The Second World War had been over for only nine years when I joined Pangbourne, yet to a thirteen-year-old Cadet it was already history and could have taken place a century earlier. This feeling was strengthened by the ‘evocative’ stained-glass window at the east end of the old chapel, mentioned by Tom Copinger-Symes in his foreword, and the large brass memorial plate half-way along the north wall with all those names. Probably because it was the longest, ‘J.H.R.Medlicott-Vereker’ still remained in my head fifty years later when I helped Lionel Stephens to compile the Book of Remembrance which had the limited aim of recording where and when they were serving when they died.

Using the resources of the internet as his foundation for further extensive research, Robin Knight has produced an invaluable, well-illustrated volume, giving us the brief lives of all those OPs who were casualties in war from 1917 to 2020. Young men from a young school, their short careers are sometimes surprising: not the high number of deaths at sea, from both the Merchant and Royal Navies nor, as in any war, many from the Army. I was surprised, though, by the number who had joined the RAF, very often having left the college to join the Merchant Navy. Perhaps it reflected the difficulty of finding jobs at sea during the depression of the 1930s coupled with the excitement of flying, a young skill in those days. Indeed, the sense of adventure in OPs is perhaps further demonstrated by the high proportion of them who are to be found in the smaller, riskier branches of the Navy, such as submarines or the Fleet Air Arm, and their Army equivalents.

The Pangbournian archetype is perhaps represented by Clement Bridgman (20-22), a Lieutenant-Commandeer, RNR, he had been awarded a DSO in August 1942 for sinking a U-Boat whilst commanding the corvette Dianthus. Later that year he assumed command of the frigate Itchen and was killed on 23 September 1943 while escorting an Atlantic convoy, being torpedoed by U-666 using the newly introduced Gnat homing torpedo. Itchen blew up: there were only three survivors, of which he was not one.

By their very variety, the full awfulness of war is recorded: seventeen year-old Apprentice John Benn in the Empire Lancer, sunk by U-Boat in 1944; three went down in the ‘mighty Hood’ in 1941; one sunk in the heroic Armed Merchant Cruiser Jervis Bay in 1940; a Japanese prisoner of war; several in Bomber Command; also a civilian casualty in a an air raid on London. Finally we have a captured SOE agent murdered by the SS (See R. Knight, The Extraordinary Life of Mike Cumberlege SOE (Fonthill, 2018). They are all here, including John Medlicott-Vereker: flying from HMS Illustrious, he was shot down while attacking an Axis convoy off North Africa on 21 December 1940.

This book is an essential second volume to Knight’s The Old Pangbournian Record: Old Pangbournian Obituaries and Death Notices 1917-2016, to be found online at www.pangbourne.com under Old Pangbournian Society/Obituaries. A lasting testimony to all the one hundred and eighty individuals listed in it, this volume has the additional advantage of being designed from the outset to be amendable online.

Mike Harris (54-59)