Lieut. Hubert Arnold POPE
Killed in Action 9 August 1915
Hubert was the eldest son of Trevelyan Arnold Pope and the grandson of Rev. George Uglow Pope, a Christian missionary, and Warden of Bishop Cotton School, Bangalore. Trevelyan was in his turn a Cambridge graduate teacher, who spent most of his professional life in the Colonies, on the staff of Royal College, Mauritius, and latterly Principal of Queen’s College, British Guiana. Hubert’s mother, Evelyn Geraldine West, from Mauritius, bore 5 children, including Kathleen Maud, born there in 1902.
Although Trevelyan was away on tours of duty for lengthy periods, the family, as the children became of school age, based itself in England, and was to be found in the 1911 Census at 72 Thornton Avenue, Chiswick, together with Evelyn’s nephew, Edward West, a year older than Hubert. It is likely that both of them attended St Paul’s school in Hammersmith.
Hubert Arnold was born in July 1897 and just 18 at outbreak of WW1. He attended St Paul’s School Hammersmith. We know nothing of his qualifications, and it seems he probably volunteered immediately from school. He was gazetted “supernumerary” 2nd Lieutenant in 9th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, a reserve Territorial unit, on 25 August 1914, and then promoted Temporary Lieutenant on 17 December 1914. It seems he was transferred to 2/10 Middlesex Regiment soon afterwards and this unit remained in training in Britain as part of the 160th Welsh Border Brigade, 53rd. (Welsh) Division. In July 1915 it embarked at Devonport for Gallipoli via Imbros. They landed at Suvla Bay on 9th August as reinforcements for the “August Offensive” which had commenced disastrously on the night of the 6th August arising from the incompetent supervision by the immediate commander, Sir Frederick Stopford. Herbert was killed in action on the day of landing.
We do not know the site of Herbert’s final resting place – he is commemorated on the Helles Memorial at Kanakkale, Gallipoli on Panel 155. Apart from his places on the St Michael’s and Bedford Park memorials, he is also remembered in the St. Paul’s school Roll of Honour.
A slightly older fellow officer in the battalion, Captain Arthur Werner Lewey, also a pre-war Chiswick resident whose family lived at 41 Airdale Avenue, survived the conflict and in 1928, he married Herbert’s younger sister, Kathleen Maud. Arthur Lewey went on to a highly successful legal career in the Colonial Service, culminating with an appointment as Chief Justice of Northern Rhodesia. He was knighted in 1954. Lady Kate Lewey nee Pope died in 1958 in Wendover.
After Hubert’s death, the family remained in Thornton Avenue until Trevelyan’s retirement in 1924, when they moved to Caterham. Kathleen married there in 1928, and Evelyn, widowed in 1925, remained until her death in 1938.