Chapter 1
IN MEMORIAM
THE bare facts are much as reported in The Times:
SECOND LIEUTENANT RAYMOND LODGE was the youngest son of Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge, and was by taste and training an engineer. He volunteered for service in September, 1914, and was at once given a commission in the 3rd South Lancashires. After training near Liverpool and Edinburgh, he went to the Front in the early spring of 1915, attached to the and South Lancashire Regiment of the Regular Army, and was soon in the trenches near Ypres or Hooge. His engineering skill was of service in details of trench construction, and he later was attached to a Machine-Gun Section for a time, and had various escapes from shell fire and shrapnel. His Captain having sprained an ankle, he was called back to Company work, and at the time of his death was in command of a Company engaged in some early episode of an attack or attempted advance which was then beginning. He was struck by a fragment of shell in the attack on Hooge Hill on September 14, 1915, and died in a few hours.
Raymond Lodge had been educated at Bedales School and Birmingham University. He had a great aptitude and love for mechanical engineering, and was soon to have become a partner with his elder brothers, who highly valued his services, and desired his return to assist in the Government work which now occupies their firm.
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In amplification of this bare record a few members of the family wrote reminiscences of him, and the following memoir is by his eldest brother:
RAYMOND LODGE
(1889-1915)
BY O. W. F. L.
Most lives have marriages, births of children, productive years ; but the lives of the defenders of their Country are short and of majestic simplicity. The obscure records of childhood, the few years of school and university and constructive and inventive work, and the sudden sacrifice of all the promise of the future, of work, of home, of love; the months of hard living and hard work well carried through, the cheerful humorous letters home making it out all very good fun; and in front, in a strange ruined and desolate land, certain mutilation or death. And now that death has come,
Unto each man his handiwork, to each his crown,
The just Fate gives ;
Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays down,
He, dying so, lives. *
My brother was born at Liverpool on January 25, 1889, and was at Bedales School for five or six years, and afterwards at Birmingham University, where he studied engineering and was exceptionally competent in the workshop. He went through the usual two years' practical training at the Wolseley Motor Works, and then entered his brothers' works, where he remained until he obtained a commission at the outbreak of war.
His was a mind of rare stamp. It had unusual power, unusual quickness, and patience and understanding of difficulties in my experience unparalleled, so that he was able to make anyone understand really difficult things. I think we were most of us proudest and most hopeful of him. Some of us, I did myself, sometimes took problems technical or intellectual to him, sure of a wise and sound solution.
Though his chief strength lay on the side of mechanical and electrical engineering it was not confined to that. He read widely, and liked good literature of an intellectual and witty but not highly imaginative type, at least I do not know that he read Shelley or much of William Morris, but he was fond of Fielding, Pope, and Jane Austen. Naturally he read Shakespeare, and I particularly associate him with Twelfth Night, Love's Labour Lost, and Henry IV. Among novelists, his favourites, after Fielding and Miss Austen, were, I believe, Dickens and Reade ; and he frequently quoted from the essays and letters of Charles Lamb.
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* Swinburne, Super Flumina Babylonis, Songs before Sunrise.
Lodge Family
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, (12 June 1851 – 22 August 1940) was a British physicist and writer. In 1877 he married Mary Fanny Alexander Marshall - they had 12 children = Oliver William (11.8.1878–17.4.1955), Francis Brodie (1880–1967), Alec (1881–1938), Lionel (1883–1948), Noel (1885–1962), Violet (1888–1924), Raymond (1889–1915), Honor (1891–1979), Lorna (1892–1987), Norah (1894–1990), Barbara (1896–1983), and Rosalynde (1896–1983).
