The men below are listed on the Second World War memorial in St Matthew's church, and this is what we've found out about them so far. If you know more, please
Image courtesy of Steve Ayres. |
Lived at 34 Lincoln Road.
Private with the 1st Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service no. 5385925.
Buried at Ranville War Cemetery, Normandy, France. |
Ken Ayres's grandparents, and later his parents, ran the Farriers Arms pub at the far southern end of the Abingdon Road. Ken worked as a lorry driver before the war; he and his younger brother Gordon both served, Ken in the army and Gordon in the RAF. Ken was killed in France in 1944 and is commemorated on the memorials in St Matthew's and St John the Evangelist in New Hinksey.
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Image from the Horsham local press, 1945. |
His family lived at 39 Canning Crescent, Cold Harbour,
Private with the 1st Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service no. 5389232.
Buried at Jonkerbos War Cemetery, near Nijmegen, Holland. |
Horace Bannister was the son of a baker; both his parents had been widowed young and he had six older step- and half-siblings. He was brought up in Radley, a village a few miles south of Oxford. As a young man he moved to Gloucester and worked as a shoe salesman. In 1940 he married Lillian Steer, and later in the war he joined the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry. He died of wounds just three months before the end of the war, as his battalion were pushing into Germany from southern Holland.
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Image from/courtesy of .... |
Lived at 28 Gordon Street, New Hinksey.
Gunner with the 144th Battery, 35th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery, service no. 1523727.
Commemorated on the Singapore Memorial, Kranji War Cemetery, Singapore. |
Edward Boswell...
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Eric Bowles in 1934, aged fourteen. Image from The Changing Faces of South Oxford and South Hinksey, Book 1, by Carole Newbigging. |
Lived at 32 Pitt Road (now Chatham Road), Cold Harbour.
Lance Corporal with the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, seconded to No. 12 Commando, service no. 5384691.
Buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, Oxford. |
Eric Bowles was born in Minster Lovell but brought up in South Oxford. He attended school in New Hinksey and was a keen footballer. Early in the war he volunteered to join No. 12 Commando, one of the specialist units trained to carry out small raids and sabotage operations in enemy occupied territory. He was killed by enemy action in February 1941, aged twenty.
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Leslie Boyles's gravestone at Botley Cemetery in Oxford. |
Lived at 42 Marlborough Road, and later at 194 Botley Road.
Driver with the Royal Army Service Corps, service no. T/98466.
Buried at Botley Cemetery, Oxford. |
Leslie Boyles was born in Haslemere, Surrey, but spent his childhood and early adult life in Oxford, partly in Grandpont. At the outbreak of war he enlisted as a driver with the Royal Army Service Corps. He died less than a year later in a motorcycle accident in Swindon.
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 Memorial to Roland Breakspear and his six crew mates at St Magnus's Churchyard, Hamnavoe, Shetland. Image from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. |
Lived at 3 Hurst Rise, Cumnor Hill, North Hinksey.
Sergeant (Wireless Operator / Air Gunner) with 240 Squadron, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, service no. 1176410.
Buried at St Magnus's Churchyard, Hamnavoe, Yell, Shetland. |
Albert Roland Breakspear (known as Roland and recorded as 'R Breakspear' on the St Matthew's memorial) was a member of the 1st Oxford Boys’ Brigade Company which was based at St Matthew's Church in Grandpont. Before joining the Royal Air Force he trained as a wireless operator with the General Post Office, and during the war he served on flying-boats in Coastal Command, based in Lough Erne, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. It was on a mission in 1942 that his flying-boat crashed in the Shetlands and Roland and six of his crew mates were killed.
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Edward Percival BUTTRUM-GARDINER 
Eddie Buttrum-Gardiner in RAF uniform. Image courtesy of Eddie's nephew Rod Andrews; click here to see the whole photo. |
Lived at 38 Weirs Lane, Cold Harbour.
Sergeant (Air Gunner) with 218 (Gold Coast) Squadron, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, service no. 1851287.
Buried at Leopoldsburg (British) War Cemetery, Limburg, Belgium. |
In civilian life Edward Buttrum-Gardiner (recorded as 'R Buttram-Gardener' on the St Matthew's memorial) was a welder-fitter, probably at Morris Motors in Cowley. He had six younger sisters. During the war he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and was stationed at Chedburgh in Suffolk. He and five of his six crew mates were killed when their Lancaster bomber was hit by American anti-aircraft fire over Belgium.
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Kenneth Cole as a prisoner of war (PoW) at Lamsdorf Camp (Stalag VIII B), 1940. Image from his PoW records on www.ancestry.co.uk. |
Born and brought up at 88 Marlborough Road, Grandpont.
Private with the 4th Battalion, Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service no. 5384698.
Buried at Krakow Rakowicki Cemetery, Poland. |
Kenneth Cole was a postman who joined the Territorial Army in May 1939, and took part in the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. He was captured and died in a prisoner of war camp in Poland. Together with Maurice Goddard (below), who also worked for the Post Office, he is named on the Oxford Post Office Second World War memorial which is in the sorting office in Oxpens.
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Image from HMS Jervis Bay. |
Lived at 14 Canning Crescent, Cold Harbour.
Able Seaman with the Royal Navy / Royal Fleet Reserve, HMS Jervis Bay, service no. C/J 93254.
Commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial, Kent. |
As a young man Reginald Collins, born in 1902, was in the Royal Navy. In civilian life he was an assistant porter at Rhodes House in Oxford. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Fleet Reserve. He was one of the 190 men (out of 255) who died when HMS Jervis Bay was sunk on 5 November 1940, following an epic battle in the North Atlantic. Reginald is also commemorated on the memorial in the church of St John the Evangelist in New Hinksey.
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Dennis Comley's grave in the Hotton War Cemetery, Belgium. Image from Find a Grave. |
Lived at 129 Marlborough Road, Grandpont.
Private with the 4th Battalion, Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service no. 5387033.
Buried at Hotton War Cemetery, Belgium. |
The memorial in St Matthew’s Church lists a ‘B Comley’. However, there is no trace of a ‘B Comley’ living in the Grandpont area immediately prior to the Second World War. The memorial in St Matthew’s was installed in 1948; it is likely that errors crept in, and that Dennis Comley was incorrectly inscribed as ‘B Comley’. Dennis's father served in the First World War and Dennis served in the same regiment during the Second World War.
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Image from Find a Grave; see the whole picture here. |
Lived at 26 Western Road, Grandpont.
Sergeant (Wireless Operator / Air Gunner) with 78 Squadron, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, service no. 1315406.
Buried at Reichswald Forest War Cemetery, Kleve, Germany. |
Christopher Daft was born in Oxford in 1922, the youngest of three brothers. His father served in the First World War and later worked as a musician and a labourer. The family lived in a three-storey house in Western Road and as well as the family, Christopher's mother looked after a variety of lodgers and boarders. Christopher was in the RAF during the war, and was killed when his Halifax bomber was shot down by a German night-fighter.
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Deryck Drew in 1937, aged eighteen. Image from The Changing Faces of South Oxford and South Hinksey, Book 1, by Carole Newbigging. |
Lived at 16 Edith Road, Grandpont.
Pilot Officer with 59 Squadron, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, service no. 79539.
Buried at Ste Marie Cemetery, Le Havre, France. |
Deryck Drew worked as a clerk in the bursary at Exeter College, Oxford, and before the war he joined the RAF's Volunteer Reserve. He did his initial flying training at Kidlington aerodrome, and qualified as a pilot in May 1940. He died less than three months later, on a flight searching for the crew of another aircraft which had failed to return to base the day before.
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Cap badge of the Hampshire Regiment. |
Lived at 228 Marlborough Road, Grandpont.
Private with the 1st Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, service no. 5506871.
Buried at Syracuse War Cemetery on Sicily. |
John English was born at 228 Marlborough Road and lived there his whole life, until he joined the army during the Second World War. Like his father and younger brother Norman, he worked for a printing firm. As a member of the 1st Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment he took part in the ultimately successful invasion of Sicily, but lost his life doing so.
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The Singapore Memorial in Kranji War Cemetery, fourteen miles north of the city of Singapore. Image from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. |
Lived at 24 Weirs Lane, Cold Harbour.
Gunner with the 89th Battery of the 35th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery, service no. 1486474.
Commemorated on the Singapore Memorial, Kranji War Cemetery, Singapore. |
Ernest Finch was born in St Ebbe's into a large family. By the outbreak of war in 1939, he and his widowed father and two youngest sisters were living in Weirs Lane in Cold Harbour, at the far southern end of the Abingdon Road. Ernest joined the 35th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment and was initially deployed in defending local RAF bases from air attacks. However, in 1941 he and his regiment sailed to Singapore, were they were taken prisoner by the Japanese. Ernest and another of our 24 men of Grandpont, Edward Boswell, were killed in the infamous Ballalae Massacre.
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Royal Army Service Corps cap badge. |
Lived at 37 Edith Road, Grandpont.
Driver with the Royal Army Service Corps, service no. T/221952.
Commemorated at the Tobruk War Cemetery, Tobruk, Al Buṭnān, Libya. |
Maurice Goddard, like his father, was a postman. During the war he served as a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps. He was deployed to Libya, and died in February 1942, soon after the Siege of Tobruk. Both he and Kenneth Cole (above) are named on the Oxford Post Office Second World War memorial which is in the sorting office in Oxpens.
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Herbert Hacksley's photograph on the war memorial in St Aldates Police Station, Oxford. Image courtesy of John Stobbs. |
Lived at 3 Whitehouse Road, Grandpont.
Leading Aircraftman with the RAF Volunteer Reserve; service no. 1320081.
Buried at Miami (Grand Army of the Republic) Cemetery, Oklahoma, USA. |
Herbert Hacksley was an Oxford City policeman. During the war he served with the RAF Volunteer Reserve, and was sent to America to train as a pilot. He was based at the Spartan School of Aeronautics in Miami, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, and was one of fifteen young British airmen killed whilst training there.
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Image from a group photograph of D Company, Ox & Bucks 52nd Light Infantry, December 1943. Image from ParaData.org.uk; to see the whole photograph, click here. |
Lived at 40 Fox Crescent, Cold Harbour.
Private with the 2nd (Airborne) Battalion, Ox & Bucks Light Infantry; service no. 5381332.
Buried in the churchyard of Periers-en-Auge, near Caen, Normandy, France (the only Commonwealth War Grave in this cemetery). |
William Hedges was born and brought up in St Ebbe's but his family later moved to Cold Harbour, at the far southern end of the Abingdon Road. During the war he flew in gliders, and took part in the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944. He died the following day as his battalion was attempting to liberate Escoville, just to the east of Caen in northern France.
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The Singapore Memorial in Kranji War Cemetery, 14 miles north of the city of Singapore. Image from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. |
His family lived at 31 Whitehouse Road, Grandpont.
Gunner with the 7 Coast Regiment, Royal Artillery; service no. 11054574.
Commemorated on the Singapore Memorial, Kranji War Cemetery, Singapore. |
Alan Martin grew up on a large country estate in Somerset, where his father was a member of the household staff of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Lyle (scion of the sugar company which became Tate and Lyle). After his father died young, Alan was sent away to boarding school in Hampshire. Thereafter he joined the Post Office as a sorting clerk and telegraphist, stationed in Hampshire and later in north-west London. Around the same time, his mother and younger siblings moved to Grandpont in Oxford.
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Fred Molyneux's gravestone in Bavinchove churchyard, northern France. Image from ww2cemeteries.com. |
Lived at 9 Bertie Place, Cold Harbour.
Private in the 4th Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service no. 5383306.
Buried in the churchyard at Bavinchove, near Cassel, northern France. |
Fred Molyneux was born and brought up in St Aldates, but his family seem to have had a long-running connection with St Matthew's in Grandpont. Before the war they moved to Cold Harbour, at the far southern end of the Abingon Road. Fred was one of seven children, but by the time he was seventeen, three of his brothers and both of his parents had died.
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George Morrison's name on column 93 of the Dunkirk Memorial, northern France. |
Lived at 273 Abingdon Road, Cold Harbour.
Private in the 4th Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service no. 5384773.
Commemorated on the Dunkirk Memorial, northern France. |
George Morrison was born in Surrey but his family moved to Oxfordshire when he was a child, and eventually to Cold Harbour, south Oxford. His father Richard ran Morrison's, one of the two motor garages on Lake Street in New Hinksey.
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Image from/courtesy of .... |
HJ Sawyer...
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Image courtesy of Mike Harrison. |
Les Shepperd...
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Frederick Thompson was an Oxford City policeman, and is named on the Oxford City Police memorial in the church of St Michael at the Northgate, on the Thames Valley Police memorial in Kidlington, on the memorial in St Aldate's Police Station in Oxford, and on the memorial in Lincoln College, Oxford....
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R Williams...
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Died on 3 August 1944, aged 29, in Normandy, France.