Lieutenant Frederick Vyvyan COUPLAND-SMITH (Did not matriculate)

173 Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
Born in 1897 in Steyning, Sussex
Killed in action 2 July 1917, aged 20 or 21
Buried in Lone Tree Cemetery, Mesen, West Flanders, Belgium. Also commemorated on the Southam and Bishops Cleeve war memorials, Gloucestershire; on Blundell’s School war memorial; and on his grandparents’ grave in Retford Cemetery, Nottinghamshire.

Frederick Coupland-Smith was the only child of Frederic Geoffrey Coupland-Smith & Ida Mary, née Ruffell of The Slades, Cleeve Hill, Cheltenham.

He was educated at Ayshford School, Uffculme, and at Blundell’s School, Tiverton, where he was a member of the choir. He left the school prematurely to accompany his parents to the Holy Land and Egypt in the summer of 1913.

Before he could matriculate he enlisted, on 10 September 1914, and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery a month later, seeing service in the Dardanelles, Egypt (in 1915), Serbia, France & Belgium.

A day after being made an Acting Lieutenant, he was killed in action at Wytschaete during the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) on 2 July 1917.