Inscription for Benjamin Lucas, High Wycombe Cemetery
Benjamin Lucas 1877 - 1916
My name is Benjamin Lucas. My father was Thomas Lucas, and he ran the firm of brewers called Thomas and Benjamin Lucas and we lived in High Wycombe although my father was born in Westminster. In 1874 he married my mother, Henrietta nee Little from High Wycombe, who was almost thirty years his junior, and he was 60 when I was born in 1877. I had an older sister, Elizabeth, who was two years my senior and then my little sister came along who was six years my junior.
We lived in the High Street in High Wycombe but the brewery was in Frogmoor. I was educated at a grammar school in Thame where I was a boarder. This was probably because my father had retired and my family were living in Southsea, near Portsmouth. By the time was 23 I was working as a ships draughtsman. Sadly my father was to pass away two years later leaving me as the ‘man of the family’.
In 1914 the Great War began and I enlisted in Portsmouth. I was to become Lance Corporal 281003 with the 1/4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment. My destination was to be Mesopotamia.
Thousands of British troops were sent to Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq, following the late Ottoman Empire's entry into the war in 1914. Britain was desperate to protect its oil supplies in the region.
By November 1915, under the control of General Charles Townshend, a unit of around 10,000 British troops advanced 250 miles to the town of Kut al-Amara located in today's Iraq, where we suffered one of the British Army's worst defeats in the First World War, at the battle of Kut al-Amara.
The battle or seige of Kut-al-Amara came about when the British Expeditionary Force was beaten back from capturing Bagdad and forced to retreat to Kut. The country was at the time part of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey and Germany joined forces to pin down the British army. Despite many attempts to relieve it, the sheltering army eventually ran out of supplies and was forced to surrender, in what was a great blow to the British and a huge morale booster for the Turkish army.
During the six-month siege we British troops experienced starvation, a lack of ammunition and widespread disease, all of which led to our eventual surrender in April 1916. It was the last battle that the Ottoman army ever won and Sadly I was Captured at the Fall of Kut-el-Amara on April 26 1916 and died a prisoner of war only a month later on 31 May 1916. Conditions in the camps there were dreadful and diseases spread like wildfire in the unsanitary conditions.
This is a memory from one of the British POWs
“As soon as the prisoners arrived in the Turkish camp near Kut, they were handed out the Turkish ration of small round loaves of black bread. These loaves were about the size and shape of a large thick biscuit; 5 of them made up the full bread ration. In the field, the Turks baked their bread away back at the base and sent it up to the front in sacks, usually weeks old, and it was so hard that it had to be soaked before one could eat it. We didn’t know this and in any case it was pretty poor sort of fare for stomachs that were mostly in bad order. Of the prisoners who entered the Turkish camp that morning nominally fit – that is not on the sick list – 91 were dead the same night. It is necessary to be very, very careful when making a complete change of diet like that, unless one is in perfect trim.”
I am remembered on the Basra Memorial at AL Basrah, Basra, Iraq, and also here, on my parents' headstone in High Wycombe Cemetery.
Researched by Margaret Anderton, Flackwell Local Area History Group and Sally Scagell, Lost the Plot.
