Ernest Buckeridge

Bank: The National Bank

Place of work: Secretary's Department, London

Died: 3 May 1917

Ernest George Buckeridge was born in London on 17 June 1882, the son of George Wakelin Buckeridge, a solicitor's clerk, and his wife Elizabeth. In November 1900, when he was 18 years old, he went to work for The National Bank at its London head office.

Ernest was a poet. His first volume of verse, Spindrift, was published in 1912. In the same year, on 20 June, Ernest's wife Gertrude Alice gave birth to their son Anthony Malcolm Buckeridge.

In 1915 Buckeridge was transferred to the bank's secretary's department. In September the following year he left the bank to go on military service, and after training was sent to France in April 1917 as a Private in the Honourable Artillery Company. Exactly one month later, on 3 May, Buckeridge was killed in action at Bullecourt near Arras, just half an hour after arriving at the front line.

Buckeridge's widow Gertrude took a job as a bank clerk, and in 1920, their 7-year-old son Anthony became a beneficiary of the Bank Clerks' Orphanage, a charitable organisation that supported the education of the children of deceased bank clerks. Anthony Buckeridge's scholarship paid for him to become a boarding pupil at Seaford College, East Sussex. He was later to draw on this experience as the author of the Jennings children's books.

Ernest Buckeridge is commemorated on a bank war memorial at the Royal Bank of Scotland London Cavendish Square branch.