Geoffrey Henry Cadwallader Adams

• Matriculated: Did not matriculate

• Born: 9 May 1896

• Died: 1 November 1916

• Regiment: Suffolk Regiment

• Grave/Memorial: Thiepval Memorial: Pier and Face 1C and 2A

Family background

b. 9 May 1896 at 136, Portsdown Road, Maida Vale, London W, as the second son (of five children) of Alfred Adams (1863–1935) and Juliet Mary Adams (née Farmar) (c.1866–1937) (m. 1892). At the time of the 1901 Census the family was living at 162, Sutherland Avenue, Maida Vale, Paddington (four servants); in 1911 at the same address (three servants). It later moved to 48, Nevern Square, Earl’s Court, London SW.

 

 

Parents and antecedents

Adams’s paternal grandfather, the Reverend Henry Cadwallader Adams (1817–99), attended Westminster School and Winchester College and matriculated at Balliol in 30 November 1835. He migrated to Magdalen in 1836, where he was elected a Demy, and graduated with a 2^nd in Classics in 1840 (MA 1842). He was a Probationer-Fellow of Magdalen from 1843 to 1852 but also taught at Winchester from 1844 to 1851. He was ordained Deacon in 1846 and Priest in 1852, resigned his Fellowship when he married in 1852, and was Curate of Greinton, Somerset, from 1852 to 1855. From 1855 to 1868 he was Chaplain of Bromley College, Kent, a post which carried a stipend of £170 p.a.; from 1867 to 1878 he was Vicar of Dry Sandford with Cothill, Berkshire, a living with a stipend of £100 p.a. and a joint population of 213; and from 1878 to 1898 he was Vicar of Old Shoreham, West Sussex, a living in the gift of Magdalen with a stipend of £318 p.a. and a house and a cure of souls of 248. He authored 47 books, mainly religious commentaries, Greek and Latin grammars, school stories and historical fiction, and also wrote poetry. He left £8,523 17s. 7d.

 Adams’s father went to Radley and was a Demy of Magdalen from 1881 to 1885. He got a First in Classics Mods in 1883 and a Second in History in 1885. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1885, called to the Bar in 1888, and elected as a Bencher in 1922. As a barrister, he enjoyed a large practice as a specialist in conveyancing and equity drafting, i.e. the drafting of written proceedings in a court action in the Chancery Division of the High Court (after 1875), and also of legal documentation regarding land and trusts within Chancery jurisdiction. Such barristers were members of Lincoln’s Inn in particular because of the Inn’s historical association with the Court of Chancery. He enjoyed a busy Chancery Bar practice for many years and was a leading Chancery junior in a large number of reported cases. He would almost certainly have known the fathers of T.B. Cave and A.G. Kirby. In 1927 and 1933 he was elected a member of the Bar Council and he left £20,408 net (c.£1 million in 2005).

Adams’s maternal grandfather was General William Roberts Farmar (1825–96), whose second wife, Ellenor Louisa Girardt (1837–1929), who came from a Huguenot family, was Adams’s maternal grandmother. General Farmar, who was of Irish extraction, was gazetted ensign in the 50^th Queen’s Own Regiment in 1845, a regiment with family associations for nearly 100 years. He spent most of his active service in India. He was badly wounded in the Battle of Aliwal (1846) by grape shot in the thigh fired from a gun mounted on a camel. He served in the Indian Mutiny (First War of Independence) in the 82^nd Regiment and was, as Captain Farmar, instrumental in capturing two 18-pounder guns from the Gwalior contingent at Cawnpore. He received the brevet rank of major and was mentioned in dispatches. The following year he was invalided home and from 1860 to 1870 he was Captain of Cadets at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and from 1872 to 1884 he was Assistant Commandant of the Royal Victoria Military Hospital, Netley, Hampshire. He retired with the rank of Major-General.

 

Siblings and their families

Brother of:

(1) Ralph Edward Cadwallader (later Major, MC) (1893–1937); married (1919) Helen Monica Griffith (1890–1979), the daughter of a clergyman; one daughter;

(2) Gwendolen Mary (1900–61), later Spranger after her marriage in 1926 to John Alfred Spranger (1889–1986); three daughters;

(3) Otho Cadwallader (1901–61), who took the surname Hopton in 1941; married (1932) Mary Pamela Pratt-Barlow (as Baskerville) (1905–48), two sons; then (1949) Vivienne Annie Lardner (née Dennys) (1905–83), the widow of William Llewelyn Parry de Winton (1902–37);

(4) Michael Cadwallader (b. 1904, d. 1979 in Bordighera, Italy); married (1931) Phyllis Evans (1907–72) of Johannesburg.

Ralph Edward also went to Radley and read History at Magdalen from 1911 to 1914 but probably left to join the Army as a Regular without taking a degree. He was promoted Lieutenant on 14 May 1914, disembarked with the 1^st Battalion, the East Surrey Regiment, at Le Havre on 15 August 1914 and saw service on the Western Front (Temporary Captain 21 September 1915; Captain 19 July 1916). He later became Brigade Major with the 231^st (Dismounted Yeomanry) Brigade in Palestine (1917–18). He kept a diary dealing with General Allenby’s first offensive in Palestine, which was published in 1920 as The Modern Crusaders. After the war, probably during the 1920s, he became a planter in Ceylon.

John Alfred Spranger was an engineer and was commissioned in the Royal Engineers, serving in Italy and reaching the rank of Captain. He was also a bibliophile who spent much of his life in Florence; and an Honorary Life Governor of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

Otho Cadwallader, too, was a professional soldier in the East Surrey Regiment (2^nd Lieutenant 31 August 1922; Lieutenant 31 August 1924). One of his sons and one of his grandsons studied at Magdalen before entering the law.

Michael Cadwallader studied at Radley and Magdalen (1922–25), where he took a Pass Degree. He was admitted as a member of Lincoln’s Inn on 14 November 1924 and called to the Bar on 29 June 1927. By 1929 he, like his father, was practising as a barrister who specialized in equity drafting, with chambers at 9, Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. He later became a County Court Judge. During World War Two he was commissioned as an officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Captain 1942), but worked at first for the Ministry of Economic Warfare (1940–41) and the Defence Department in South Africa (1941). In 1944 he became the British Vice-Consul in Lourenco Marques and in 1946 he worked temporarily with the Foreign Office in the British Embassy at Rome as their property adviser. From 1950 he acted as an Agent of the British Government on the Anglo-Italian Conciliation Committee; in 1955 he became a resident of Johannesburg; and from 1957 he was a member of the Administrative Tribunal, Unidroit, in Rome. By 1966 he had moved permanently to the Villa Gaia, Bordighera, Italy, where he died. He was also at one time the legal editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary.

 

Education and professional life

Adams attended Cothill House Preparatory School (also known as Dauglish and Tomkinson’s), Cothill, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire (founded 1860, moved to present location in 1870), from 1905 to 1909. While at Cothill,

he always displayed a spirit of keenness, both in work and games, and those who know the school will not need to be told that such a spirit was appreciated and encouraged with unfailing sympathy. But his rise was by no means phenomenally rapid. He had to work his way up from the lowest rung, and amongst contemporaries who were at least his equals in all departments. For some years he seldom came out top in any class, though frequently second; while in games of all kinds there were nearly always one or two boys ahead of him. But his development, though somewhat slow, was certain, and in his last term he outpaced all the rest. He won the first-class prizes and headed the averages for cricket.

In September 1909, he won an Entrance Scholarship to Radley College and joined the House where his elder brother Ralph Edward was a House Prefect and whose Housemaster was the legendary Arthur Capel Molyneux (“Crumbo”) Croome (1866–1930), all-round sportsman and Classicist, who had been a Demy at Magdalen from 1885 to 1889 and had taught at Radley since graduating. After Mr Croome left Radley, Adams transferred to Mr Barmby’s House in September 1911 and remained there until he left Radley in 1915. In September 1912, one or two boys at the head of Mr Barmby’s House unexpectedly left the school and Adams succeeded to the headship. He had not been a House Prefect, had no experience of governing, and was only 16. But as he had just got into the VIth Form, the then Warden, Dr (later Canon) Thomas Field (1855–1936; Fellow of Magdalen 1877–88; Warden of Radley College 1897–1913), “took the strong course of appointing him a School Prefect straight away”.

 

 

The step was a wise one and he became a very successful Head of House. According to Edward Gordon Selwyn (1885–1959), who was Warden of Radley from 1913 to 1918 and Dean of Winchester from 1930 to 1959, Adams’s career at Radley was very similar to that at Cothill:

His development was slow during the earlier years, perhaps due to the fact that he greatly outgrew his strength. He was always very tall for his age, and finally reached the height of 6 ft 4 in. Moreover, both in and out of doors, he had a large variety of pursuits and tastes. He did not devote himself at all exclusively to cricket, and indeed for a considerable period seemed to prefer fives, rackets, tennis, and squash rackets, at all of which he was, for his age, very expert. It is remarkable […] that he first came into prominence in the school-world by bye-ways. He had from boyhood strong literary and dramatic tastes, and had no greater pleasure when at home than in reading and acting for the benefit of his younger brothers and sisters in the nursery. At Radley he appears to have found a favourable field for these pursuits. He seems to have made a mark in the Junior Literary Society as early as 1910 by his reading of the character of Blanche in Widowers’ Houses [the first play by G.B. Shaw to be staged (1892)], and after his election, in the autumn of 1911, to the Literary Society proper, he was constantly the exponent of the title-rôle throughout the remainder of his school career. It was, however, in the autumn of 1911 that his talents in these directions attracted general attention. Aristophanes’ Wasps was selected as the Greek play to be acted on All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days that year. Although Geoffrey had taken no part in any previous school entertainment, and was only fifteen, and comparatively low in the school, he was cast for the leading part of Philocleon, a duty which involved not only constant presence on the stage, but the learning by heart of some 600 lines of Greek. […] The whole performance was an unqualified success, and great praise was bestowed on Geoffrey and H.W.S. Cotton, who played the equally important part of Brigadelycleon, and E.C. Dunstan, the leader of the chorus, not only by the audience, but also in The Times and Westminster Gazette.

The same pattern is visible in Adams’s membership of the Debating Society. From October 1911 to about the beginning of 1913, he features merely as one of those “who also spoke”. But suddenly, he seems “to have sprung into prominence, and he is recorded as having made ‘quite the speech of the evening’, ‘in his own inimitable manner’, and to have been ‘lively as usual’.”

 

 

From early 1913 Adams, who was 6 foot 4 inches by the time of his attestation, also began to make his mark “in the department of games”: in March 1913 he won the School Single Challenge Fives, “a very unusual performance for a boy who had never even been tried for any eight, or any eleven, either at cricket or football”. Adams’s athletic progress gave rise to the hope that he would, in the Summer Term of 1913,

be allowed a trial for the Second XI at cricket, but the event passed all expectations. He was selected to play for the Second XI with such satisfactory results, that he speedily obtained a place in the First Eleven matches also. All the old spirit and form of his last year at Cothill seemed to have returned, after a three years’ absence, and he, as well as the whole eleven, had a most successful season. He received his Second Eleven cap in June, and his First Eleven cap in July […]. In the following September he was elected Captain of Rackets and Fives. On All Saints’ Day the plays were in English, and he took the part of Bottom in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the most interesting episode in his career during that term was the Old Radleian dinner, which was held at the Hôtel Cecil on December 11. The circumstances were very special, as it was the occasion at which the present Warden, then newly appointed [i.e. Selwyn], was to make the acquaintance of the numerous Old Radleians who wished to bid him welcome, and it was also the moment chosen for the presentation to Mr Wharton of the testimonial which his pupils of all generations offered as an inadequate tribute of gratitude and affection. There was in consequence an assemblage of Old Radleians at the dinner far in excess of the numbers reached on any previous occasion, greatly though those numbers had increased in recent years.

As both the Senior and Second Senior Prefects were unable to attend because they were at Oxford, trying for a scholarship, Geoffrey, who was Third Prefect, was drafted in at short notice.

He had a couple of hours in the train to make some notes for his speech, and made good use of his time, for his speech has been described as the event of the evening, notwithstanding the many and great counter-attractions of that memorable occasion. The Warden passed round to him at the conclusion of his speech a little note, which has not been lost – “κἁλλιστα εἶπας” [“you have spoken very well”] – and these two words happily expressed the judgement of the whole company. In the Lent Term of 1914 Geoffrey won the Single Fives Cup for the second time, and again represented Radley against Bradfield. On this occasion he would almost certainly have avenged his defeat of the previous year, but unfortunately he sustained a heavy fall early in the match, due to a slip on the unaccustomed flooring of the Bradfield Court, and in the result was just defeated. In the following May he was elected Captain of Cricket rather unexpectedly. It was his first experience as Captain of any sort of team, but he put his heart into the work, and came through the season creditably, though the team was weak and the victories few. […] In the following September he was appointed Senior Prefect. The war had now broken out, and the school, of course, became something of a training camp. Geoffrey had been in the Radley OTC from his first entry into the School, and in September 1912 had reached the rank of Corporal. He was now appointed Platoon Sergeant, and during the ensuing year much of his time was taken up with drill and training of all kinds. There was no All Saints’ Day play, and no Old Radleian dinner that year, and the only event to be recorded concerning Geoffrey is that he was elected to a Classical Exhibition at Hertford College, Oxford. […] But he did not retain that award very long, for in the Lent Term of 1915 he was elected to [the second] Classical Demyship at Magdalen, upon which he of course resigned the Exhibition at Hertford.

Both his grandfather and father had held Classical Demyships at the same college, and this election of three successive generations of the same family to Open Scholarships at the same college is believed to be unique. Geoffrey was welcomed with open heart by the President of Magdalen, and he fully appreciated and reciprocated the cordiality with which he was received.

On 25 March 1915 Adams’s father wrote a letter to President Warren in which he described how pleased he was to hear of his son’s Demyship:

Geoff has literary tastes and powers of imagination which I never possessed: and I do trust that he may prove a credit to the College. You may remember telling us years ago – and I have never forgotten it – that Magdalen men should walk worthy of their vocation. When I wrote to Geoff last night to congratulate him, I repeated those words: & I hope he may some day hand them on to his son. I only wish my father was alive to hear that the 3^rd generation is maintaining the tradition.

Although Adams did not matriculate, Selwyn tells us that from that time forward, Magdalen began to occupy a very prominent place in all his thoughts and hopes and his brief memory of the warmth of his reception, coupled with a sunlit anticipation of better things to come there after the war, formed his “chief solace” during his time in the Army. Nevertheless, Selwyn adds,

he did not on that account neglect his duties in or out of doors at Radley. In March he won the Single Fives cup for the third successive year, being the first person to do so since its institution in 1876. He also again represented Radley against Bradfield at Fives, and this time he had his revenge, as he defeated his opponent without difficulty. […] In the Summer Term of 1915 Geoffrey was Captain of Cricket for the second time, and he was now firmly in the saddle. The season was on the whole highly successful, though of course the absence of so many cricketers at the Front made the teams available as opponents of a rather variable character. [… But] it was his captaincy that was the most valuable asset to his side.

After Adams’s death, Mr Croome wrote: “It rarely happens that a boy can do all Geoffrey did at Radley and be as well beloved as he was. I saw him when the school played Westminster at Vincent Square, and a little conversation with others in the eleven showed that they positively worshipped him, and so did the professional, Walter Wright.” In 1915 Geoffrey was awarded the Richards Gold Medal for Classics, and he also won the Sixth Form prizes. In this area, “his late development was even more remarkable at Radley than at Cothill. He never obtained a prize of any sort until he reached the Sixth Form, and then he obtained prizes of all kinds, for English Essay, for Greek Iambics, and for Divinity; and finally the ordinary school prizes for the term’s work. In his Diary entry of 9 November 1916, the diarist and Fellow of Magdalen C.C.J. Webb described “our demy-elect Geoffrey Adams” as “a very promising boy”.

 

 

War service

At the end of the Summer Term of 1915, Adams went with Radley’s Officers’ Training Corps into camp near Wantage, and while he was there he was appointed Cadet Officer. Then, on 22 September 1915, he was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the 3/4^th Battalion (Territorial Forces) of the Suffolk Regiment, the Battalion which supplied the 1/4^th Battalion (Territorial Forces) with drafts (London Gazette, no. 29.305, 21 September 1915, p. 9,402). He spent the whole of the following 12 months training in Britain – mainly in Halton North Park near Tring in Hertfordshire, but also in Windsor Great Park, with intervals of special courses at Dover and Dunstable. According to Selwyn, “the winter months were principally remarkable for the seas of mud in which the camp was submerged, but like the majority of the other sufferers, he made little complaint of the discomfort”. Adams, who occasionally wrote poetry, left a poem about this period of his life:

 

At Halton Park Camp

Winter, 1915–16

 

A sheet of snow and woody hills above,

And sun low-sinking, gorgeous at his end,

And no man heedeth.

Who should heed such things,

When War prevails, and comes the welkin rend?

 

Yet had the Oldest Poet scanned with sightless eyes

These rolling woods and snows about their feet,

Had not this other Ida seemed to him

Worthy his battlesong and cadence sweet?

 

He sung of fair Scamander and of Hector slain in war;

One song for both.

Men, loving beauty, fell.

Here, no man heedeth. Who should heed such things?

The sun sinks lower, and ’tis night.

’Tis well.

 

The reference is to the Battle of the River Scamander (The Iliad, Book XXI) and the poem, which is cast in the form of a mutilated sonnet, seems, despite its consoling last line, to contrast blind Homer’s heroic treatment of the Trojan War with the inability of poets to deal with the current war in the same way. A minor point, perhaps, but even before Adams has had any experience of the Western Front, his poem tacitly raises questions about the contemporary relevance of the Hellenism which was so prominent in British Public Schools of the time. In mid-December 1915, President Warren sent Adams a copy of the Creweian oration, which he had delivered in Latin in his capacity as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry from 1911 to 1916 and whose tenor was unashamedly pro-war even though its primary purpose was to give thanks to the University’s benefactors. Adams read it with interest before passing it on to his father, and on 13 December 1915 he wrote to Warren expressing their enjoyment and concluding: “I only wish I had more opportunity for reading now, as a life entirely of action does not really appeal to me.”

While at Halton North Camp, in about mid-May 1916, Adams contracted German measles, and while convalescent he also caught scarlet fever and was sent to Tring Isolation Hospital as from 26 May 1916. Although he had recovered from both illnesses by 18 July 1916, he was not considered fit for duty and was sent on convalescent leave from 16 July to 14 September 1916. Selwyn summarized as follows:

There is little to be said of his year’s training […]. His letters are cheerful, even when he was recovering from scarlet fever in hospital, and his company was appreciated. But he felt military life to be always a second best. He writes with delight of a visit to Mrs. Humphry Ward [(1851–1920), a novelist whose works involved strongly religious subject matter, and an educationalist and social reformer] at Tring, where he had a long talk on Balkan affairs with a guest who was a Greek. And among the letters about Geoffrey, after his death, is one from [a] Mr Stannard, whom he met on two training-courses, and in whom he found real sympathy with his own literary tastes. Mr Stannard gave him a volume of Browning’s Selections, which “seem to have done something to help him through the tedium of measles”. But the memories of Radley and the hopes of Magdalen were his chief solace. More and more throughout this year, and largely owing to the very kind and cordial welcome extended to him when he won his demyship by the President of Magdalen, Oxford cast its spell over him. He describes “a glorious day” with Gibbs and Parry-Crooke at Oxford, with a row downstream to Sandford, and shortly before he fell he writes: “I feel that every push brings me nearer to Magdalen”.

On 20 September 1916, Adams, now fully recovered and returned to duty, finally disembarked in France. Here, together with 12 other officers, he duly joined the 1/4^th (Territorial Forces) Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, on 25 September 1916, as one of the replacements for the three officers who had been killed in action and the ten officers who had been wounded during August. Adams was assigned to ‘A’ Company, and on 26 September the Battalion went into the front-line trenches east of Hébuterne as part of 98^th Brigade, 33^rd Division. The front there was still relatively quiet and until 3 October, when it went into billets at Sus-St-Leger, the Battalion spent most of the time improving the trenches. For the next three weeks, the Battalion spent its time training behind the lines, with one of those weeks devoted to learning how to use the medium machine-gun known as the Lewis Gun, which had been in service with the British Army for almost a year, until on 24 October it was sent to Trônes Wood, where it experienced heavy rain for three days.

On 28 October, the day when Adams was transferred temporarily from ‘A’ to ‘C’ Company because of a shortage of officers, the Battalion took part in the capture of Dewdrop Trench, to the east of Lesboeufs, from where ‘D’ Company attempted to push forward outposts onto the low ridge known as Transloy Ridge that rose some little distance in front of the British front-line trench near Lesboeufs, at about the extreme limit of the British advance. But the enemy was already there and the attack cost the Battalion five other ranks killed and 9 wounded. A second attempt to take the ridge was made on the following day and failed, but on 30 October ‘D’ Company succeeded in gaining a section of the ridge. On 31 October ‘C’ Company tried twice to capture the right-hand section of the ridge, but to no avail. The two days had cost Adams’s Battalion 107 of its number killed, wounded and missing. Then, on All Saints Day, 1 November 1916, Adams was put in command of two platoons from ‘A’ Company and ordered to advance on the right-hand end of the ridge in conjunction with an attack by the Brigade on the Battalion’s right, and then capture a German machine-gun emplacement which had been located some 30–40 yards beyond the crest of the ridge. Unfortunately, the artillery bombardment which preceded the attack failed to destroy a well-positioned German machine-gun, and Adams, who was leading the attack, was killed in action, aged 20, together with five of his men; 12 others were wounded. Although Adams’s body was brought in and buried at night behind the British line in Dewdrop Trench, he now has no known grave.

On 20 November 1916 Adams’s father wrote the following letter to President Warren:

Dear Mr President, I cannot thank you adequately for your beautiful letter. It only makes me regret the more that poor Geoff did not live to come into residence. His words that every push brought him nearer to Magdalen are full of pathos. He was longing to be there, all last winter: & was looking forward so keenly to the time when it would be possible. Perhaps the giving up of Oxford was the greatest part of his sacrifice. But he never grumbled or complained. His case is[,] I believe[,] that of a large number of others of his age, similarly placed: some of his own school friends among them: The spirit which has possessed them has been very wonderful. In this war the sons seem to have set an example to their fathers. I like to believe and hope that those who have fallen may already be together again: and that each sad loss which desolates a home here adds one more to their gallant company in the other world. I am very glad that you think that a short memoir of him would be appropriate: for the Warden of Radley has already written to make the same suggestion and I hope it may be practicable. It is most considerate of you to have sent a notice of him to the Oxford Magazine; & I am much touched by your kindness. We are having some nice photos of Geoff printed & I will of course send you one. Ralph arrived home unexpectedly from Egypt last Sunday week on a fortnight’s leave. Needless to say we look upon it as a God send. It cheered my wife up as nothing else could have done. With my true thanks – Yours ever, Alfred Adams.

Selwyn summarized his thoughts about Adams in a paragraph of the extensive obituary which appeared in The Radleian two weeks later:

Few Radleians have had a more distinguished career. He combined with his great ability a gentleness, a grace of character, and coolness of judgment which at once attracted the attention of those, even much older men, who met him. He was a natural leader, and it seemed certain that a remarkable career awaited him. Athough all his tastes were literary, his letters from the front were full of happiness. He kept his love of the classics even there, and one of his last requests was for an Odyssey.

After a mere three years, Selwyn seems to have been affected exceptionally deeply by his protégé’s death – so much so that those terse, initial thoughts on Adams’s character gradually grew into something larger, more puzzled, and more puzzling. So, after setting out the bare facts of his short life in the first 16 pages of his Memoir, Selwyn meditated on them more freely and with greater penetration for a further eight pages. Here are some of his observations, dictated by a mixture of grief and love and set down almost randomly:

Outwardly, the record of Geoffrey’s life was like that of many another English boy of his generation who has seen twenty summers […] so that it would seem as though there were little to say of him. And yet he filled every stage of this life with so much joy to others, of crisp and unerring achievement, of consistent high quality in thought and deed, that he stands out conspicuous among his fellows. […] There is not a trace of that gradual reserve and half-selfish shyness which so often mark a boy’s development into manhood. His letters from France have the same frank simplicity as those from his preparatory school. This note of simplicity dominated Geoffrey’s character. He was so essentially what William James would have called “once-born”. No touch of morbidness or introspection or jealousy of others ever seems to have marred his keen contact with the events he lived in, or the people he knew. His personality never sank below its horizon, and he saw and showed others of the best of life. He had a Greek love of directness and of the concrete. [When he describes such scenes as], his billet behind the firing line, where “the effect of the vaulted passages and cellars and the men in steel helmets by candle-light is most medieval and picturesque” – one feels that he never ceased to think with the truthfulness of perfect simplicity.

In Selwyn’s view, it was this characteristic, “this sustained ease of good form”, which gave Adams his power of leadership; and,

like Sophocles, whom he loved, he ruled “less by kingly power than grace”. […] When he thought it necessary, he was the strictest of disciplinarians, and none doubted his impartiality. But he was never worried by it; it came with as much ease as a copy of Greek Iambics or the reading of a lesson in chapel. He was such a one as Stevenson would have loved, thinking it a more obvious duty to make his neighbour happy than to make him good. There was one trait in Geoffrey’s personality so persistent that it deserves special mention – I mean his love of the classics. It was a far greater thing than good scholarship, and indeed Geoffrey’s scholarship was never of the faultless kind. […] Certainly Hellenism was to him a joy of the spirit. […] It accounted for his strong preference for Greek in Form, for the care he took over his Greek verses shown up always in a perfect hand-writing, for his love of penning silhouettes and pen-and-ink pictures of scenes which amused him. He had the Greek distaste for βαναυσία, as when he speaks of “my great disapproval of all things mechanical”, though he admits with characteristic shrewdness that the Lewis Gun instruction which prompts this avowal, “does not seem by any means uninteresting, and it is certainly useful to have some knowledge of the matter”. In a letter written to me from France within a week or two of his death, Geoffrey vigorously denounced the theory which had been ventilated in the Press, that the war had exploded the classical education, and he proceeded thus: “A son of science remarked to me the other day that he had never known a classical man out here who was not thoroughly happy on all occasions. In my own humble way I know the truth of this, even in the short time I have been out here.” The same letter says that he would give much for an hour of Thucydides, book vii, and a game of rackets, and contains a request for a small edition of the Odyssey, which so many men seem to have found a good companion in battle. But more than all, there was a strong vein of Hellenism in Geoffrey’s outlook on life. Σωφροσύνη was a marked characteristic of it. We call it temperance, but it is more than that. When Plato in the Republic is expounding the four cardinal virtues, it is noticeable that his synonyms for σωφροσύνη all imply an intellectual quality – those for δικαιοσύνη a practical one only. Temperance is a state of mind, a credo, an intellectual adjustment of interests and passions. It was just so with Geoffrey. His action was always reasonable, his character like that portrayed in the Phaedrus, with the twin steeds of will and emotion in the firm rein of the charioteer.

 But, Selwyn hastened to conclude, possibly aware at some level that his description of Adams “the once-born” drove a huge hole through the central doctrines of Christianity, Adams was a man “to whom religion meant much”, who never went anywhere without a little book of prayers and a pocket testament, but whose religiosity expressed itself in the quality of his relationships with others and in the “simplicity, gentleness, directness, humour, clearness of vision” which were never more evident than when Adams was in physically challenging situations: “at mid-off, where he would stop the hardest drive, or on Fairfield in the Lakes, where he climbed up with two other Radleians and myself over 2,000 feet in a blizzard, with six inches of snow underfoot, gloveless and smiling, or in khaki, when he paid a farewell visit here with Douglas Chandor early in August 1916.”

A letter from a contemporary supports Selwyn’s views:

It is hard to find words to express our sorrow […]. No-one can realize, but those who worked with him, how faithfully he served the school during his year of office as Senior Prefect. The cricket eleven of 1915 will be remembered as one of the best the school has ever had, and its success was largely due to the personality of its captain, who by his own enthusiasm inspired the eleven with a like keeneness. In a letter which he wrote on […] the day before his death he said, “I suppose you are going to Radley on All Saints Day, think of me a little.” Many of us will always remember All Saints Day, 1916, and as each year comes round bringing us nearer to him, will think of him who has made the great sacrifice, and laid down his life for his friends. May he rest in peace.

Adams is commemorated on Pier and Face 1C and 2A, Thiepval Memorial; on a memorial in All Saints’ Church, Queen’s Park, Bedford; on a memorial in Lincoln’s Inn to the sons of Benchers who were killed in action in World War One; on the Memorial Arch at Radley College; and by a shield on the wall in Radley College, a tradition among Radley’s prefects. Adams’s shield is adorned with a motto that is frequently used by the Adams family: “Sub cruce veritas” (“Beneath the Cross there is Truth”).

 

Bibliography

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

 

Special acknowledgements:

**Revd E[dward] G[ordon] Selwyn, Warden of Radley College, Geoffrey Henry Cadwallader Adams: A Memoir (Oxford: Frederick Hall, Printer to the University, 1917). Contains seven poems by Adams (pp. 25–31).

 

Printed sources:

[Anon.], ‘A Soldier of the Indian Mutiny. Interesting Stories of his Life’, Southern Echo, no. 2,410 (27 July 1896), p. 3.

[Anon.], ‘Obituary’ [General William R. Farmar], The Times, no. 34,954 (28 July 1896), p. 9.

[Anon.], ‘Second Lieutenant Geoffrey Henry Cadwallader Adams’ [obituary], The Times, no. 41,322 (11 November 1916), p. 10.

[Anon.], ‘Second Lieutenant Geoffrey Henry Cadwallader Adams’ [obituary], The Radleian, no. 414 (16 December 1916), p. 23.

Bryans, A History of St Peter’s College, Radley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1924).

[Anon.], ‘Mr. A.C.M Croome’ [obituary], The Times, no. 45,617 (13 September 1930), p. 12.

[Anon.], ‘Canon Thomas Field’ [obituary], The Times. no. 47,380 (21 May 1936), p. 21.

A.K. Boyd, The History of Radley College 1817–1947 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948).

McCarthy (2002), pp. 142–6.

Guy Arnold, ‘Adams, Henry Cadwallader (1817–1899)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 1 (2004), pp. 230–1.

 

Archival sources:

MCA: PR32/C/3/6-16 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters relating to G.H.C. Adams [1915–1916]).

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

OUA (DWM): C.C.J. Webb, Diaries, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1161.

WO95/2427.

WO374/258.