Samuel Lomax

Lieutenant-General Samuel Holt Lomax, (2 August 1855 – 10 April 1915) was a British Army officer who commanded the 1st Division during the early battles of the First World War. He was fatally wounded in action in October 1914 at the First Battle of Ypres, being one of the most senior British officers to die on active service during the war.

Early military career Born 2 August 1855 to Thomas and Mary Helen Lomax of Grove Park in Yoxford, Suffolk, Lomax joined the Scottish 90th Regiment of Foot as a junior officer aged eighteen in June 1874. In 1877 he went with the regiment to South Africa and participated in the Ninth Cape Frontier War, and the latter phase of the Zulu War in 1878, seeing action at Kambula and Ulundi, which secured British victory in the campaign. Lomax was promoted to captain in July 1880 and major in July 1889.

He attended the Staff College, Camberley, from 1891 to 1892 and was promoted to lieutenant colonel in October 1897, when he took command of his battalion, which he would command for four years, so missing action in South Africa. After relinquishing command of the battalion in October 1901, he was placed on half-pay and promoted to colonel on the same date.

In early 1902, he was transferred to a temporary staff posting as assistant adjutant general (AAG) of the 2nd Army Corps from 26 February 1902, an appointment which was made permanent later the same year. In April 1904 he was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier general and given an operational command, the 10th Infantry Brigade, taking over from Major General William Franklyn. He relinquished command of the brigade in April 1908 and went on to half-pay. He was promoted to major general while still on half-pay in June.

In August 1910 he was given command of the 1st Division, in succession to Lieutenant General Sir James Grierson. This was normally a four-year posting, and in late July 1914 he received notice that he would not be further employed due to his advanced age and lack of operational experience.

First Battle of Ypres In late October 1914 the 1st Division was engaged in heavy fighting at the First Battle of Ypres in Belgium, with its headquarters in a chateau at Hooge, recently vacated by Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Haig, commanding I Corps. On 31 October 1914, at the height of the battle, with the Germans launching repeated mass man assaults on the weakening British line, supported by concentrated barrages of fire from their artillery, a meeting took place at the chateau H.Q. between Lomax and his 2nd Division counterpart, Major General Charles Monro. An eye-witness at the scene noted that the officers' staff parked along the roadside outside the building provided an obvious target to German artillery spotters seeking targets to call fire down on to. The first shell exploded in the chateau's garden, causing the staff officers at the meeting to go to the windows of the garden room to see the result of the detonation, when the second shell landed in front of them, the blast killing six and seriously wounding Lomax and another officer. A third shell struck an empty part of the house, its owner, Baron de Vinck, narrowly escaping injury from that blast. however, Lomax was seriously wounded and medically evacuated back to England. Major General David Henderson stepped in to assume command of the 1st Division.

Death

On arrival back in England, Lomax was treated in a nursing home in London, where he received palliative care for the next five months before dying of his wounds in his 60th year on 10 April 1915. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, and his ashes were buried at Aldershot Military Cemetery, later to be joined by his wife's under a private headstone.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later wrote that Lomax's early death in the war had deprived the British high command of a talented general, which "was a brain injury to the Army and a desperately serious one."