Fact file:

  • Matriculated: 1916

  • Born: 20 May 1898

  • Died: 13 October 1917

  • Regiment: Worcestershire Regiment

  • Grave/Memorial: Dozinghem Military Cemetery: Grave XII.H.20

Family background

b. 20 May 1898 at Sherborne, Malvern Wells, Worcestershire, as the younger son of Henry (“Harry”) Arbuthnot Acworth, CIE, JP (b. 1849 in Piedmont, d. 1933), and Anna Mary Godby Acworth (née Jenkins) (b. 1860 in Lahore, d. 1938), who married in 1880 in Dharmsala, Punjab, India. After Henry’s retirement in 1895, the family moved back to England and lived first at “The Mythe” (an Anglo-Saxon word for the place where two rivers meet), Malvern Wells, Worcestershire. By 1918 it had moved to a large Victorian house called “The Palms”, Orchard Road, Great Malvern, Worcestershire.

 

Parents

Acworth’s paternal grandfather was Nathaniel Brindley Acworth (1806–92) who in 1822 was articled for five years as a clerk to William Thornbury, a solicitor in the High Court of Chancery. By 1841 he was the prothonotary and registrar of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Madras, but returned to England and in 1845 was ‘called to the degree of barrister-in-law’ by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. He practised as a barrister and became a JP for Hertfordshire. He married Anna Diane Close (1821–93), the daughter of Reverend Dr Francis Close (1797–1882), Dean of Carlisle and opponent of horse-racing, theatre, tobacco and alcohol, and author of 70 publications (although George Clement Boase considered that “few of these are of any permanent value”).

Acworth’s father studied at Worcester College, Oxford, and followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a member of the Indian Civil Service in July 1870. In this capacity he worked for the Presidency of Bombay (now Mumbai), where he served as Assistant Collector and Magistrate, Under-Secretary in the Finance and Revenue Department (1879) (a position that Lord Dufferin is said to have described as “the most difficult appointment in India”), Collector and Magistrate, Collector of Salt Revenue, and finally Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay (1890–95). His services during the great famine of 1876–78 received the thanks of the Government of India and he took a leading part in the suppression of the Hindu–Muslim riots of 1892. He was also a member of the Anthropological Society of Bombay and a Major in the Bombay Rifle Corps.

 

Harry Arbuthnot Acworth

 

Harry Acworth’s major achievement was, however, the foundation in 1890 of the Homeless Leper Asylum for vagrants and beggars at Wadala, Bombay, an achievement that was followed by other Indian state governments. In 1904, the Asylum was renamed the Acworth Leper Asylum in recognition of his efforts, and it underwent further name changes until, in 1992, it became the Acworth Municipal Hospital for Leprosy. The hospital was tolerant of relations between the sexes and of the caste and religious affiliations of the inmates, allowing a Hindu temple, a mosque and a Roman Catholic church to be erected in its grounds. In 1970, hospital staff established the Acworth Leprosy Hospital Society for Research, Rehabilitation, and Education in Leprosy, with the aim of facilitating the rehabilitation of leprosy victims, encouraging research into the disease, and carrying out health education for its prevention. On 5 February 2003, during Anti-Leprosy Week, the Acworth Leprosy Museum, which is an extension of these research activities in collaboration with the Acworth Hospital, was opened by Shri Eknath Gaikwad, the Health Minister of Maharashtra State. The Museum was set up to tell visitors about important events, institutions and people in the leprosy saga that dates from the nineteenth century, and has displays relating to the disease, the history of treatment, official, legal and social perspectives on the disease, philanthropic efforts to wipe out the disease, literature on leprosy, and health education. One of the exhibits is a wooden partition that was once used to keep patients and doctors apart during consultations in the days when it was not known how the disease was transmitted. The Museum’s broader aim is to serve as a leprosy archive for all of India, by making available important historical documents, reports, photographs and other records that bear on the medical and social history of the disease. Its work is taking on more significance as the incidence of the disease declines and leprosy organizations diversify into other areas. Harry Acworth’s bust still greets visitors to the Museum and Hospital that bear his name.

While working on the Indian subcontinent, Harry Acworth co-authored A Handbook for Revenue Officers in the Presidency of Bombay, and edited Ballads of the Marathas (1891) and Ballads of the Marathas rendered into English Verse (1894). After his retirement from the Indian Civil Service in 1895 and return to England in the following year, he became friends with Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934), who had lived in Great Malvern since his marriage and move from London (1891), and at his and his wife’s request Harry reworked Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf and the patriotic cantata Caractacus. These became the libretti for the cantatas King Olaf (1896, Op. 30) and Caractacus (1897–98, Op. 35, published 1900). According to legend, the first-century British chieftain Caractacus led the Celtic resistance against the Romans and made his final stand at the British Camp, an Iron Age hill fort that dominates the Hereford Beacon in the Malvern Hills, near to the homes of both Acworth and Elgar. Modern scholarship takes the view, however, that Church Stretton, in Shropshire, was a more likely place for the battle.

A man of deep religious convictions, Harry Acworth was greatly interested in theology and a loyal member of the Church of England, and after his return to England he became very active in Conservative politics and local affairs in the Malvern area, especially those concerned with education. He gave up this activity in spring 1919, most probably because of the deaths of his two sons. He was a nephew of Admiral Sir Francis Arden Close (1828–1918) and a major beneficiary of his will.

Acworth’s mother was the daughter of Major-General Charles Vernon Jenkins (Bengal Staff Corps (1830–1901), who was born in Calcutta. He was the son of Robert Castle Jenkins (1803–92) a Calcutta merchant.

 

Siblings and their families

Brother of:

(1) Edith Mary (b. 1884 in Bombay, d. 1949); married (1909) Edward Cecil Brindley Acworth (1867–1929);

(2) Douglas Harry (later Major, MC, Order of the Nile) (1885–1919); married (1915) Edith Knowles (b. 1881 in India, d. 1962); one son;

(3) Rosamund Alys (1892–1973), later Conquest after her marriage in 1915 to (Robert) Folger (Westcott) Conquest (b. 1891 in Virginia, USA, d. 1960 in Vence, to the west of Nice in Southern France); two sons.

Douglas Harry, Acworth’s elder brother, was at Winchester from January 1899 to December 1903, where he was a keen Volunteer, a member of the Bisley Eight, and a House Prefect. After passing through the Royal Military College (Sandhurst), where he became a cadet Sergeant and won a cup for rifle shooting, he gained an Indian cadetship and on 5 August 1905 he was gazetted Second Lieutenant. On 23 October 1906 he was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the 55th (Coke’s) Rifles, Indian Army, one of the crack regiments of the old Punjab Frontier Force, Indian Army, and became, successively, its Quartermaster and Adjutant (1914). He was promoted Lieutenant on 5 November 1907 and Captain on 5 August 1914, while he was on eight months’ leave in England, and when war broke out, he was one of the Indian Army officers detained in England by Lord Kitchener to drill new levies when 600 other Indian Army officers were sent back to India. In this capacity, he spent a short period at Aldershot with the 8th Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, before being attached to the 57th (Wilde’s) Rifles in France. He was recommended for the DSO after a very gallant bombing exploit on 24 November 1914, when he received a bayonet wound, but being only a Captain, he was awarded the newly instituted MC instead, the first officer in the Indian Army to receive this decoration.

 

Douglas Harry Acworth
(© IWM: HU 112645)

 

At the end of April 1915, during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, Douglas Harry was wounded in the thigh and badly wounded in the right forearm by a shrapnel ball which had passed from elbow to wrist. He was sent home, where, only partially recovered, he became a General Staff Officer (Grade 3) on the Staff at Canterbury from 19 August 1915 to 3 February 1916. After some months he joined the 57th (Vaughan’s) Rifles in Egypt, where he became a Staff Captain from 28 May 1916 to 8 April 1917, and Brigade Major of the 232nd Infantry Brigade on 9 April 1917. He served as a General Staff Officer (Grade 2) on the line of communications in Palestine and moved to General Allenby’s Staff with the rank of Major in Spring 1918. He was mentioned in dispatches three times for his Staff work. In December 1918 he obtained a few weeks’ leave to visit his family in England, but on 2 February, while returning from that leave, he was attacked by influenza that turned into pneumonia. He was landed at Port Said on 5 February and died there the next day in No. 76 Casualty Clearing Station. He was a man of splendid physique, a superb horseman and shot, and master of all weapons. Before coming home from India in 1914 he won a silver cup as “the best man at arms in the Bannu Brigade”. Like his younger brother John Arden, Douglas Harry, according to his Malvern News obituary, was “a man of profound religious convictions, a simple-hearted and earnest member of the Church of England, and a regular communicant”.

Douglas Harry’s only son was Granville William (“Bill”) (later MVO) (1916–2004), who in 1945 married Mary Frances Tyra Tunstall Behrens (1924–2014); they had one son and two daughters. In 1967, after they divorced, he married Ausma Tolēna (b. 1931 in Riga, Latvia, d. 2006). Granville William was a professional soldier, who, like his father, attended the Royal Military College (Sandhurst). He became an officer in the 2nd Royal Lancers (Gardner’s Horse), part of the Indian Army, and rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He was captured in the Western Desert in 1941, almost certainly between 6 and 8 April 1941, when his Regiment, part of the 3rd Indian Motorized Brigade, in the 7th Division, was reduced to barely one squadron during the Battle of El Mechili, and he spent the rest of World War Two as a prisoner of war. He was mentioned in dispatches twice. After the war he returned to India and served in Waziristan in 1946, but after the independence and partition of India (15 August 1947), he transferred to the Royal Artillery, and in 1955 he became Assistant Military Attaché in Paris. After leaving the Army, he worked as Bursar at Summer Fields Preparatory School, North Oxford, from 1959 to 1963 (see G.H. Alington); and from 1962 to 1976 he was Oxfam’s Asia Secretary. He became actively involved in the peace movement and in 2003 took part in a protest meeting against the Second Iraq War; he also ran a second-hand bookstall whose proceeds went to Amnesty International and hospices in Latvia, the home country of his second wife.

Ausma Tolēna was the daughter of a wealthy army officer and born in Rīga. But in 1944, she and her mother were forced to leave Latvia, and they travelled to Germany, where they lived in a refugee camp for a while before settling near Hamburg. She found a job at a volunteer agency and in 1966 moved to Oxford to work for Oxfam, where her focus was on aid projects in Southern India. In the mid-1970s, she and Granville William, now married, moved to Malvern, Worcestershire, where she, too, was active in the peace movement and raised money for cancer victims in Latvia.

Edith Mary married her distant cousin Edward Cecil Brindley Acworth (1867–1929) in Malvern in 1909. He was a solicitor in Bombay.

Of Rosamund Alys’s two sons, one died in infancy and the other was the distinguished Anglo-American poet and historian of Soviet Russia (George) Robert (Acworth) Conquest, CMG, FBA, OBE (1917–2015), who read PPE at Magdalen from 1936 to 1939, and had two sons.

(Robert) Folger (Westcott) Conquest was an American gentleman of independent means who, like six or seven generations of his forebears, was born in Virginia. His parents separated shortly after the birth of their youngest child; because his mother and the children eventually settled in San Remo, on the Ligurian Coast of northern Italy, Folger did not return to America until his early teens, when he was sent to school at the Episcopal Academy, and then to the University of Pennsylvania (which he left without a degree). He voted for Roosevelt in 1912, and soon after went back to Europe with his mother and sister. When war broke out in 1914, the family left Switzerland for England, and settled in the popular spa town of Malvern. It was here that they came to know the Acworths – including, of course, Rosamund Alys, whom Folger married in 1915. As, during World War One, he was too short-sighted to serve in the Army, he joined the American Ambulance Service and drove ambulances for the French Army. He served at Verdun (1916), and after being wounded in the face while rescuing two wounded French artillery officers whose battery was being heavily shelled, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star “for his endurance and remarkable coolness”.

 

Education

From c.1906 to 1911 Acworth attended Twyford School, Hampshire (also known as Mr McDonnell’s Preparatory School, founded 1809 and one of the “Famous Five” nineteenth-century preparatory schools), where he became Head Boy. He then attended Winchester College from 1911 to 1916, where he was in the Senior Division of “Sixth Book”, the School’s highest form, and while going up the School, he “raised books” (Winchester slang for “won prizes”) several times. Although he, like his brother, took no prominent part in school games, he was an excellent horseman and shot, and over 6 foot tall. In his final year at Winchester, he distinguished himself above all the other Commoners in his year by winning the King’s Gold Medal for English Essay and the Moore-Stevens Divinity Prize. He was also a member of the School’s Debating Society and made his maiden speech on 11 October 1915, when he criticized the attacks made on the Government by the Northcliffe Press. He became a House and a School Prefect. The diarist and Fellow of Magdalen C.C.J. Webb knew Acworth’s father and was very fond of John, whom he took under his wing when he applied for a place at Magdalen. Acworth matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 14 October 1916, having been exempted from Responsions because he had an Oxford & Cambridge Certificate. He spent the Michaelmas Term of 1916 at Magdalen, but was waiting until he could join an Officer Cadet Battalion, and although he contrived to pass History Prelims in December 1916, he left without taking a degree in the same month.

 

John Arden Acworth
(Photo courtesy of Magdalen College, Oxford)

 

“Those who knew John Acworth will definitely recall the unmistakable genuineness of his religion. It was a religion at once childlike and manly. There are few young men of whom one can feel more confident that they have won the beatitude pronounced upon the pure in heart, that shall see God.”

 

War service

Acworth had been a member of the Winchester College Officers’ Training Corps from 1912 to 1916 and reached the rank of Corporal, and when he left school, his Commanding Officer described his military efficiency as “very fair”. While he was at Magdalen, half of his working time was taken up by his duties with the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps. On 22 May 1916 he was recruited at Winchester for the Army Reserve and on 14 August 1916 he was nominated for a commission in the 1/7th Battalion (Territorial Forces), the Worcestershire Regiment. He joined the Regiment on 30 December 1916, probably as a member of the 7th (Reserve) Battalion, which had been formed in September 1916 by the amalgamation of the 2/7th and 3/7th Battalions. On 3 January 1917 Acworth was sent to No. 6 Officer Cadet Battalion whose headquarters was at Balliol College, Oxford. But his particular Company was quartered in Magdalen, for which, according to an obituarist, “he had already a very loyal affection”. Thus, when his duties permitted, he was able to join his friends in the Junior Common Room and attend Chapel services, in which he took great pleasure. After four months of intensive training, he completed the course on 25 April 1917 and was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the 7th (Reserve) Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment on the following day (London Gazette, no. 30,053, 4 May 1917, p. 4,346).

Although he then spent two months with that Battalion at Catterick, in Yorkshire, his obituarist recorded that “his affections largely centred round Winchester, and the last visit he paid, except to his own home, before leaving England was to his old House and School”. Accordingly, on 6 May 1917, while he was at home on leave, Acworth wrote a touchingly naïve but thoughtful letter to Winchester’s Chaplain, the Reverend J.T. Bramston, who was responsible for compiling Winchester’s Roll of Service. The letter gives an excellent insight into Acworth’s psychological unpreparedness for modern warfare: “It was”, he wrote, “a most abominable winter. You can imagine it was not very nice doing military work during that frost & snowy weather of January, Feb[ruar]y & March, especially generally without fires in our rooms, & often with only cold water to wash in!” But, he concluded: “now it’s over I don’t mind. I think the life did me a lot of good, and it has been no worse for me than anyone else, rather better, since I was billeted in my own college, Magdalen.” On returning from leave, starting on 9 May 1917, he began a five-week course with the Fifth Army Infantry School.

Acworth disembarked in France at the end of June 1917, where he was attached to the Worcestershire Regiment’s 1/7th Battalion (Territorial Forces), which had landed at Boulogne on 31 March 1915 and become the 144th Brigade in the 48th (South Midland) Division on 13 May 1915. Like many war diaries by this stage of the war, that of the 1/7th Battalion is very sketchy and does not record the arrival of a Subaltern – whose life expectancy was very low. But throughout June 1917 the Battalion was in and out of the front line at Morchies, 11 miles south-west of Arras, and from 4 July to 14 August 1917 it rested and trained at Blairville, 12 miles north-west of Morchies and six miles south-south-west of Arras. So Acworth probably joined the Battalion at Blairville and his second letter to Bramston, dated 8 August 1917, was almost certainly written there since it was clearly composed after his arrival with the Battalion and before he had had any first-hand experience of the trenches. For Acworth, the war was still something remote and his frame of reference still largely consisted of the trivia of school life: he hopes to meet friends from his school-days, but when he does bump into one, the other man doesn’t have time to stop and talk as he is busy – as if running a peace-time errand for one of the ushers. The irony contained in Acworth’s hesitant, unformed views on the College’s proposed war memorial is particularly poignant, since it seems not to have occurred to him that his name might be one of those carved upon it:

Have not been in the trenches at all & shall not be for the present. I have met no old Wykehamists yet bar Barnes, who I spoke to for a minute the other day in a town. He couldn’t stop. I like my regiment v. much & the officers are excellent. The C.O. is Tomkinson & has several Wykehamist brothers, mostly of our house. I was sorry about Eton Match but it must have been a fine game. I think the conclusion of the conference over the War memorial seems fairly satisfactory don’t you? The great thing will be for them not to rush us into anything before they are quite sure what anybody does want. The correspondence in the Wykehamist lately over Boat Club has been rather amusing, especially the many indignant replies.

 

John Arden Acworth

 

By 16 August 1917, however, Acworth’s Battalion had been transferred to the Ypres Salient and on that day, the first day of the phase of Third Ypres that is known as the Battle of Langemarck (16–18 August), it took part in the attack by one Brigade from each of the 11th (Northern) and 48th Divisions (XVIII Corps, in General Sir Hubert Gough’s 5th Army) on the Langemarck–Gheluvelt Line, east of the Steinbeek River. But after the Brigade from the 48th Division had managed to capture Sint Juliaan, its advance was checked by artillery, snipers and machine-gun fire. Acworth’s Battalion lost at least nine officers and 49 other ranks (ORs) killed, wounded and missing, admittedly a very small percentage (0.39%) of the c.15,000 casualties that it cost the 5th Army on that day to gain c.1,500 yards on the left of the attack and capture the fortified village of Langemarck. A second attack, which took place on the following day, was at first successful but again repulsed, costing the Battalion another five officers and 34 ORs killed, wounded and missing. From 26 to 28 August the Battalion participated in minor, inconclusive and costly attacks on the Langemarck Line, and this time its casualties were put at 101 officers and men killed, wounded and missing. So, at the end of August 1917, the Battalion’s total estimated casualties for the month had risen from 198 to 269 men killed, wounded and missing, and on 1 September it was withdrawn to the Schools Camp at Sint-Jan-ter-Biezen, just to the west of Poperinghe.

The Battalion stayed here until 18 September, when it moved to Zutkerque, in northern France, about halfway between Calais and St-Omer. It was probably during this respite that Acworth met his coeval Maurice Bowra (1898–1971), later the Warden of Wadham College, Oxford (1938–70) and the University’s Vice-Chancellor (1951–54), who had come to France in September 1917 as a subaltern in the Royal Field Artillery and was also serving in the Ypres Salient, where he would see action at Passchendaele. But on 2 October, Acworth’s Battalion was back just west of Ypres, near Vlamertinghe, as part of XIV Corps in General Sir Hubert Gough’s 5th Army, and it stayed here until 7 October, i.e during the two phases of Third Ypres that became known as the Battles of Polygon Wood (26 September–3 October 1917) and Broodseinde (4 October 1917). On 7 October the Battalion moved to dug-out billets north of Ypres, but during the following night the mud and rain meant that it took Acworth’s Battalion, like the other battalions in the 11th and 48th Divisions that had been ordered up to the front, 14½ hours to get from those billets to their start line in the northern sector of the front for the next phase of Third Ypres – the Battle of Poelcapelle which began at 05.20 hours on 9 October (see D. Mackinnon and T.S. Arnold).

In conjunction with the 1/6th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment (Territorial Forces), Acworth’s Battalion, of which he was now the Second-in-Command, was ordered to capture Adler Farm, Inch Houses, Varlet Farm and Wallemollen Ridge. But heavy rifle and machine-gun fire meant that the attack was only partially successful, and Acworth, who had to act as his Company’s Commanding Officer for five to six hours after the other two Company officers had been killed in action during the first ten minutes of the attack, was severely wounded during the morning by a fragment of shell that went through his chest. He passed through the Field Ambulance and Dressing Stations and got as far as No. 4 Casualty Clearing Station at Dozinghem (a joke name made up by British soldiers = “Dosing [th]em”), just west of Ypres, and although the wound was very serious, he might have survived but for the onset of gas gangrene. But at 16.45 hours on 13 October 1917 he died very suddenly of wounds received in action, aged 19. Although the action at Poelcappelle cost Acworth’s Battalion ten officers and 211 ORs killed, wounded and missing, the worst casualties were suffered elsewhere – by the New Zealanders and the Australians – and overall the Battle has been judged as yet another “dreadful failure”.

Acworth is buried in Dozinghem Military Cemetery (west of Ypres and just to the east of Proven), Grave XII.H.20, with the inscription “The glory which thou hast given me, I have given unto them. John 17: 22)”. Acworth and his brother are commemorated on the walls of Winchester College War Cloister, and on the War Memorial Cross in the churchyard of the Priory Church of St Mary and St Michael, Great Malvern.

 

Dozinghem Military Cemetery (west of Ypres and just to the east of Proven), Grave XII.H.20

 

An Old Wykehamist who lived in Malvern wrote to Acworth’s father: “We Wykehamists who have always been proud of our School are now even prouder, seeing how it has been honoured by men like your son.” C.C.J. Webb noted in his Diary on 16 October:

By the 5.30 post came a card from Harry Acworth to tell us that John was badly wounded on the 9th & died on the 13th. It is a real blow to us. I had never had a boy about whom I felt so much that he belonged to me before: he came in and out as he liked: & he was a charming boy, affectionate, simple, happy: genuinely religious and though not particularly clever, with an intelligent interest in serious things: a very good member of his College during the short time he belonged to it: Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine et lux perpetua luceat ei.

On 17 October, Webb received a request from Acworth’s father asking him to write a memoir of John for the Malvern Parish Magazine. Webb obliged: his obituary first appeared on 10 November 1917 in the Malvern News and was reprinted in the Great Malvern Parochial Magazine in the same month. Webb described his memoir as “the honourable record of the outward incidents of a life laid down on the threshold of manhood in the cause of England, and in defence of justice and freedom throughout the world”, and then concluded:

But those who loved John Acworth, and it was very easy to love him, for he had the charm of clean, young manhood and a delightful and sunny smile, will dwell rather on the memory of simple goodness of straightforward dutifulness, of happy, affectionate response to affection, which he has left with those who knew him well, even where that knowledge does not date back beyond the last two or three years of his brief life. They will definitely recall the unmistakable genuineness of his religion. It was a religion at once childlike and manly, and remarkable in its freedom from the fault which often disfigures the religion of young men, even where it is not by any means insincere; from any taint of cowardice or shamefacedness on the one hand, or of pedantry or ostentation or censoriousness on the other. He wrote to his father from the front that he could not understand how anyone at the seat of war could do without religion. This was very characteristic, since for him, his religion was an abiding help and support: and his regular and devout use of the sacraments of Holy Communion was the expression of a life which was Christian in no merely conventional sense. There are few young men of whom one can feel more confident than of John Acworth that they have won the beatitude pronounced upon the pure in heart, that they shall see God.

On 9 October 1918 Webb recorded the fact in his Diary that this was “the anniversary of dear John Acworth’s being wounded” – one of the two or three times that he memorialized such an event, probably because he was related to Acworth through his wife. And on 11 February 1919 he noted “The very sad news in today’s paper of Douglas Acworth’s death in Egypt from pneumonia. It is terrible for his father: who was so proud of him – tho’ less wrapped up in him than he was in John.”

 

Bibliography

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

 

Special acknowledgements:

*Malvern Remembers, ‘Major Douglas Harry Acworth’: http://www.malvernremembers.org.uk/ww1-profiles/douglas-harry-acworth (accessed 13 July 2018).

* Great War Forum, ‘Douglas Harry Acworth’: https://www.greatwarforum.org/gallery/ (accessed 9 July 2018).

 

Printed sources: 

Boase, George Clement, ‘Francis Close’, The Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1887), vol. 11, pp. 123–4.

[Anon.], ‘Second Lieutenant John Acworth’ [obituary], The Times, no. 41,614 (20 October 1917), p. 5.

[Anon.], ‘Killed in Action’, The Wykehamist, no. 568 (31 October 1917), p. 182.

C.C.J. Webb, [obituary], Malvern News, 10 November 1917. Reprinted in the Great Malvern Parochial Magazine, November 1917.

[Anon.], ‘Death of Major D.H. Acworth’, The Malvern News, no. 2,590 (15 February 1919), p. 2.

[Anon.], ‘Major Douglas Harry Acworth, M.C.’ [obituary], The Times, no. 42,036 (28 February 1919), p. 8, col. C.

[Anon.], ‘Roll of Honour’, The Wykehamist, no. 583 (13 June 1919), p. 345.

[Anon.], ‘A Supplement to the Alumni Register, October, 1920’, in Pennsylvania; A Record of the University’s Men in the Great War (University of Pennsylvania General Alumni Society, 1920), p. 40.

Rendall et al., iv (1921), p. 132.

[Anon.], ‘Francis Close’, The Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1921–22), vol. 4, pp 579–81.

[Anon.], ‘Mr. H.A. Acworth’, The Times, no. 46,457 (30 May 1933), p. 21.

Relevant article in the Leprosy Review (1984).

Leinster-Mackay (1984), pp. 4, 30–31, 46, 113, 116, 123–4, 135, 185, 192.

Steel and Hart (2001), pp. 65, 146–55, 257–73.

 

Archival sources:

MCA: PR32/C/3/4-5 (President Warren’s War-time Correspondence, Letters relating to J.A. Acworth [1917]).

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

OUA (DWM): C.C.J. Webb, Diaries, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1162; MS. Eng. misc. e. 1163.

OUA: UR 22/1/91.

Winchester College Archives E3/5/1/1-3 (letters [1917] from J.A. Acworth to “Trant”, the Revd J.T. Bramston).

WO95/2759.

WO374/166.

 

On-line sources:

The Worcestershire Regiment, ‘Second Lieutenant John Arden Acworth’: http://www.worcestershireregiment.com/wr.php?main=inc/roh_J_A_Acworth (accessed 9 July 2018).

Imperial War Museum, ‘Lieutenant John Arden Acworth’: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205023677 (accessed 9 July 2018).

Malvern Remembers, ‘Second Lieutenant John Arden Acworth’: http://www.malvernremembers.org.uk/ww1-profiles/john-arden-acworth (accessed 13 July 2018).