Raymond Asquith - Career and Honours

Career and Honours

Asquith was educated at Winchester College and won a scholarship to Balliol in 1896, bringing with him a reputation for brilliance. He won Ireland, Derby, and Craven scholarships, and was distinguished by first-class honours. Elected a fellow of All Souls in 1902, he was called to the bar in 1904. The tall, handsome Asquith was a member of "the Coterie," a group of Edwardian socialites and intellectuals.

Asquith was junior counsel in the North Atlantic Fisheries Arbitration and the investigation of the sinking of the Titanic, and was considered a putative Liberal candidate for Derby. However, his rise was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. He was initially commissioned, on 17 December 1914, as a second lieutenant in the 16th (County of London) Battalion, London Regiment. He was transferred to the 3rd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, on 14 August 1915 and assigned as a staff officer, but he requested to be returned to active duty with his battalion, a request granted before the Battle of the Somme. While leading the first half of 4 Company in an attack near Ginchy on 15 September 1916, at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, he was shot in the chest and died while being carried back to British lines. He was buried in Guillemont Road Cemetery, where his headstone is inscribed 'Small time but in that small most greatly lived this star of England', a concluding line from Shakespeare's "Henry V", about a warrior king who had died in his thirties after campaigns in France.

Asquith's death exemplified the end of the Edwardian era in World War I. The writer John Buchan devoted several pages of his autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door, to remembering Raymond Asquith and their friendship in some detail.