John Lewis Anderton Grout

Tags

John Grout, London Gazette, Military Cross, Royal Army Medical Corps, Rugby, Sheffield, Tettenhall Road, Waterloo Road, Wellington College, Worcestershire

John was born in Lye, Worcestershire, in 1889, the son of John and Mary Julie Grout. He attended Wellington College, where he was in 1901. They had moved to 10 Waterloo Road, Wolverhampton, by 1911, here his father was a physician and a surgeon. They lived there with John’s sisters Elsie Theodora, Audrey Violet and Elaine Joyce. John was a medical student.

He enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and became a Captain. On 6 April 1918, the London Gazette announced that he had been awarded the Military Cross,

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in conducting a number of stretcher squads through very heavy shell fire to the aid-posts after they had previously failed to get through. Two bearers were killed and three wounded, but by his gallant action over forty stretcher cases were got to safety. Later, he personally conducted squads to these aid-posts under similar circumstances.

A small article also appeared in the Express & Star on 9 April 1918, by which date his father’s address was given as 59 Tettenhall Road.

John survived the war, and married Mary E. Harris in Rugby in 1919. He died on 27 November 1963 at The Royal Hospital, Sheffield at the age of 74, and left items to the value of £24125.

Ernest Edgar Pugh

Tags

Belgium, Coldstream Guards, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Ernest Pugh, Limes Road, London, Royal Orphanage, Sheffield, Tettenhall, Tettenhall Church School

There is a small article in the scrapbook of First World War newspaper cuttings dated 25 April 1915, which states the following:

The boys at Tettenhall Church Sunday School opened the day’s proceedings yesterday by singing the hymn ‘Fight the Good Fight’, in memory of the late Private E. E. Pugh, of the Coldstream Guards, who was the first of the old boys of the school to be killed in action during the present war. Private Pugh lived in Limes Road, Tettenhall, when he attended the Sunday School, and he afterwards entered the Royal Orphanage of Wolverhampton.

The Commonwealth War Graves site confirms that Ernest Edgar Pugh of the Coldstream Guards (number 8601) was killed on 23 October 1914 aged 22. He was the son of Lydia Fayram Raybould (formerly Pugh), of 2, Tabley Road, Tufnell Park, London, and the late James Benjamin Pugh.

Ernest Edgar Pugh was born in Sheffield in 1892, and at some point the family obviously moved to Wolverhampton. His father died aged 37 in 1900, and his mother remarried to a William J. Raybould in 1912 in King’s Norton. His father’s death is presumably the reason he spent some time in the Royal Orphanage, now the Royal School. Ernest Pugh is commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial in Belgium.