Richard Lacey

Robert Lacey was born at Fareham on 8th April 1883 and moved to Hambledon as a young man. By the beginning of the twentieth century he was living and working in the parish and soon became part of village life. In 1910 he married Nora Smith of Hambledon and the couple settled at Green Lane, where they began raising a family. He first worked as a threshing machine labourer and later became a traction engine driver, a skilled occupation that took him from farm to farm across the district and made him well known throughout the local farming community.

Their first child was born in 1911, followed by a daughter in 1913 who sadly died the following year. Another daughter was born in February 1915, only months before Robert left for active service. Like many married working men of the parish he volunteered after the outbreak of war, joining the 10th Battalion Hampshire Regiment, one of the new service battalions formed for Kitchener’s Army.

The battalion was sent to the Mediterranean and took part in the August 1915 landings at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli campaign. These operations were among the most difficult of the war, fought in intense heat, short of water and under constant fire from well prepared Turkish positions. Robert was wounded during the fighting on 6th August. He was evacuated from the peninsula aboard the troop and hospital ship SS Canada, but died of his wounds at sea on 11th August 1915. With no known grave he is commemorated on the Helles Memorial.

His death occurred during one of the most tragic weeks in Hambledon’s wartime history. Within a few days several other men from the village were also killed in the same campaign, bringing sudden and devastating loss to the small rural community.

Robert Lacey was thirty two years old. He left a widow and young children, including a daughter only a few months old who would never know her father. His name remains among those of Hambledon who did not return from Gallipoli.