Second Lieutenant Charles Hugh Davies died in France on 17th January 1916 after a piece of shrapnel pierced the roof of his dug-out and struck him on the head as he was sleeping. He was 28 years old and was serving with the 9th Battalion Welsh Regiment. Although born in Stoke Bishop, Bristol in June 1887, his father, Thomas Davidson Davies, was from Camarthenshire, Wales.
Charles was the eldest of the three sons of Thomas Davidson Davies (Chief Mathematical Master at Clifton College) and his wife, Elinor Lucy (née Thomas). His local connection to the Solihull area is that he was a boarder at Packwood Haugh School from 1899 until 1901 when he went on to Rugby School, winning a General Exhibition before he left in 1905. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford with a Classical Demyship (scholarship).
After graduation in 1909, he went to India to work in the Civil Service and, in 1910, moved to Burma to work with the Burma Railways Volunteer Company. Returning home on Short Leave in June 1915, he enlisted as a Private in the Honourable Artillery Company, in order more quickly to go to the Front. He served in the ranks in France before being commissioned as Second Lieutenant with the Welsh Regiment.
There is some biographical information about him in Memorials of Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great War, vol. III and a photograph of him on the Bristol Cathedral We Have Our Lives project website.
If you have any more information, please let us know.
Tracey
Heritage & Local Studies Librarian
tel.: 0121 704 6977
email: heritage@solihull.gov.uk
Solihull Life 
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