FOUNDATION OFFICE
In from the Cold A Lancing College master is laid to rest after 105 years. I first came across the name of Osmond Bartle Wordsworth when I was researching the names on the College War Memorial for the new memorial website which was completed in 2014. As I was skimming through the names of former College masters, I found an entry, O B Wordsworth (1911) BA Winchester College and Major Scholar Trin. Coll. Camb. In World War 1, 2nd Lieut. M.G.C. Killed in action in France 2 April 1917. Osmond Wordsworth joined the staff at Lancing as an Assistant Master in 1911 but left later the same year to lecture at Selwyn College, Cambridge. We have no record of how long he was here. In 1914 he moved to Canada where he accepted a position at Toronto College.
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THE QUAD
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SUMMER 2022
With the outbreak of war in August 1914 he returned to England for a commission in the army and travelled to New York with his sister where they boarded the ocean liner SS Lusitania on 1 May 1915. Six days later, the Lusitania was hit by a torpedo, fired by a German U Boat. As the ship was sinking Osmond is reported to have given his life belt to a fellow passenger who did not have one. He managed to swim to a fishing boat and then travelled on to England. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and in April 1916 he transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and left for France where he served with the 21st Company.
On 2 April 1917, the 21st Company, Machine Gun Corps was called to action to support an infantry attack at Héninsur-Cojeul. Osmond was hit in the chest by machine gun fire and killed instantly while making the journey across to one of the gun crews who were in difficulty. He had refused to allow any of his other men to go and so went himself. His men buried him close to where he fell but the grave site was lost in the subsequent fighting. At the end of the war his name was recorded on the memorial to the missing at Arras. Following the completion of my research his name was added to the Lancing College memorial in November 2018 and there his story ends.
