A shared story, forever remembered

This month’s Archive post is different. For the first time, our social media post highlights contemporary photographs. Together, the featured photographs reveal a First World War connection that plays an important part in Year 9’s experience of the annual Battlefields Study Visit.   

Taken at Essex Farm Cemetery earlier this term, the photographs show the graves of two Old Breconians buried there: C P Hazard and H B Davies.

Sometimes, connections between Old Breconians emerge in surprising ways. None is quite as surprising as the connection between C P Hazard (School House 1904-07) and H B Davies (School House 1909-11). Both were boarders in School House, both played for the First XV and both left school for Oxford, but their careers at school and university never overlapped.    

It is easy to imagine them seated together at an OB dinner or on the touchline on Llandovery Day or watching a cricket match on a sunny Brecon afternoon. But we will never know whether they ever met, which makes such close proximity at Essex Farm even more poignant.

The two young Old Breconians who – in slightly different eras – had sung in the same Chapel and played on the same pitches became two young Second Lieutenants who were killed in action near Ypres within days of each of other. They are buried just a few graves apart.  

Each of the graves, like all the others at Essex Farm, would originally have been marked by named wooden crosses. When the Commonwealth War Graves Commission replaced the original crosses with the more familiar white headstones, C P Hazard’s family arranged for their son’s cross to be retrieved and presented to his old school. It has been in the antechapel ever since, displayed since 2015 in accordance with specialist advice from Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. 

In 1931 Mrs Hazard wrote to the Headmaster, the Reverend J L Phillips (Headmaster 1921-31) to thank him for placing the cross in the antechapel. She wrote, “I very much like to think of it there”.

Her simple words movingly convey an emotional connection to Christ College, a place that had been such an important part of her son’s life. The enduring strength of that connection speaks of a sense of belonging that links different generations of the same community through shared experiences, traditions, memories – and Remembrance.

On Wednesday 11 November, the school will gather for this year’s Remembrance Service to honour those who gave their lives in conflict and to ensure that the courage and sacrifice made by Old Breconians such as C P Hazard and H B Davies is never forgotten.

Charles Piper Hazard  took a full and active part in school life: he was a keen sportsman, took part in the annual ‘theatricals’, became an editor of the school magazine and was a school prefect.

He gained a Classical scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, and played regularly for the Jesus College XV and occasionally for the Hockey XI. After graduation he joined the Colonial Civil Service overseas.   

At the outbreak of war, he returned home to enlist. Shortly after arriving in France in July 1915, he was wounded in action but later returned to the Front. On the night of 21 April 1916, the 1st Battalion, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry was ordered to counterattack an earlier German attack on Morteldje Estaminet, an area where his brother had been killed in action in May 1915. 

Second Lieutenant C P Hazard was first reported as missing in action, but news soon came in that he had been killed while trying to assist a wounded fellow officer under very heavy fire on 21 April 1916, the day after his twenty-eighth birthday. 

Harold Blakeney Davies was a talented sportsman who played in the Cricket XIs of 1909, 1910 and 1911 and in the XVs of 1909 and 1910. In 1911 he captained the Hockey XI. He was a long distance runner of some merit, winning the senior steeplechase in record time in 1911 and carrying off the senior Challenge Cup in the same year.

He took up his place at Keble College in autumn 1911, and played cricket, tennis and rugby football for his college. In the summer of 1914 Harold took Honours in his Modern History finals and decided to prepare for Holy orders.

Though he was known to have felt a strong dislike for war and militarism, he “at once obeyed the call of duty" at the of war and joined the officers’ training Corps. He was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion (Reserve), West Yorkshire Regiment, and attached to the 1st Battalion which was seeing heavy action in the Ypres salient.

On 23 April 1916 25-year-old Second Lieutenant H B Davies moved up to the front line for the first time. He was killed in action less than an hour after arriving at the Front. 

Read more about the 2026 Year 9 Battlefields Study Visit on the Christ College website