Major Geoffrey Ellsworth MEUGENS (1909)

11th (Service) Battalion, Manchester Regiment; Tank Corps
Born 1 September 1890
Died 30 October 1918, aged 28
Buried at Tunbridge Wells Cemetery, Kent.

Geoffrey Meugens was the youngest son of Marc Meugens, of Fleet, Hampshire. His father Marc was an Englishman of Belgian descent, who in 1880 had established an accountancy practice in Calcutta; the firm would eventually evolve to become Price Waterhouse. Geoffrey married May, née Campbell Thomson, in September 1914.

He was educated at Eton College, and came up to Merton in 1909 as an Exhibitioner, taking his BA in 1913. Before the war he worked as a Chartered Accountant in his father’s practice in India.

He enlisted on 29 August 1914, and served at Gallipoli—where he was wounded—in Egypt, and in France & Flanders, where he was again wounded at Poelcapelle on 2 October 1917. In 1918 he was Mentioned in Dispatches; in February that year he was made a temporary Major in the Tank Corps.

He died on 30 October 1918 of pneumonia, contracted while on active service.