 was gazetted 2^nd Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery; he was a Lieutenant at the time of the 1911 Census. During the war he was transferred to the Supply and Transport Corps and served in the Middle East, attaining the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. After the war he matriculated as a commoner at Exeter College, Oxford, where in June 1921 he won the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin verse; in December 1922 the Craven Scholarship; and in 1923 obtained a 1^st in Honour Classical Moderations, and was elected an honorary scholar of Exeter College. In 1947 he married Rosa Pennick Jones (b. 1910) of Delganny, County Wicklow. From 1928 to 1950 he was Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Leeds University.

Margaret Edwards never married but was a part-time art student before World War One.

Kenneth Edwards became a dedicated and successful professional naval officer. At the age of 13 he was one of the first officer cadets to attend the Royal Naval College, Osborne House, near East Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. Osborne House was designed by Prince Albert as a summer home for the royal family, and after Queen Victoria died there in January 1901, part of it was handed over to the Royal Navy, who used it as a training establishment for junior officers from September 1903 until 1921. In 1907, aged 17, Kenneth transferred to Dartmouth College for sea training and passed out second of his term, having achieved first-class grades in all his subjects. He then trained on the armoured cruiser HMS Cumberland, which had been launched in 1902 and was used from 1907 to 1920 as a training ship for Dartmouth cadets. On leaving Dartmouth in April 1908 he won the Goodenough Medal, a Gold Medal that is awarded to the Sub-Lieutenant who, when qualifying for his lieutenancy, achieves the best examination results for gunnery, provided that he has also gained a first-class certificate for seamanship. From then on he served as a Lieutenant on HMS Lord Nelson, firstly in the Channel Fleet and then at the Dardanelles, where he was awarded the DSC for his work during the landings on and the evacuations from Cape Hellas (April 1915–January 1916), and for setting “a fine example to his men” while helping to salvage the monitor HMS M.30 “under fire from enemy guns” after it had been sunk by Turkish shore batteries in the Gulf of Smyrna on 14 May 1916. From 1916 to 1917 Kenneth specialized in gunnery at the shore establishment in Portsmouth that is known as HMS Excellent. From June 1918 he became the Gunnery Officer aboard the super-dreadnought battleship HMS Centurion (the second ship of the King George V class which had been launched in 1911 and fought at Jutland: see G.M. Johnson), the light cruiser HMS Dunedin (launched in 1919 and sunk by a U-Boot on 24 November 1941 with the loss of 419 lives), and the Navy’s last battle-cruiser HMS Hood (launched in 1920 and sunk by an unlucky shell from the Tirpitz on 24 May 1941 with the loss of 1,415 lives).

After the war Kenneth took part in the first staff course to be held at Greenwich, and during 1921 he was naval assistant to Admiral Alfred Ernle Chatfield (1873–1967) – later the First Sea Lord and Admiral of the Fleet – when he was Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff between February 1920 and September 1922. After being promoted Commander in 1925, Kenneth spent most of his time for the next nine years on air work, both in the Admiralty’s Air Division and on board the aircraft carriers HMS Furious and Glorious. The Furious had been launched as a battle-cruiser in 1916, turned into a carrier while under construction by the addition of a flight deck, and reconstructed with a full-length flight deck in the early 1920s. Her sister-ship the Glorious, also launched in 1916, had spent the war as a cruiser, been laid up after the war, and was reconstructed as a carrier between 1924 and 1930; she could carry 30 per cent more aircraft than the Furious but was sunk by the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on 8 June 1940 while ferrying British aircraft from Norway with the loss of 1,207 lives. In December 1932 Kenneth was promoted Captain, and in February 1934 he was given command of the multi-functional sloop HMS Folkestone, a post from which he retired in November 1934 because of ill health. He rejoined the Navy in 1939 and died in 1943 while on active service at HMS Daedalus, the Fleet Air Arm’s major base at Lee-on-Solent, Hampshire, which acted as the headquarters of the Flag Officer Air (Home). He is buried in Haslar Royal Naval Cemetery, near Portsmouth, Hampshire; Grave H.19.3.

 

Education and professional life

Edwards attended Clifton Preparatory School (also known as A.C. Rowley’s School), College Road, Clifton, Bristol (cf. H.R. Russell), from 1902 to 1905 and then Clifton College, President Warren’s old school, from 1905 to 1911. While at Clifton, he made considerable academic and intellectual progress, especially in the disciplined use of English, and distinguished himself on 3 November 1908, when aged only 14, by producing a very stylish Latin translation of lines 2031 to 2043 of William Morris’s Tennysonian poem ‘The Doom of King Acrisius’ (c.1869). He matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 17 October 1911, having passed Responsions in Trinity Term 1911. He then took the First Public Examination in Trinity Term 1912 and Hilary Term 1913, when he was awarded a 3^rd in Classical Moderations. After this he read for a Pass Degree (Groups B6 [English Literature] and A1 [Greek and/or Latin Literature/Philosophy], Michaelmas Term 1913; Group D [Elements of Religious Knowledge], Trinity Term 1914). When he took his BA on 18 June 1914, he was intending to take Holy Orders.

 

 

War service

Edwards, who was 6 foot 1¾ inches tall, attested on 19 September 1914 and served as a Private in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 19 September 1914 to 21 October 1915. On 25 March 1915 he wrote to President Warren informing him that he was a member of 1/3^rd S[outh] M[idland] F[ield] Ambulance (Territorial Force), based in Chelmsford, Essex, but that he was “hoping to get an Honorary Lieutenancy as Quartermaster of a new Imperial Service Unit of the R.A.M.C., which is shortly to be formed in Bristol”. But this hope was not realized and on 29 March 1915 his unit embarked from Southampton and landed at Le Havre on the following day. By 26 July 1915 Edwards was attached to the Office of VII Corps’s Deputy Director of Medical Services, and on 23 September 1915, while still working in that capacity, he applied for a Temporary Commission in the Army Service Corps (ASC; Royal Army Service Corps from late 1918). On the very next day he suggested the reason for this decision when he remarked, in a second letter to President Warren, that he had “seen little of real ‘Active Service’”. His application went through with effect from 21 October 1915 (London Gazette, no. 29,375, 19 November 1915, p. 11,564), and he was notified of his promotion ten days later. On c.5 November 1915 Edwards went back to France, where he did a two-week course at the ASC’s School of Instruction at Boulogne. But when he wrote to President Warren to tell him of this move, he assured him that he “would not have missed [his] experience in the Ranks for anything”. About six months later Edwards was promoted Temporary Lieutenant (LG, no. 29,671, 18 July 1916, p. 7,100), and in January 1917 he was mentioned in dispatches for his work during the Battle of the Somme in the previous autumn.

He then remained with the ASC’s Troops Supply Column in III Corps until August 1917 when, much to his surprise – as he wrote to President Warren on 10^th of that month – he “got very sudden orders” to report to No. 1 Infantry Training School, Brocton, Staffordshire. “Not that the authorities were dissatisfied with my labours in the A.S.C.”, he explained, “but rather, that I was too fit to remain here! & there is clearly a crying need for Infantry Officers”. “So”, he concluded,

there is nothing to do but to try to make the most of the meagre 8 weeks training that we are to have – To me it seems insufficient, as I am told that I have to emerge from the School in command of a Company, – & I scarcely see how I can become competent in the time!

Despite these reservations, on 28 August 1917 Edwards wrote President Warren a long and ironically appreciative letter about his life on the Brocton course which, incidentally, suggests that he was not the only ASC officer to have been required to learn a new trade:

Well, wonderful transformations are worked in war-time & certainly we are as enthusiastic over the bayonet now, as ever we were over cases of “bully” & have quite forgotten how to handle thousands of tons of coal, amid the new wonders of machine-guns, bombs & other dire instruments of war! The only drawback is, that we got treated half as schoolboys & half as conscripts, which is, perhaps, a trifle galling to our pride, after having had the command of men abroad for so long –! But it is doubtless all for the best, & we are duly humble! I think we shall only get Platoons, in the end, but they “train” us (as far as they can in 8 little weeks!) to know all the duties of a Company Commander! – Our location is on Cannock Chase, & I wonder what it looked like before its beauty became blotched with unending huts!

Two days later, on 30 August 1917, Edwards was granted a Regular Commission with the ASC, ante-dated to 21 July 1916, in response to an application that he had made on 13 August 1917, but his promotion within the ASC was not published in the London Gazette until 1 March 1918.

The Brocton course ended on 3 December 1917 and on 16 December 1917 Edwards informed President Warren that he was “with a real Battalion at last” – the 14^th (Service) Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, which had arrived at Le Havre on 31 January 1916 as part of 105^th Brigade in the 35^th Division. This Division, which had been officially formed on 5 July 1915 as a so-called “Bantam Division” within Kitchener’s New Fourth Army, originally consisted of men, many of whom were miners or farm-workers, who were physically fit but shorter than the regulation height of 5 foot 3 inches (cf. V.A. Farrar and G.G. Miln). But very heavy casualties during the Battles of the Somme and Arras (July 1916–16 May 1917), together with the lack of replacements who were both short and fit, caused the Bantam units to be discontinued as such in spring 1917. Nevertheless, Edwards was very pleased with his new unit and continued his letter of 16 December by saying that he had “fallen on my feet & could not wish for pleasanter companions”.

When Edwards reached the 14^th Battalion, it was resting at School Camp, near Herzeele in northern France, halfway between Wormhoudt and the Belgian frontier, after its costly participation in the Third Battle of Ypres (31 July–10 November 1917) between 16 and 30 October and its less costly stay in the Canal Bank/Langemarck sector of the same area between 1 November and 9 December 1917. But the Battalion War Diary does not mention either Edwards’s arrival or his subsequent transfer to the 7^th (Service) Battalion, the Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent) Regiment, part of 53^rd Brigade, in the 18^th (Eastern) Division. This happened with some despatch and was almost certainly the result of a decision by the Army Council to reduce Divisions from 13 to ten battalions (cf. Miln). Thus, the 35^th Division lost four battalions, one of which was the 14^th Battalion, which was dispersed between 9 and 14 February 1918. But just before this happened, two officers and 38 other ranks from the 14^th Battalion carried out a successful night-time raid on a German strong-point known as Gravel Farm that had been a source of irritation to the British for about a month. Edwards did not take part in the raid, nor was he one of the 12 officers and 250 ORs from the 14^th Battalion who were absorbed by the 13^th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment. So he was most probably one of the remainder who made their way by train and on foot to the Surplus Wing II Corps Reinforcement Camp.

As the War Diary of the 7^th Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment does not mention Edwards’s co-option either, we cannot be absolutely sure when he joined it. But on 8 February 1918, the 7^th Battalion had been taken to Noyon, way to the south, and after resting for a week it began to march north-eastwards via Caillouël-Crépigny to the trenches near the Canal de la Sambre south of St-Quentin. It then spent periods here both in and out of the trenches until 12 March 1918, when it went into Brigade Reserve at Ly Fontaine, a mile or so north-east of Rémigny, and it returned to the trenches on 19 March. But on 21 March, the first day of Operation Michael, the Battalion’s War Diary records that “under cover of dense mist [the] enemy advanced & surrounded Battn HQ at about 11.00 am”, having surrounded ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies at c.10.30 hours. Twenty officers and 577 ORs were killed, wounded or captured, and for the next eight days the remnants of the Battalion, which must have included Edwards, fought a rearguard action in a zig-zag line south-westwards towards the River Aisne via Villequier-Aumont, the western suburbs of Chaunay, Commenchon, Crépigny, Caisnes, Nampcel and finally Autrêches, roughly halfway between Compiègnes and Soissons. On 29 March, in an attempt to out-run and out-flank the rapid German advance westwards, the survivors of the 7^th Battalion were taken by lorry in a loop c.40 miles north-westwards to Boves, a south-eastern suburb of Amiens, from where, on 30 March, they marched around three miles westwards to the village of Gentelles and took over as Corps Reserve. On 31 March the decimated 7^th Battalion moved forward another three miles to the village of Hangard, where it took over the main support line in the Bois de Hangard and were reinforced by 500 men from the 12^th Entrenching Battalion. The Battalion stayed here until the night of 3/4 April, when, after a heavy trench mortar barrage, they were attacked by the Germans, whom they managed to drive back with Lewis Gun and rifle fire. On 5 April the Battalion rested at Gentelles and then spent a week in and out of the line before taking over in the front line from the 10^th (Service) Battalion of the Essex Regiment.

It was here that Edwards was mortally wounded either by a shell or a bullet during a major German attack on 12 April – one of the 22 officer casualties that the 7^th Battalion would suffer during April 1918 – while he was leading his Company into action towards a forward position at Hangard, about six miles east of Amiens, and on 17 April 1918 he died of wounds received in action, aged 25, at No. 41 Casualty Clearing Station, Namps-au-Val (some 15 miles to the west). He is buried in Namps-au-Val British Cemetery, Grave II.B.11. He is commemorated on the memorial at St Paul’s Church, Clifton, Gloucestershire. He left £315 10s. 5d. and stipulated that it should go to the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

 

 

 

Bibliography

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

 

Printed sources: 

[Anon.], ‘The will …’, The Leeds Mercury, no. 14,637 (7 March 1885), p. 2.

[Anon.], ‘Edwards, Major Eustace Gresley (Dover) (Labour)’, The Times, no. 41,772 (26 March 1890), p. 12.

[Anon.], ‘Edwards’ [brief obituary], The Times, no. 41,772 (24 April 1918), p. 1.

[Anon.], ‘Captain C. Edwards’ [brief death notice], The Cliftonian, no. 7 [issue 295] (May 1918), p. 229.

[Anon.], [untitled and brief death notice], The Cliftonian, 25, no. 8 [issue 296] (July 1918), p. 253.

[Anon.], ‘Death of Major Edwards. A Dover Parliamentary Candidate who introduced Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’, Dover Express, no. 3,378 (20 April 1923), p. 11.

Davson (1926), pp. 183–5.

[Anon.], ‘Captain Edwards-Heathcote’ [obituary], The Times, no. 44,802 (28 January 1928), p. 4.

[Anon.], ‘Command of the Folkestone’, The Times, no. 46,673 (8 February 1934), p. 24.

[Anon.], ‘Captain Kenneth Edwards’, The Times, no. 46,912 (15 November 1934), p. 20.

[Anon.], ‘Fallen Officers: Royal Navy’, The Times, no. 49,600 (17 July 1943), p. 7.

Richard A. Preston, ‘The British Influence of RMC’, in Gerald Tulchinsky (ed.), To Preserve and Defend: Essays on Kingston in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976), pp. 119–34 (pp. 131–2).

 

Archival sources:

The Archive, Clifton College.

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 1.

MCA: PR 32/C 3/407-412 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters from Cuthbert Edwards [1915–17]).

OUA: UR 2/1/74.

WO95/2040/2.

WO95/2049.

WO95/2488/1.

WO339/45412.

 

On-line sources:

Wikipedia, ‘John A. Macdonald’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Macdonald (accessed 1 March 2019)