Old Boys who fell in the 2nd World War
Eric Arnold (1931-7 Army)
Peter G Campion (1923-33 Army)
John A Chapman (1927-32, Navy)
John A C Clarke (1936-9 RAF)
Stanley R Colbert (1934 – 8 RAF)
Colin D P Cuthbert 1929-36 Army)
Sidney C M Dicker (1922-8 Army)
Richard F Gower (1926-9 RAF)
Gordon H Gudgeon (1927-32 Army)
Edward G C Holbrook (1922-5) Navy,
Bernard Howe (1930-37 RAF)
Charles R Jarratt (1930-9 RAF)
Peter M Jennings (1927-32 RAF)
Herbert E Jones (1931-34 Army)
Henry William Little
Vivian Lower (1922 – 9 RAF)
Alexander F McDonald (1933-7 Navy)
Hugh C J McRae (1918-23 Navy)
Douglas B Neale (1932-6 RAF)
Herbert J Ody (1928 – 31 RAF
Thomas H Parrott (1929 – 33 RAF)
John B Philips (1931-6 RAF)
Sidney J Plater (1925 – 31 RAF)
Douglas Rolfe (1931-7 RAF)
Kenneth Sellwood (1937 – 41 Army)
Alkyne R P Shields (1939-41 RAF)
Stanley Slade
Gordon Smith (1934-8 Army)
Derek E Teden (1925 – 30 RAF)
J G Wadmore (1927 – 32) RAF
Joseph A Wicks (1931-4 Army),
Hereward Wagner (Civilian PoW)
Frank Wood (1931-39 RAF)
We are currently developing this page and gradually adding obituaries for each of the fallen and so all entries are currently WiP.
(Please note that if a forebear is listed here, their name is read out in an Act of Commemoration every November. You are welcome to attend this event which is held at St Mary’s Church, Thame. Please contact the OTA via [email protected] for more details.)
Information supplied by Derek Turner, archivist, autumn 2021
Hereward M S Wagner
[Hereward] M S Wagner, who is commemorated on the WW2 memorial board, …. was wrongly supposed to be Howard. Because the Wagner family lived most of their lives abroad – father was chief of police in the Malay States – their sole appearance in the English census returns was in 1901. In that census HMS’s first name was recorded as Howard, leading to later confusion. The family were living in Bedford at the time where Howard was a very famous name, so the census enumerator was perhaps predisposed to hear ‘Howard’ rather than the much rarer ‘Hereward’. However, all the Wagner sons had Anglo-Saxon names and all the other records record HMS as Hereward.
Hereward might not have come to LWGS at all….. [due to his] absence from the LWGS admissions register, though his two brothers are there, and the lack of any record of him leaving.
Early issues of The Tamensian conclusively prove that he was at LWGS. A brief notice states that he arrived in September 1904 along with his two younger brothers as a boarder, placed like them in ‘School House’. Why he was omitted from the register remains a mystery. Though there is nothing recorded about his academic career, he was quite a talented sportsman, initially a football goalie, later moving to being left back in the school team. He and his next younger brother Alwyn were both in the 1906 school cricket team, a photo of which fortunately survives. Headmaster Shaw must have had a reasonably high opinion of his responsibility and literacy for he appointed Hereward as boy editor of The Tamensian for the June 1906 issue, a post which he continued to hold for the next issue in April 1907, after which he was succeeded by Alwyn and disappears from the school records. …… He makes occasional appearances in the OT sections of later issues of The Tamensian though Alwyn is a much more frequent contributor. Hereward returned to the Far East after leaving school, was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and interned in the notorious Changi gaol. He survived long enough to be liberated; he moved to Australia after the war but died there prematurely in 1950 as a result of his treatment by his Japanese captors.