Major Robert Wilfred Fairey JESSON (1906)

5th (Service) Battalion, Duke of Edinburgh's (Wiltshire) Regiment
Born 17 June 1886 in Southampton
Killed in action 22 February 1917, aged 30
Commemorated on the Basra Memorial, Iraq.

Robert Jesson was the only son of Robert William Jesson and Annie Randall, née Fairey, of 10 Archers Road, Southampton.

He was educated at Handel College, Southampton, and Sherborne School. Before the war he worked as a Managing Clerk with Hepherd & Winstanley, of Southampton. He played cricket, making 14 appearances for Hampshire as well as for Sherborne School and the University, and rugby, with Trojans RFC and Rosslyn Park.

He joined the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps on 6 August 1914, was gazetted as a Second Lieutenant in the 5th (Service) Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment 22 days later, promoted to Lieutenant in October, and Captain in March 1915. He served at Gallipoli, was wounded on 9 August 1915, returned to his regiment in October, but was invalided home with shellshock (listed officially as ‘frostbite’) that December.

He returned to the war in Mesopotamia in July 1916.

He was killed by a Turkish sniper whilst in action outside Kut, near Basra in modern-day Iraq, on 22 February 1917.

His obituary in the Sherborne School magazine remarked:

There was never a more lion-hearted cricketer than he; and to have him on our side went a long way towards victory. But it was not in the field only that he played so great a part. Which of us will ever forget his cheerfulness, his modesty, his tact, his sympathy and his intense love of all that had to do with Sherborne?