LIEUTENANT MURRAY STUART BENNING
EAST SURREY REGIMENT
1ST NOVEMBER 1914 AGE 20
BURIED: BOULOGNE EASTERN CEMETERY, FRANCE
Murray Stuart Bennings's inscription is taken from one specially written by the Revd T F Royds for the war dead. Royd's inscription was included in a selection published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1919 called 'Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials'. It reads:
Sons of this place, let this of you be said
That you who live are worthy of your dead.
These gave their lives that you who live may reap
A richer harvest, ere you fall asleep.
The purpose of the publication was to provide a selection of suitable extracts from the Bible and literature, Classical antiquity and the present in the hope that it would encourage war memorial committees and the bereaved to choose inscriptions of 'literary quality'.
Benning joined the army on leaving school, Uppingham, in 1912. Two years later, on the day after the declaration of war, he was promoted lieutenant, and ten days after this crossed to France with the Expeditionary Force. It was 15 August 1914. Attached to the 1st Battalion the East Surrey Regiment, he was involved in all the early fighting - the retreat from Mons and the battles of Le Cateau, the Marne and the Aisne. On 28 October 1914 the regiment took part in an attempted counter-attack at La Bassee, part of the First Battle of Ypres. Benning was wounded, perhaps in the vicious hand-to-hand fighting that developed. He died in hospital in Boulogne three days later, 1 November 1914.