Norbury, RF

Lieutenant Robert Fiddes Norbury

Robert was born in Rawton, Yorkshire, on August 6^th 1889, the fourth of six children of commercial agent John Norbury and his Scottish wife, Mary, although his father passed away in the spring of 1900, when Robert was ten years old, and he was subsequently brought up his widowed mother. He was at the College for five and a half years, starting at the beginning of 1901, and ending in the summer of 1906, when he left whilst a member of the Classical Remove. After finishing his education he went into the City, and spent many years working at a firm of merchants.

The summer of 1914 saw the declaration of war, and that September Robert enlisted as a member of the London Scottish, and was part of the first unit of his regiment to go to the continent that November. After serving through the Battle of Neuve Chapelle he went to the Officers Training School at St. Omer and took a commission in the Seaforth Highlanders in July 1915. That October he was wounded whilst serving at the Hohenzollern Redoubt and as a result invalided home. In January 1916, whilst recuperating back in Britain, he transferred to the Machine Gun Corps, with whom he went back out to France that June. Robert was wounded again at Arras that October, and invalided home for a second time. In August 1917, whilst posted at Grantham, he discovered that his old regiment, the Seaforths, were short of officers, and transferred to join them at the front. He was killed in action during the battle of Broodseinde Ridge, near Ypres, on October 4^th 1917.