Second Lieutenant Horace William FLETCHER (1908)

9th (Service) Battalion, attached to 7th (Merioneth and Montgomery) Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers
Born 19 September 1889 in Maidstone, Kent
Died of wounds received in action 26 March 1917, aged 27
Commemorated on the Jerusalem Memorial, Israel/Palestine. Also commemorated on a wayside cross at the junction of North St and North Pole Rd, Barming, Kent; and on the war memorial plaque at All Saints Church, West Farleigh, Kent.

Horace Fletcher was the youngest son of Lionel John William Fletcher and Eleanor Mary Agnes, née Stopford-Sackville, of “Elmscroft”, West Farleigh, Maidstone, Kent.

He was educated at Eton College and gained a Postmastership at Merton, taking his degree in 1912. The same year, in preparation for taking holy orders, he became a resident at Oxford House, Bethnal Green, in east London.

He enlisted in the Royal Naval Division in September 1914 and was gazetted on 21 December, and served with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force at Gallipoli and in Egypt & Palestine.

He died on 26 March 1917 of wounds received in action at the 1st Battle of Gaza. He had been hit by a sniper while talking to some German prisoners.

In a letter to his mother from Egypt in early 1916 he wrote:

Do you think that the experience of this war has made the general public realize that there must be other ways of settling points of dispute which are as satisfactory as the way of bloodshed?