Ephraim Hughes

Ephraim Hughes was born in Hambledon in 1884, the son of Charles Frederick Hughes and Harriet Louisa Clay. His childhood was unsettled from an early age. The family left Hampshire while he was still young and by 1891 he was living in Leeds. Two years later, in 1893, his mother died, and his upbringing thereafter took place largely among extended family away from his birthplace.

By 1901 he was living in Sheffield with his father and stepmother, working as an errand boy, his first recorded employment and typical of the working lives entered by many young men of the period. As he grew older he followed the movement of labour common at the time, travelling south into the coal and industrial districts of South Wales. By 1911 he was living at Ty Stynon, Blackwood, Monmouthshire, recorded within a relative’s household and working as a labourer in the building trades. Despite these moves, official records consistently gave Hambledon as his birthplace, and it remained the village that claimed him.

He enlisted at Newport into the 4th Battalion, South Wales Borderers and entered active service in the Balkan theatre on 19th July 1915 during the Gallipoli campaign. The battalion was committed to the fighting connected with the Suvla Bay landings, part of the Allied attempt to break the deadlock and force a passage through the Dardanelles. Conditions were severe – intense heat, disease, shortage of water and constant fighting against well prepared Ottoman defences.

Ephraim Hughes was killed in action on 9th August 1915, only twenty one days after first arriving in the theatre of war. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated on the Helles Memorial, which records more than twenty thousand men of the campaign who have no known grave.
His death occurred during one of the most tragic weeks for Hambledon in the entire war. Between the 6th and 11th August 1915 three other men connected to the village – John Searle, Charles Hooker and Richard Lacey – were also killed in the same operations. For a small rural community the losses within those few days were devastating.

Ephraim Hughes was thirty one years old. Though most of his life was spent far from the village of his birth, Hambledon remained his home in memory, and his name is preserved among those who did not return from Gallipoli.