Basil Perrin HICKS

Ancestral surnames: 

• Hicks, Geach, Mitchinson, Rundle, Perrin, Pearce, Story, Fotherby (by marriage: Gore, Nasmith, Keys, Harding, Hartridge)
• see his family tree drawing via www.groupphoto.co.uk/extra Row 1

Education: 

• Rugby School

• Trinity College, Cambridge University

Decorations & Campaign Medals:

• 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal

Memorials: 

• originally buried on the battlefield at 36c.G17b.5.9 (also given as 36c.G17b.4.9). His body was exhumed (from G.24b.6.8 – identified by cross on grave) in October 1919 and moved to Plot VI, Row B, Grave 19 in Dud Corner Military Cemetery at Loos. Gravestone: “Lieutenant Basil Perrin Hicks, Royal Berkshire Regiment, 25^th September 1915, Age 22” - Personal inscription: “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends”. CWGC

• in Rugby School chapel (one of 682 names)

• in School Field House at Rugby School (one of 71 names)

• in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge (one of 606 names)

• outside St John's Church, Ranmoor, Sheffield (one of 58 names)

• inside St John's Church, Ranmoor, Sheffield (one of 59 names)

• in St Peter’s Church, Bushey Heath, the Great West Window (commissioned by his uncle & aunt Henry & Ida Perrin and designed by Henry Holiday) was dedicated to him on 14^th April 1918. The window was cleaned and re-dedicated along with the addition of a brass information plaque in 2002

• Memorial Lectureship Fund at the University of Sheffield, endowed by his father in 1925 stipulating that it should “deal with some aspect of the Great War, either in its origins, its conduct or its social and international consequences, or such other subject of national or international interest as the Selection Committee may determine”. There have been 13 lectures:

  • 1925 The Rt Hon H A L Fisher
    on “The pacification of Europe”

  • 1928 Professor Gilbert Murray
    on “The future of the British Empire in relation to the League of Nations”

  • 1931 The Rt Hon J C Smuts
    on ”The disarmed peace”

  • 1950 The Rt Hon Lord Boyd Orr
    on “Political problems raised by modern science”

  • 1953 Professor Arnold Toynbee
    on “The concentration of power and the alternatives before us”

  • 1957 The Rt Hon The Earl Alexander of Tunis
    on “The Battle of Tunis”

  • 1960 The Rt Hon Viscount Slim
    on “The making of an Army”

  • 1968 Mr A J P Taylor
    on “The legacy of the First World War”

  • 1980 The Rt Hon Roy Jenkins
    on “Europe and trade in the 1980s”

  • 1995 The Rt Hon the Lord Owen
    on “US-European Relations over Yugoslavia 1915-1995”

  • 2005 General Sir Mike Jackson
    on “Changes in global security since the Cold War”

  • 2012 Dr Edward Madigan
    on “Our Glorious Dead: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as Guardian of First World War Memory in Britain”

  • 2015 Professor Sir Ian Kershaw
    on "After the Armistice: Europe's Turbulent Peace, 1919-1923"

Pages in book (www.groupphoto.co.uk/the-book): 96-98

Appears in Charles Bartlett's letters: see I Shall Not Be Away Long book

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