Fergus Bowes-Lyon was born on 18 April 1889 at Forbes House, Ham, Surrey, the son of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck.
Fergus was one of ten children. His sister, Elizabeth would later marry Prince Albert, the Duke of York, becoming Queen when he ascended to the throne as King George VI and Queen Mother of Queen Elizabeth II.
Educated at Ludgrove School, Wokingham, Berkshire and Eton College, Fergus was an avid cricketer, often playing on the cricket ground at the family home, Glamis Castle in Angus, Scotland.
On 19 August 1914, he joined the 8th Battalion, Black Watch as a lieutenant. On 17 September, he married Lady Christian Norah Dawson-Damer and was promoted to temporary captain on 17 November that same year.
Sadly, just a year later Fergus, age 26, was killed in action on 27 September 1915 while leading an attack on a German position known as the Hohenzollern Redoubt during the Battle of Loos. His daughter Rosemary was just two months old.
Fergus was buried near where he died on the Loos battlefield in a disused quarry near the village of Vermelles. Unfortunately, the site suffered extensive shell damage during later fighting and his grave was lost, so after the war his name was recorded on the Loos Memorial to the missing.
His death had a profound impact on his mother, causing her to withdraw from public life until the marriage of her daughter Elizabeth to the Duke of York in 1923.
After the First World War, the quarry at Vermelles was adopted as a war cemetery.
In 2011, details and photographs from the Bowes-Lyon family records were provided to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. These confirmed without doubt that Fergus Bowes-Lyons’ was buried in Quarry Cemetery, Vermelles.
His precise burial location within the cemetery will never be known and so the new headstone which bears his name also includes the superscription ‘Buried near this spot’.
Missing for almost a century, his family finally received closure on the story of this much loved and missed young man.
DONATE TO OUR CHARITABLE FOUNDATION
Your donation supports projects like this one, which educate and involve future generations in remembering those who fell in the two world wars. Your support helps us keep their stories alive. Thank you.
