Lieutenant Charles Murray Cramsie
Charles Murray Cramsie was born at O'Harabrook, Ballymoney, on 2 November 1897, son of Captain James Sinclair Cramsie of the Northumberland Fusiliers and his wife Laura Mary Cramsie (nee Butler).
Cramsie was educated at Repton School Public School in Derbyshire (September 1911 to July 1915), where his housemaster wrote frankly though not always positively of his abilities, for example:
An attractive Irish Youth. Stupid and fearfully forgetful in School. (November 1911)
He is a leading light in the Officers' Training Corps band. (June 1915)
He applied for a commission in the North Irish Horse as soon as he turned 18, and was appointed a 2nd lieutenant on 8 December 1915.
He embarked for France on 5 August 1916, serving there with the 1st North Irish Horse Regiment.
Cramsie was promoted to lieutenant on 1 July 1917. On 17 November that year he transferred to the 5th (Royal Irish) Lancers, Special Reserve, even though the move meant dropping rank to 2nd lieutenant. He regained the rank of lieutenant on 1 September 1918.
Cramsie was demobilized on 13 September 1919 and resigned his commission on 7 April the following year, as he hoped "to be going abroad very soon on business, and should therefore be unable to do any yearly training." Soon after he left for Canada, where he lived in Montreal.
He died on 31 December 1981.
Lieutenant Cramsie's brother James Randal Beresford Cramsie also served in the war, first as a sergeant in the North Irish Horse, and later as an officer in the Army Service Corps.
House photo, Repton School, 1913. Cramsie is in the back row, ninth from the left.
I am grateful to Paul Stevens, Librarian and Archivist at Repton School, for providing the above images and some of the information.