Thursday 20th August 1914

Gilbert and Geraldine Tunstill arrived back in England at the end of their 10-day journey from St Petersburg. It was the experience of seeing the Russian mobilisation (see 1st August 1914) which seems to have convinced Gilbert to raise a Company of men in Craven to join Kitchener's New Army.

Percy Illingworth passed on to Harold John (“Jack”) Tennant, Under Secretary of War State for War and brother-in-law of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, a copy of the letter he had received from Dr. Thomas Ingram regarding his brother Robert Ingram’s application for a commission. Illingworth recommended Ingram as ‘a likely man’ and asked that Tennant should ‘do what you can’.

 

Leonard Hammond applied for a commission in the Royal Engineers; he would instead be commissioned in the Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) Regiment and would serve as Transport Officer for 10^th Battalion, working closely with Gilbert Tunstill and his Company.



Leonard Hammond

Leonard Hammond was 25 years old in 1914 (b. 1^st May 1889). His father, Walter John Hammond, had worked as a civil engineer, which occupation had taken him around the world; Leonard and his older brother, Paul (b.1883) had both been born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Leonard, like his brother, had been educated at Tonbridge School, Kent (1903-07) and had then gone on to study at the University of Louvain, Belgium, (Louvain had been occupied by the German Army the day before Hammond applied for his commission) and at the North British Locomotive Works in Glasgow.