LIEUTENANT ROBERT QUILTER GILSON
SUFFOLK REGIMENT
1ST JULY 1916 AGE 22
BURIED: BECOURT MILITARY CEMETERY, BECORDEL-BECOURT, FRANCE
Robert Gilson was one of the four members of the TSCB, the Tea Shop and Barrovian Society, a quartet of school friends of whom the other members were JRR Tolkien, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman. Tolkien and Wiseman were the only ones to survive the war, Gilson was the first to die, killed leading his men into action on 1 July 1916.
The four were all pupils at King Edward's School, Birmingham where Gilson's father, Robert Cary Gilson, was the headmaster. He chose his son's inscription, a quotation from the Roman poet, Juvenal (c.55 BC-127 AD) which translates as, 'No, not for life lose that for which I live'. The meaning being that it is not worth saving my own life only to lose that which makes life worth living. And what was it that made life worth living? Robert Gilson probably explained this in his reply to Tolkien's letter of condolence when he wrote: 'you are going to win and restore righteousness and mercy to the councils of mankind I am certain'.
King Edward's have used Gilson's letters as the basis for a moving forty-minute documentary: Robert Quilter Gibson: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, which is beautifully made and well worth watching. And there is more information about the four friends in Connie Ruzich's blogpost, The First Fellowship, in which she examines a poem Geoffrey Smith wrote in Gilson's memory, Let Us Tell Quiet Stories of Kind Eyes:
Let us tell quiet stories of kind eyes
And placid brows where peace and learning sate;
Of misty gardens under evening skies
Where four would walk of old, with quiet steps sedate.