Charles Henry Holton was the first War Graves gardener to die in a German internment camp during the Second World War. He was born 18 August 1898 in Gawcott, Buckinghamshire, the youngest son of a farmworker.

During the First World War, Charles joined the Royal Engineers and served as a sapper with the 42nd Broad Gauge Company, Railway Operating Division, R.E. While serving in France, Charles met and married Maria Agathe Sauty of Beaumetz. He took a job as a gardener with the Imperial War Graves Commission in order to remain in France with his wife and her family.

Eventually, Charles and Maria had six children and moved to Hébuterne, where Charles tended the cemeteries on the northern edge of the Somme battlefields. In 1940, Charles Henry Holton and the other gardeners in Hébuterne followed the orders they received from the Imperial War Graves Commission: to stand to their posts until they were given an explicit order to evacuate. No order ever came, so they did not leave.

Over half the IWGC gardeners in France were stranded under the Nazi occupation. On July 15, 1940, German Feldgendarmes arrived in Hébuterne. They arrested Charles Henry Holton, his 19-year-old son Noël, and two other gardeners residing in Hébuterne. In all, more than 150 Imperial War Graves Commission staff were arrested and interned by the Germans.

Charles and the other IWGC personnel from northern France were sent to Ilag VIII Tost, an internment camp in Upper Silesia. During the first year of their internment, the gardeners and their fellow prisoners were starved. It took many months for the Red Cross to establish a reliable supply route to deliver life-saving food parcels to Ilag VIII.

In the meantime, the gardeners suffered from extreme weight loss, diarrhea, and low morale. A later Red Cross inspection found conditions at the camp unacceptable for civilian internees and warned the UK government that the prisoners — many of them middle-aged ex-servicemen — were teetering on the edge of "moral and physical disintegration."

Charles Henry Holton was the first of several IWGC internees to die in German custody. He fell desperately ill in February 1941 and died on April 24, 1941. He is buried with other IWGC staff in the civilian burial plot at Kraków Rakowiki Cemetery in Kraków, Poland.