Alexander Gawain Douglas
Lieutenant, 10th (Reserve)
Battalion Leicestershire Regiment, attached 1st Battalion.
Alexander Gawain Douglas was born on 20th June 1895 in Bradford. He was
known as Guy. His parents were both Scots, from Dundee and Lanark.
His father George Henderson Douglas held M.A.s from the Universities
of St. Andrews and Cambridge (Corpus), and he was a long-serving
Mathematics master at Bradford Grammar School. His mother, Jessie
Isabella Reoch, bore five children of whom four survived. Guy was their
second child.
Guy’s educational career was one of outstanding
achievement. He started at Bradford Grammar in 1903 in the most junior
form when he was eight, and he left in 1914 aged 19. He was frequently
first and won prizes for one or more subjects. In his final years he
gained seven higher certificates, three with distinctions, and he went
to Queens’ College, Oxford as a Hastings Mathematical Exhibitioner. He
was not only a talented scholar, but he also captained the second XV and
organized the paperchases for the younger boys.
Douglas went up
to Oxford in Autumn 1914, where he joined the Officer Training Corps,
and he applied for a commission in the Army. This he obtained in July
1915, in the 10th Battalion Leicester Regiment. This was a reserve
battalion for training recruits to feed units at the front. Guy was
promoted to Lieutenant (temporary) on his 21st birthday in 1916. On 12th
July he landed in France, and five days later he joined the 1st
battalion of his regiment near Ypres. At the start of August, the 1st
Leicester battalion was transferred by train to the Somme front— severe
loss of life was narrowly avoided when part of the train broke away
while it was ascending a steep incline. The quick thinking of a
pointsman spared a collision.
On 14th August the battalion
relieved the Grenadier Guards in the trenches opposite Beaumont Hamel.
That night, British artillery and machine guns fired a thirty-minute
bombardment of the German positions. The Germans retaliated by firing
gas shells for three hours. Although the battalion War Diary states no
casualties were caused, it also noted that Lieutenant Douglas was killed
by shrapnel. He had been at the front less than a month. His body was
taken for burial to Knightsbridge Cemetery, Mesnil-Martinsart.
Note:
1.
George William Douglas
(1859–1947) also attended Bradford Grammar School
|
