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Brief Lives:

E Company Hockey Team, 1915

Dr Frances Hurd

E Company Hockey Team, 1915, with Captain Baillie-Hamilton and Captain Priestman (copyright F M. Hurd)

This team were all members of a wartime Sandhurst course spe- was never found. In December 1915 the War Ofice wrote to the
ciically targeted at undergraduates, which ran from December Battalion (by then in Salonika) asking if Davies was still with them.
1914 to May 1915. The photograph shows ten cadets and two He was declared dead in 1920, and is commemorated on the
members of staff. Nine of the cadets are wearing the Sandhurst Loos Memorial.

games jacket; only the referee is in uniform. They are typical of the
hundreds who passed through the RMC during World War One.
They all joined their regiments as second lieutenants (subalterns),
the rank at highest risk of death or injury, whose average life in a

front-line battalion on the Western Front was just six weeks. It is
not surprising that half of the team were killed and two were per-
manently disabled. The group included an Irishman, two Scots,
and a Welshman, not unusual in the RMC. However, what marks

them as children of their time is how many came from families
with links to the British Empire. One was born in Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka), two in India, and one in Singapore. Most had relatives in
the Indian Army. In 1915 three were 18, ive were 19, one was 20

and one 21. Three of them earned the Military Cross.
Freshmen at Clare College, Cambridge, 1914 (copyright Clare College)
THOMAS DAVIES d. 1915
Davies attended Llandovery College, Carma- ISAAC USHER d. 1916
thenshire, founded to educate Welsh boys for Although Usher was a Protestant, he was born

Oxford or Cambridge. Davies went up to Clare and grew up in Dundrum, a small town outside
College, Cambridge, in September 1914. He Dublin, where a memorial to his doctor father
is in the second to back row, hands on hips. still stands. Usher was at Trinity College study-
Davies had intended to study medicine, but left ing medicine at the outbreak of war. He joined

Cambridge for Sandhurst. He joined the 1st the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment,
Battalion of the Welsh Regiment. During the
and was a casualty of the Somme, dying on
battle of Loos the Battalion attacked between Hulloch and Hill 4 July 1916 near Mametz Wood. Reports of his
70 (part of the Hohenzollern Redout) on 1 October 1915. Davies death vary widely, illustrating how dificult it is to recall accurately

was severely wounded and died the next day, aged 20. His body
in the confusion of conlict. He was variously said to have been

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