Sunday 22 February 2015

Famous People who lost sons in The First World War - E.W. Hornung, writer


E.W. Hornung, the British writer, poet and member of J.M. Barrie's recreational cricket team, was the author of the "Raffles" stories. 

E.W. Hornung married Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's sister Constance in September 1893.  Their son Arthur Oscar (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's nephew) was killed on 6th July 1915.  Educated at Eton and then Cambridge University,  when war broke out Oscar, as he was known, volunteered and was commissioned into the Essex Regiment.  

Oscar was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres on 6th July 1915.   His father joined an anti-aircraft battery and then went to work as a YMCA volunteer running recreational huts for soldiers on the Western Front.