In memory of


Gunner Charles H Ferguson


Royal Field Artillery


†December 14th 1918, age 21

Gunner Charles Hope Ferguson was born in Lugar, Ayrshire on 8th May 1897 the third son of David and Maggie Ferguson.  His mother died in 1901 when he was 3 years old. Charles was only 21 years old when he died on 14th December 1918 of meningitis at 12 Stationary Hospital, France.  Many soldiers died later in the war, not on the immediate field of battle, but from illness and disease as the result of military service and hardships and wounds in the war. None the less, those brave men, most of whom had fought in many battles, gave up their lives in the great cause for which the Allies had been fighting since the fateful fourth of August, 1914.  As the war began at Mons, from which the British had in the beginning to retreat amid terrible hardships, owing to the smallness and the unpreparedness of what the German Emperor styled, General French's contemptible little army, so by an unusual yet kindly gift of fate to a long-suffering army, the British captured Mons before dawn on the 11th November, Martinmas. An Armistice was signed at 5 a.m., and hostilities ceased on all fronts at 11 in the forenoon. The war ended with the Battle of the Sambre, and the British front, extending about sixty miles, from near Montbliart to just south of Grammont.

St. Pol-sur-Ternoise was a military administrative centre during the whole of the First World War and was taken over by Commonwealth troops from the French in March 1916. No. 12 Stationary Hospital was posted on the race-course near the town from 1 June 1916 to 1 June 1919.

Gunner Charles Ferguson’s Medal Record >>