On the Culture of Memorialisation Page 2

From the prospectus we also learn “That there was a large and excellent cricket field, with bathing-place adjoining, at which swimming is regularly taught (the leat by the river). Annual Athletic Sports are held on the field in April or May of each year. “Football is played,” we are told, “strictly according to the laws of the game, whereby rough and dangerous play is prevented”. The boys were also admitted as “Grammar School Cadets” to the Totnes Rowing Club. Converting the old stable at the back of the School provided a gymnasium and dressing room. Some new toilets were built; the playground was cleared of various outhouses and other debris and a shed was built in the place where the Fives Courts used to be until recently to serve as an indoor playground in wet weather.”

Concerning Rev. F. W. Tracy M.A. we have this testimony by A. S. M. Hutchinson author of If Winter Comes, (interestingly about a certain fictitious Captain Lord Tybar VC) which was published in 1921. Hutchinson was at Totnes Grammar School at the same time as Dick. Hutchinson writes in the following rapturous terms about his headmaster which is added here to give a feeling for the Grammar School that Dick attended.

Hutchinson writes as follows: “Of Mr. Tracy, “that most lovable and splendid man. I think there were but four of us boarders, but Tracy had also at his table four members of what were I suppose a sideline of his own. ‘Private pupils’ they were called, and though they appeared grown men to me they were, I suppose, youths of eighteen to nineteen whom he was coaching for university examinations. Oddly enough I remember them and their geniality to me better than I can recall associations with the three other boarders of my own standing. Mrs. Tracy fed us on a scale far above anything that could be afforded in my mother’s home at Paignton. I seem to remember table and sideboard positively restaurant-like in the amplitude and variety of their fare. From the impression that my childhood memory holds Mrs. Tracy must have been a very beautiful young woman; of a Spanish type of beauty, my recollection says. They must have made a striking couple.”

Dick was not a boarder as has already been noted. His father paid at this time £2 2s. (£2.10p) per term for Rory and £3 5s. (£3.25p) per term tuition fees, with an extra 3s. (.15p) per term for drill, for Dick. In addition there were fees of 5s. (.25p) per term for the School Recreations Fund, and 5s. (.25p) for the Rowing Club. In the list of boarding fees it is noted that “Wine, Beer, Extra Milk, etc. are charged according to quantity - but only supplied under Medical Certificate, not for Dick.

In 1894 Dick entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in Surrey.

In 1896 he was gazetted to a commission as 2nd Lieutenant into the 20th Regiment of Foot, the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers sometimes nicknamed the Two Tens. The Regimental motto was Omnia Audax XX (the 20th is in all things daring) and sometimes called the Minden Boys and Kingsley's Stand after regimental history. Fusiliers were army regiments formerly equipped with lightweight muskets called 'snap-hance' muskets, which were the same as the French 'fusil' meaning musket.

After passing out from Sandhurst Dick was immediately posted to Quetta, where his regiment was stationed, then in British India and now in Pakistan, Quetta is close to the Afghanistan border. Passage was by sea and took 30 days.

On board the ship going out to join the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers there was also a Colonel Robert S. S. Baden-Powell. He was travelling to India to lead the 5th Dragoon Guards. Later known as Lieutenant-General Lord Baden-Powell he became renowned for his exploits at the seige of Mafeking (now Mafikeng, South Africa) in the Boer War and as founder of the world Scouting Movement.

During his first year, after only six months in India, Dick suffered from typhoid fever and was sent home on sick-leave to recover, again making the journey by sea.

In 1898 we find Dick rejoining the 2nd Battalion, this time in Cairo, Egypt from where he moved up country to the Sudan by way of the River Nile to engage in the riverine expeditionary force under Lord Horatio Kitchener. The objective was to recapture Khartoum which, 15 years before, under Egyptian forces led by General Charles Gordon, had fallen to Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad, leader of the Mahdist rebel army who had overrun large parts of Sudan, including Darfur and Kurdufan.  The 2nd Battalion of the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers was escorted by the riverboats of Commander David Beatty RN, later Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty, who became famous for his action as commander of the 1st Battle cruiser Squadron at the battle of Jutland in the North Sea in 1916.   Sir Winston Churchill, later First Sea Lord and Prime Minister was also in the Sudan taking part in the last great cavalry charge in English history at the battle of Omdurman.

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