239137 Col. Edward Sidney Grune MID.British Army 13th Btn. Middlesex Regiment Edward Sidney Grune was born in Putney in 1887 and baptised in Putney Church. He was educated at Lancing College and at 17, in defiance of his father, ran away and enlisted as a private soldier in a regiment that was about to leave for West Africa, the "White Man's Grave."
His maternal uncle, Maj. Hampden Chawner, was horrified and was instrumental in his obtaining a commission in the Bedfordsire and Hertfordshire Regiment in 1905. He joined the Battalion in Gibraltar where he met his future wife and married her in 1910. As he was only a subaltern and had no private income, this made life difficult. On its return to England the regiment was stationed at Colchester, where the young couple lived in a cottage in a cherry orchard.
Meeting up with his brother-in-law, Claude, home from Malaya and rubber planting, he was fired with the idea of joining him in this remote and little known country. Somehow he persuaded officialdom to allow him to leave the regiment without actually resigning and off he and his young wife went to an isolated life in the middle of vast Dutch owned rubber estates in the Kuala Lumpur district. A year later, in January 1914, a daughter was born to them.
It was only some months after the outbreak of war that news reached him and he immediately set about returning to his regiment. He reached Dover in October 1914, just in time to participate in the campaign in Salonica. Wounded in the ribs on 9 December 1914, he was eventually sent to Malta and from there on 1 March 1915 to Alexandria. After much badgering of HQ he was transferred to the 1st Essex Regiment and travelled by sea and rail to Ballincourt and Abbeville. He was in front line action when in 1918, owing to casualties amongst officers, he was transferred to the Northamptons and promoted colonel in the field. He remained with them until the end of the war and led the parade when the regiment received the freedom of the City of Northampton. At Ypres he was in the same trench as his cousin Meredith Chawner who was killed beside him. His other cousin, Alain, brother to Meredith, was also killed, a few days later.
According to Services of Military Officers: arranged alphabetically corrected to December 1920. Polstead, Suffolk: J.B. Hayward & Son: E.S.C. Grune commanded 13th Batallion, Middlesex Reg. 8 Aug. - 11 Sep. 1917 and 7th Bat. Northumberland Reg. 27 June 1918 France, Belgium 16 March - 11 Nov. 1918 Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Aegean islands Oc - Dec. 1915; wounded twice; despatches: London Gazette 8 July 1919
Order of the White Eagle 5th Class. (This is the military service class of this Serbian decoration instituted in 1883 - HT Dorling, Ribbons and Medals, Naval, Military, Air Force and Civil, London: Philip, new ed. 1960, p. 254.)
After the war he returned to the Beds and Herts and went with them to Ballyshannon in Ireland, on one occasion in 1922 sitting in a train with a man who had been sent to shoot him. When volunteers were asked for to go and police Palestine, he applied and spent two years on the edge of the Sea of Galilee. On rejoining the regiment, he spent two years in Aldershot before the batallion was ordered to Malta in 1926. After a little more than a year there was trouble in China and the battalion was sent to guard the coal mining area of Weiheiwei, which was a British concession. Two years later they were posted to India to Mhow, a station in the Central Provinces.
Although he was a first class soldier, he was not an ambitious man. Promotion was slow in the Bedfords, so his commanding officer recommended him for transfer to the Royal Welch Fusileers. He returned to England, to Tidworth, for six months, prior to a tour of three years in Gibraltar, during which his daughter got married. Next the battalion went to Hongkong. Here the sins of his youth found him out. Because he had given the wrong year of birth on enlistment, being still under age, he had to retire a year early and missed out on commanding his battalion.
He arrived back in England just when the RAF were selecting recently retired officers to train for administrative work in order to release men into the air. On 1 September 1939 he was commissioned as Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. He had a useful and satisfying Second World War career as his organizing ability was used to the full. This included getting a new airfield started at Morpoth in Northumberland, organizing the balloon barrage around Glasgow and Edinburgh, coordinating the biggest hotels in Blackpool to form the No 1 Airmen's Convalescent Depot, and converting one of the Rothschild houses into part hospital and part training depot, particularly for Polish officers and apprentices smuggled out of Poland.
Just after the war he had a short spell with the Navy in the radar station at Haslemere. He worked briefly as an official of the High Court in what was then Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia before retiring to Sidmouth in Devon. He died in the Exeter Hospital on 6 July 1960, aged 72 years [Exeter First District, Col. 434].
Lt Grune, Beds Reg., 3rd Bat., promoted to Captain 13 June 1915 (London Gazette 12 June 1915)
Lt.Col apptd Squadron Leader (Acting Wing Commander 26 April 1939 (London Gazette 27 Oct., 39) WO 339/6884
After service in WWII he retired to Sidmouth
|