William Augustus Portman Foster

Born: 2 June 1887

Died: 11 November 1914

Rank and Regiment: Captain in the 1st Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment

Resting Place: Niederzwehren Cemetery, Germany

Memorials: St. George’s, Hardingham United Kingdom; Wellington College Chapel and; the Durnford School War Memorial in St George’s Church, Langton Matravers, Dorset.

William was born at The Grove, Hardingham and was the eldest son of Colonel Sir William Yorke Foster, Baronet.

After attending Durnford School, a “notoriously spartan and uncomfortable” preparatory school in Dorset, he was educated at Wellington College and R.M.C., Sandhurst, and joined the South Staffordshire Regiment in 1908.

Like Geoffrey Walley, he was an avid sportsman, being a keen player of polo and racquets; with Lieutenant Naylor, he won the Garrison Racquets Cup at Gibraltar in 1912.

On the outbreak of war, his regiment was deployed to France. His battalion suffered huge losses in the first Battle of Ypres around the 25 October 1914. William Foster was the last officer left standing after many days of continuous fighting, and on 31 October 1914 he was severely wounded. He lay on the battlefield for nearly two days before being taken prisoner by the Germans. He died of his wounds in military captivity at Frankfurt am Main on 11 November 1914.

He was initially buried in a military cemetery at Frankfurt am Main and was exhumed and reinterred at Niederzwehren Cemetery, Germany. His remains were identified by the cross he was wearing.

The inscription on his tombstone reads:

THE ELDEST AND DEARLY LOVED SON OF WILLIAM Y. AND AILEEN E. FOSTER

Although his name was omitted from the War Memorial at Hardingham, he is commemorated on a substantial plaque on the wall of the nave; he is also commemorated on the War Memorial in Wellington College Chapel and on the Durnford School War Memorial in St George’s Church, Langton Matravers, Dorset.

The Foster baronetcy had been created in 1838, and William was the heir to the title. The title passed instead to his younger brother Henry William Berkeley, born in 1892 in Dorset. Henry Foster succeeded to the Foster baronetcy on the death of his father in 1948; as his son predeceased him, on Henry Foster’s death the baronetcy became extinct.

William’s aunt Lucy Whitmell (1869-1917) was the author of the poem Christ in Flanders. In 1915, William’s eldest sister Aileen married an American by the name of Dwight Foster, who was himself a survivor of the torpedoing of the Lusitania. Aileen died in New York in April 1978.