OV’s Rededication for a ‘Lost’ OV

On Wednesday 3 July 2024, OV the Rev’d Richard Mutter CF (Ch 81-91) will be taking a burial service, rededicating a grave for OV Captain Clifford Nichols, who attended King’s in the early 1900s.

Richard explains, “As part of the work as a Chaplain in the Army, we are sometimes asked to take ‘rededication’ services for service personnel who have died in past conflicts. Quite a few of these are associated with the First World War, when a great number of people were buried without proper record-keeping. This is why there so many graves marked, “an unknown soldier of the Great War,” and so on. There is a team of people working to identify these unidentified bodies so that their relatives can finally know where they are buried, and that they might have their graves dedicated by name.

“I have recently been asked by the Commonwealth Graves’ Commission (CWG) to take a number of rededications of graves this July across France and Belgium. On Wed 3rd July, I will be rededicating the grave of Captain Clifford Nichols of the Fifth Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, attached to 164 Machine Gun Corps.”

From the biography supplied by CWG:

“Clifford Nichols was born in Harborne, Birmingham in 1890, one of four children born to Joseph Nichols and his wife Emily. He was educated at Dudley Grammar School and King’s Cathedral School, Worcester before qualifying as a Chartered Accountant in 1912.

“He enlisted in the army in November 1914 and was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in December. He transferred to the 164th Machine Gun Company in 1917, serving with them in France and Flanders from January of that year. He took part in the Battle of Arras in the spring of 1917 and was killed in action during the Battle of Passchendaele on 31 July 1917. He was recorded as missing at this time, and following the war he was commemorated on the Menin Gate memorial to the missing in Ypres.

“Captain Nichols’ remains were recovered from an unmarked field grave near Spree Farm, south of St Julien in 1923. At the time he remained unidentified, though the recovery team noted that his badges and buttons affiliated him with both the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and the Machine Gun Corps.

“Today, drawing together all the information which wasn’t accessible during or immediately after the war, we can say for certain that Captain Nichols is the previously unknown man buried at Bedford House Cemetery, and today we rededicate his grave accordingly.”