SECOND LIEUTENANT FELIX RAMON ARTHUR DANSEY
LONDON REGIMENT
25TH JULY 1918 AGE 27
BURIED: CONTAY BRITISH CEMETERY, FRANCE
Not surprisingly, the idea that the dead man is always in his family's thoughts is not an uncommon sentiment in an inscription. Few people, however, have expressed it quite as emphatically as Felix Dansey's mother. But then perhaps she never imagined that the war would touch her.
Felix Ramon Arthur Dansey was an Argentine citizen, born in Argentina in 1891. His father, William Foley Dansey, had been born in England in 1847 and subsequently gone to Argentina to work as an engineer on the Central Argentine Railway. There he had married Indalecia Guido, his second wife, who possibly came from Uruguay. Felix was their eldest child. William Foley Dansey died in 1905 when Felix was 14.
As an Argentine citizen, Dansey would have been exempt from call up. But it's obvious from the Central Argentine Railway's roll of honour, Felix was an administrator there, that many of their employees had British names and that many volunteered and were killed in the war.
Dansey enlisted originally with the Artists Rifles. He was commissioned into the 1/7th Battalion the London Regiment in December 1917 and was killed on 25 July 1918. Although the Germans were still on the offensive, the victorious Allied fight back was just about to begin.