Royal Marine casualties of the Great War, 1914-1919
/The memorial for the 1914/18 War which is situated beneath the King's and Regimental Colours of the old Chatham Division of the Royal Marines in the North Quire Aisle.
It reads:
1914 - 1919
To the glorious
memory of 1640 Officers,
NonCommissioned
Officers and men of
The Chatham Division
Royal Marines
Who fell in the
Great War.
Greater love hath no man
than this, that a man lay
down his life for his friends
A bed in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Rochester, was endowed from the war memorial fund of the Division to which all ramks contributed.
His Majesty's Ships, Hogue, Cressys and Aboukir
The memorial book of the Royal Marines for the 1914/18 War contains many names, but the names of men from three ships in particular appear with great frequency. The ships HMS HOGUE, HMS CRESSY and HMS ABOUKIR all based on Chatham, were the central figures in an early naval disaster which shocked Britain.
All were the victims of a dawn attack by a lone German U-boat, the U-9, off the coast of Holland on 22 September 1914. They were aged and obsolete cruisers, quite unsuited for the type of sea warfare of World War I. The sinking of "three before breakfast" resulted in a death toll of 1,459 - greater than the number of men lost at Trafalgar.
A month later on 15 October the U-9 secured another victim, HMS Hawke. The names of the Royal Marines from the Hawke also appear in the book.
From the notebooks ‘The Naval and Military Memorials of Rochester Cathedral’ (1979)
by Roy Trett, OBE, TD,
Rochester Cathedral Chapter Library
The medieval tombs of the Presbytery and Quire Transept have had a tortured history which many effigies apparently moved and several defaced along with the medieval memorials and brasses over the Early Modern period.
