Horace Amos BANNISTER

Image from the Oxford Mail, 17 February 1945.

Horace Bannister was born on 20 March 1915 in Radley (between Oxford and Abingdon), which was then in Berkshire. He was the son of a baker, Amos Bannister, and his wife Harriet (née Collett), a cook. Amos had been brought up in Headington near Oxford, the son of a farm labourer. Harriet was originally from Highworth, Wiltshire. They had both been widowed young; they married in June 1914, bringing their six surviving young children from their previous marriages to live together at Amos’s home, 32 Radley. (Radley was such a small village that there were no street addresses, only house numbers.) Their son Horace was born there in 1915.

Harriet’s daughter Daisy (Horace’s older step-sister) died in 1919, aged nineteen. In the 1921 census Harriet (aged 41) was recorded as the head of the household at 32 Radley, living with her daughter Lily Bolt (aged seventeen, a housemaid currently out of work); her step-son Aubrey Bannister (aged eighteen, a railway porter at GWR Colnbrook, west London); her step-daughter Muriel Bannister (aged thirteen); her step-son William (Bill) Bannister (aged ten); and her son Horace Bannister (aged six). Her other step-son Leslie Bannister (aged sixteen) was living with her sister in Swindon, employed as an apprentice at the Great Western Railway works there. Harriet's husband Amos – Horace’s father – appears to have been absent, possibly living in Sheffield and working for the wholesale bakery trade there.

By 1936, Horace’s parents – and possibly Horace too – moved to 39 Canning Crescent in Cold Harbour, at the far southern end of the Abingdon Road in Oxford. Amos was still working as a baker. In 1939 Amos and Harriet moved to 260 Marlborough Road in Grandpont, by which time all their children had left home. Horace (now aged 24) was lodging in Millers Green beside Gloucester Cathedral, and working as a shoe salesman. Early the following year he married Lillian Steer in her home town of Horsham in Sussex. Lillian was four years older than Horace and the daughter of an engineer. Prior to her marriage she had been living with her parents and working as a domestic servant.

Horace and Lillian had a daughter, Pauline, who was born in Oxford in early 1943 and died just a few weeks later.

At some point during the war, possibly in 1941, Horace enlisted as a Private with the 1st Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, service number 5389232. Lillian returned to Horsham to live with her parents at 3 Swindon Road.

In September 1944 Horace’s regiment moved from France into Belgium and thence into southern Holland. By January 1945 they were in the area around the town of Eindhoven. On 1 February they received orders for an attack into the Reichswald, across the border in Germany. The attack began on 8 February; the British met little opposition, and took many German prisoners, but in the evening heavy shelling of regimental headquarters wounded the doctor and caused considerable casualties among the intelligence section and signallers. It seems that Horace was injured during this attack; he was taken to the Allied hospital at the Marienbosch Monastery in Nijmegen, but died of wounds the next day, 9 February 1945. He was 29. The war ended three months later.

Horace's death was reported in the Oxford Mail on 17 February 1945. He was initially buried in the makeshift cemetery of the Marienbosch hospital, but was reburied at Jonkerbos War Cemetery, near Nijmegen, in April 1947. His Commonwealth War Grave headstone bears the inscription 'Sleep on beloved / And take your rest / We love you / But Jesus loved you best'. He is also commemorated in the Second World War Book of Remembrance in the Regimental Chapel in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford.

In 2015 Horace’s was one of 40 names added to the war memorial in Horsham, following research by military historian Gary Cooper. You can read Gary's detailed description of the movements of the 1st Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry in the period leading up to Horace's death here.

Horace left an estate worth £200 17s 7d (about £8,500 in today’s money) to his widow Lillian. She never remarried; she died in Horsham in April 2011, aged 100.

Horace's older half-brother Bill fought with the Royal Artillery during the war; on 15 March 1944 the Oxford Mail reported him as having been wounded in action in the Far East. He survived and returned to Oxford.

Horace’s father Amos died in 1949 aged 74; until shortly before his death he had been working at Back's bakery at 59 Marlborough Road, Grandpont. Horace's mother Harriet remained at 260 Marlborough Road for another ten years until she left, possibly to live with her daughter Lily. Harriet died in Oxford in 1966, aged 86, and was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery.

Research by Brenda Stones; with thanks to Horsham military historian Gary Cooper for additional information, and to Mark Hathaway for the photograph of the new panel on Horsham's war memorial.

Back to the 24 Men of Grandpont and Cold Harbour 1939-45 biographies page