CAPTAIN EDWARD STANLEY RUSSELL, MC
HEREFORDSHIRE REGIMENT
6TH NOVEMBER 1917 AGE 34
BURIED: BEERSHEBA WAR CEMETERY, ISRAEL
"Who is the happy warrior? Who is he, that every man in arms should wish to be?" Wordsworth asked the question in his 1807 poem and his answer was a man who was brave, modest, faithful, resolute, diligent and magnanimous, an honourable man, a man of high endeavour guided by reason and duty, a home loving man and thus "more brave for this, that he hath much to love".
A hundred years later and the term happy warrior had been transmuted through GF Watt's 1884 painting of the same name, and though numerous attributions to famous men whose lives had been triumphantly dedicated to noble struggles, into a widely used term of praise for a certain type of man, a thoroughly good sort..
Before the war, Stanley Russell had been a Unitarian minister at Ullet Road Church, Liverpool. In September 1914 he enlisted as a private in the Liverpool 'Pals' and in February 1915 was commissioned into the Herefordshire Regiment. He served in Gallipoli and Palestine and won the Military Cross in April 1917 during the First Battle of Gaza. He was killed in the second battle in November that year.
In an unpublished memoir by the Rev. Arnold H. Lewis, quoted in the Christmas 1918 edition of The Bookman, Stanley Russell is described as:
"a man of great personal charm and variously gifted: an accomplished reciter, a speaker and preacher of originality and power, a clever writer. He was unusually handsome and of a most engaging address. Unfailing good temper and a deep understanding of and love for human nature and an indomitable spirit gave him influence and leadership alike at the university, in the Church and in the Army".
Lewis's manuscript was lodged at Manchester College, Oxford and provides the information for
'Killed Fighting for their Country: Two Unitarian Ministers by Alan Ruston on the website Faith and Freedom.