HMS Hamphire (Wikipedia)

" A good son, a true patriot, respected by all who knew him, he gave his all for King and country. He died with Kitchener, his coffin a battleship, the wide ocean his tomb."

That was the epitaph printed by the Luton News for the third member of its staff to have died in World War One. Able Seaman Lester Stone Bennett, employed in the newspaper's commercial department, was a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (Sussex 5/112) and was among the 655 people lost when HMS Hampshire, the cruiser carrying Secretary of State for War Field Marshal Lord Kitchener and his staff to Russia on a diplomatic mission, sank within minutes of striking a German mine off Orkney on June 5th, 1916.

Lester (image right from microfilm), who came to the Luton News/Saturday Telegraph from Tunbridge Wells in 1914, was born in Colchester in March 1892 and joined the RNVR when he was 17. For three years running he had spent his annual holiday at sea, serving on HMS Good Hope (sunk off the Falkland Islands in November 1914), HMS Indefatigable (sunk in the Battle of Jutland on May 31st, 1916) and HMS Africa.

He had received notice to report himself to headquarters on August Bank Holiday 1914 and he was the first member of the newspaper's staff to join up. He was in training at various stations on the south coast. On the outbreak of war he was posted to the Howe Battalion, R.N.D, and was present at the siege of Antwerp, the company to which he belonged being the last to leave the trenches and the last over the pontoon bridge in August 1914, a spy in Belgian uniform nearly leading them to their destruction. A forced march of 36 miles in 13 hours preceded his return to England.

Shortly after his return he was sent to the Gunnery School, Whale Island [Portsmouth], and after a short course joined HMS Calyx, spending the winter of 1914-15 in the North Sea and North Atlantic.

On June 3rd, 1916, he wrote to his mother in Hastings telling how the Hampshire, on which he was then serving, had come through the Battle of Jutland without a scratch. He asked her to send some articles by an early post, unaware then that HMS Hampshire was about to sail for Russia.

[The Luton News: Thursday, June 15th, 1916]

In its July 27th edition, The Luton News reported that the body of Lester Bennett had been recovered and the Admiralty had informed his father in Hastings that he had been buried in Orkney. The official note read: "With reference to the communication from this Department date the 9th ultimo respecting Lester Stone Bennett, R.N.V.R., late of HMS Hampshire, I have to inform you that information had now reached this Department to the effect that his body has been recovered, and that it was buried in the Naval Cemetery, Grave 70*, Block F, in the Island of Hoy, Orkneys, on the 6th inst."

[* The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website says Grave 69.]