In 1916, RBGE lost two members of staff in France during the First World War. The first was George Blackmore who was killed in the trenches of the western front in March, the second was Arthur Henry Jones who died in hospital in April 1916, but he wasn’t an infantry man.

Papaver rhoeas from A. Dietrich’s Flora Regni Borussici. III; T.185. Berlin, 1835

Arthur Jones was born in Dymock in Gloucestershire in around 1882 to Thomas and Charlotte. He became a porter in a workhouse before becoming a labourer at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh in December 1911. On the outbreak of war Jones enlisted immediately, joining the Royal Army Medical Corps in London on the 5th August 1914. He quickly entered the theatre of war, crossing to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force on the 25th August 1914. Jones ended up working as a ward orderly in the No.11 General Hospital which was situated in the Imperial Hotel on the sea front in Boulogne. The book ‘A Doctor on the Western Front’ (edited by John Hutton, 2013), comprised of the wartime diary entries of Captain Henry (Harry) Barton Owens, describes this hospital, from the point of view of a doctor. He was posted there briefly in September 1915 and referred to life there as

“a complete change in every way. I was able to refresh my memory in medicine and surgery… We lived in luxury in a very nice house let to us fully furnished with bed rooms, bathroom, billiard room, dining room, smoking room, etc. on the sea front at the north end of the town. We bathed in the sea whenever we wanted to, played a good deal of tennis and altogether had a good time and were not too busy.”

I suspect things would have been somewhat different for the orderlies, but still, one wonders what caused Arthur Jones’s death if he was not fighting in the trenches? One would imagine that disease would be the most likely cause, but the answer came on the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission where one of the documents associated with Jones’s grave in the Etaples Military Cemetery states that he had attained the temporary rank of Acting Corporal, Army Health at the time of his death at the young age of 34 on the 30th April 1916. The cause of death was given as heart failure.

A.H. Jones’s Service Card, RBGE Archives

(RBGE records state that Jones died on the 19th May 1916, but it looks as if we must be mistaken)

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Again I am deeply indebted to Garry Ketchen for his genealogical research into the men that appear on RBGE’s War Memorial and his kind permission to use it in these Botanics Stories.