R. P. Dickason
Second Lieutenant, Middlesex Regiment, 6th Battalion attd. 1st Battalion
Died age 20 on 14 February 1917
Son of Harold Burfield Dickason, of 155 Clapham Road, London.
Remembered at Peronne Communal Cemetery Extension, France
British Army WWI Officers Service Records 1914-1920
Reginald Percy Dickason was educated at King’s College School and Pitman’s Metropolitan School. Pitman’s, opened in 1870, was the first school of business education in the world, and covered office routine, accounting and law, and shorthand and typing. Possibly Dickason was training to be a court reporter, for he transferred out of the 3/25th London Cyclists, which he joined as a private on 1 April 1915, to the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.
This corps was originally part of the London Territorial Force and consisted mainly of men connected with the law courts. On 4 August 1916 he was accepted for admission to No. 8 Officer Cadet Battalion at Lichfield, and a little over three months later he left for France, serving with the Middlesex Regiment.
He survived for just under four months, dying near Clery-sur-Somme. In July 1920 the Army wrote to Dickason’s father Harold Burfield Dickason to tell him that his son’s body had been moved to the cemetery at Peronne, assuring him that the removal was done “carefully and reverently.”
Dickason, born on 3 December 1896 and an only child, was 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighed over 10½ stone and measured 40½ inches around the chest. He had the distinction of being the only man on the Memorial whose family included an elephant hunter.
Information from the 1911 census
Reginald Percy Dickason was 14 in 1911 and living with his family at 155 Clapham Road, where they occupied 10 rooms. Reginald was an only child. His father, Harold Burfield Dickason, 36, was an orchestral musician who was born in Highgate. His mother, Esther Dickason, 35, was from Lambeth. Harold’s brother, Percy Dickason, 34, an elephant hunter, and an aunt, Charlotte Hare, 69, lived with the family, along with a boarder, John Greenslade, 35, a stone and wood carver. Lily Cawley, 15, a general domestic servant born in Lambeth, lived in.
Information from the family
After Reginald died, his parents Harold and Esther went on to have another child, a son. This son later joined the Army and fought in World War 2. Esther died in the 1930s.