With each year that passes, the end of the First World War stretches further into the past. Yet the war was fought by real people with real dreams and aspirations, just like us, and millions of people lost their lives.
One such person was Ronald Poulton Palmer, a scion of one of Reading’s most prominent families. He turned 25 in 1914, but never saw 26.
Ronald Poulton Palmer on the rugby pitch. Photo courtesy wikimedia commons.
A Reading Rugby Captain
Ronald Poulton Palmer was born in 1889 as Ronald Poulton. His mother, Emily Palmer, was the daughter of George Palmer, a Reading businessman who transformed the modern history of our town when he co-founded Huntley & Palmers.
Poulton Palmer’s uncle, George William Palmer, was a second-generation Palmer and had a controlling share in the company by the turn of the 20th century. Yet George Palmer and his wife were childless, and so Ronald Poulton became the main beneficiary of his will, as well as taking his surname.
When his uncle died suddenly in October of 1913, RPP became a very wealthy young man. That same year, Poulton Palmer took to the international stage as the captain of the England men’s national rugby union team. The team finished the 1913-14 season unbeaten, and Poulton Palmer scored four tries against France in the final test match.
The outbreak of war
When the war began in 1914, Palmer was commissioned as an officer in the Royal Berkshire Regiment. He requested overseas service. As he wrote to his parents, ‘Those who are best trained are most wanted so I would be a skunk to hold back.’
During the First World War, officers were expected to lead from the front, often positioning themselves at the head of the charge from the trench into no man’s land. Unsurprisingly, then, the average monthly fatality rate from August 1914 to November 1918 was 5.76 per thousand among officers and 3.12 per thousand among other ranks.
During a night-time working party, as he directed his men to repair a trench, Palmer was struck by an enemy sniper and instantly killed. He had been at the front for just over one month.
The sign demarcating the Royal Berkshire Cemetery (Hyde Park Corner)
Palmer's grave
Ronald Poulton Palmer is buried in Ploegsteert, Belgium, in Hyde Park Corner Cemetery. The cemetery, administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, includes the graves of 87 soldiers and was originally set up by the Royal Berkshire Regiment. The cemetery’s name pays homage to the informal naming conventions in the trenches, where particular locations were nicknamed after familiar landmarks from back home.
Early on in the war, the decision was made not to return the remains of those killed in action, with no exceptions, in order to commemorate all war dead equally. At the end of the war, when the CWGC put up its standardised grave markers, the original wooden cross marking Palmer’s grave was returned to his family and is now displayed in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, next to the graves of his mother, father, and sisters.
Ronald Poulton Palmer's original grave marker, a wooden cross
A lost generation
Ronald Poulton Palmer was just 25 when he died, his whole life ahead of him. He’s a striking example of the ‘Lost Generation’ - the millions of young men who were lost to war at the beginning of the 20th century and whose loss was felt for decades to come.
Not everyone who died in the First World War had a massive inheritance and a rugby championship to fall back on. One in seven of the male employees at Huntley and Palmers were in the armed forces by December 1914, and 145 of them never made it back. The factory itself regularly stayed open until 11pm providing the military, hospitals, and people on the home front with biscuits and cake. For more on World War I’s impact on Huntley and Palmer’s see our online exhibition.
Captain M H Cleeve and his soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915 with large wooden cases stamped 'Huntley and Palmer Reading Biscuits'.(REDMG : 1997.130.200)
Memorials to the armed forces can be found throughout English towns and cities, as memorials and cenotaphs stand guard over busy thoroughfares or quiet corners of public parks. Yet what is harder to see is the negative space - the empty places where grandfathers, husbands, cousins, friends, and neighbours should have been. We preserve their names in memorials, and use the 11th of November to honour not just their service, but their memories.
For more on the history of wartime in Reading, why not join us for our popular walking tour, the Day Reading Was Bombed, on 16 November?
