Pulverman, OP

2nd Lieutenant Oscar Percy Pulverman

Oscar was born Oscar Percy Pulvermann in Forest Hill on May 26^th 1892, the third son of German hardware salesman Martin Pulvermann and his wife, Clara. On March 16^th 1896 his father, and therefore the rest of the family, became naturalised British Citizens. Oscar at first attended the Prep before, at the start of 1903, joining his elder brothers, Franz and Alfred, at the College. He went on to be a pupil for six and a half years, leaving in the summer of 1909 to take up a position working with the family business. He took a breakr to go abroad for a year and study languages but upon his return in 1912 he resumed his position in the family firm.

In September 1914 Oscar, who by now, along with the rest of the family, had shortened his surname to Pulverman, almost certainly to sound less ‘Germanic’, enlisted as a member of the Artists Rifles. In January 1915 he went over to the front for the first time, and for the next six months was fighting in the trenches in Flanders, before being granted a commission in the Suffolk Regiment that June. He was serving near Ypres with his new regiment when, on September 1^st that year, he was mortally wounded by a grenade whilst preparing for an assault, dying as a result of his injuries while being taken to the nearest Field Hospital.