Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1915, Second Lieutenant Robert John Mead, 8th Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment), died at Armentieres in France of wounds sustained the previous day.
Educated at Mr. Thring’s school in Brighton and Winchester College, he was considered an exemplary student and was to have gone to Balliol College, Oxford, on leaving school. He had been in the Officers’ Training Corps at Winchester, and after the outbreak of the Great War postponed his university education in order to be commissioned into the Royal Fusiliers.
Second Lieutenant Mead’s battalion arrived in France in May of 1915, and took over a section of the front line at Ploegsteert Wood on the 23rd of June. On the day of his death he was supervising a digging party near Armentieres when one of his men hit an unexploded bomb with his pick. Thirteen men were wounded, but Second Lieutenant Mead’s wounds were so grievous at he could not be saved and died the following day, the first officer casualty of his battalion. He is buried in the Cite Bonjean Military Cemetery in Armentieres, and is remembered on the Winchester College war memorial. His brother Frederick was killed in August of 1914 while also serving with the Royal Fusiliers.
Robert, born in South Africa and raised in St. Alban’s, Hertfordshire, was 19 years old.