Second Lieutenant Karl Henry CULPIN (1912)

1st Battalion, attached to 10th (Service) Battalion (Bristol), Gloucestershire Regiment
Born 10 September 1893 at Wheatley, Yorkshire
Died of wounds received in action 15 May 1917, aged 23
Buried at Lapugnoy Military Cemetery, Pas-de-Calais, France.

Karl Culpin, also known as Charles, was the elder son of Henry Culpin, chief accountant at the Great Northern Railway Plant Works, and a founding member and first curator of the Doncaster Museum, and Johanna, née Staengel, of Doncaster.

He was educated at Doncaster Grammar School, where he captained the 2nd XI Football team and the swimming club, was secretary of the rifle club, and served as joint editor of the school magazine, Danensis. At Merton he took a first class degree in Modern History in 1915. He then went to Sherborne School as a temporary master. While at Oxford he became one of TS Eliot’s closest friends – Eliot called him “the most intelligent of the Englishmen at Merton”. The New Zealander Robert Sencourt, Eliot’s first biographer, described their relationship:

As soon as Tom and Karl started talking to each other, each knew that he had found an ideal companion. The Yorkshireman’s brain was brilliant enough to keep pace with the American’s, and this exercise was the more stimulating because it was not centred on philosophy or literature but history and economics.

Culpin was a temporary Master at Sherborne School, teaching mathematics, geography and history, between September 1915 and April 1916, when he was called up and commissioned as Second Lieutenant, despite his poor eyesight.

He died near Bethune on 15 May 1917 of wounds received in action near Fresnois, north-east of Arras six days earlier.