Pike, EN

Gunner Eustace Noel Pike

Eustace was born on the 5^th of December 1885, the youngest of eleven children born to hop merchant Christopher Pike, who was to sadly pass away before Eustace’s sixth birthday, and his wife, Mary. By the time he started at the College at the beginning of 1899 the family already had strong Dulwich connections, as not only were two of his older brothers, Norman and Oscar, O.A.s, but so were two of his cousins, Arthur Pike and Neville Miller. Eustace played for the cricket 2^nd XI in both 1902 and 1903, the latter of which was his final year, as he left the College that summer. After Dulwich he trained as a horticulturalist, and by 1911 was farming fruit in Berkshire. In the summer of 1914 he married Olive, the sister of fellow O.A. Bruno Rooney who would go on to fall the following year at Gallipoli.

For the first two and a half years of the war Eustace remained in England as a farmer, living near Reading with his new wife, who in 1916 gave birth to a son, named Oliver. In February 1917 he gave up farming, volunteering for the armed forces as a member of the Royal Garrison Artillery, with whom he went over to the front that May, and was attached to 160^th Siege Battery. Having already seen action at Poperinghe and Ypres, he was serving at Passchendaele when he was killed, on November 11^th 1917. He was survived by his widow and their son.