SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT BRIAN HOLMES
KING'S ROYAL RIFLE CORPS
1ST JULY 1916 AGE 29
BURIED: NOEUX-LES-MINES COMMUNAL CEMETERY, FRANCE
YORKSHIRE POST AND LEEDS INTELLIGENCER
Friday 7 July 1916
Sec-Lieut. Robert Brian Holmes, King's Royal Rifle Corps, who died of wounds on July 1, was the sixth and youngest son of the late Alfred Holmes and Mrs Holmes, of Udimore, Sussex, and Ashfield, Bingley. Educated at Oatlands, Harrogate, and at Haileybury, he was a partner in the firm of J.R.Holmes & Sons, Bingley, and at the commencement of the war enlisted in the Public Schools Battalion. He was granted a commission in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and was sent to France in October 1915. He was wounded last spring by the accidental explosion of a bomb, but very shortly rejoined his regiment.
Despite the influence of the Classics in British education, especially in the public schools - Holmes was educated at Haileybury - classical authors do not provide many inscriptions. Except of course for Horace whose Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori always remained popular even after the savaging Wilfred Owen gave it in his poem of the same name. In fact, this is the inscription on Hume Sanders Wingard's headstone, just five graves down from Holmes'.
Kate Holmes, Robert's mother, chose his inscription. It comes from Pericles Funeral Oration taken from Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War:
"And of how few Hellenes can it be said of them, that their deeds when weighed in the balance have been found equal to their fame! Methinks that such a death as theirs has been gives the true measure of a man's worth."
J.R.Holmes & Sons, the firm in which Holmes had been a partner, were brewers, taken over by Hammonds in 1919. Was his death a material factor here? They were a prosperous family. The 1911 census shows there were seven people in the household: four members of the family, a cook, a parlour maid and a house maid in a house with eighteen rooms.