Gordon Alexander

Educated at Harrow School, Gordon Alexander was a stockbroker with his family’s firm of J.D. Alexander and Co. Although he also excelled at sailing and golf it was as a fencer that enjoyed success. He was the British champion at the foil and competed, though with little success, in that discipline and also in the epée at the Olympic Games of Stockholm. At the outbreak of the First World War he joined the British Army and served in France throughout 1915 and 1916. In April 1917 Lieutenant Alexander was serving with the 13th East Surrey regiment at the attack on Villers Plouich in the North of France when a soldier under his command was wounded by an artillery shell in the process of digging a trench. Alexander was bandaging the soldier’s wound when a further shell scored a direct hit on the two men killing them instantly.