Valentine Fleming

Valentine Fleming, the son of Robert Fleming, was born in Newport-on-Tay, Fife, in 1882. His father was a highly successful businessman who established the Investment Trust Corporation and the Robert Fleming and Company. Valentine was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College. He left Oxford University with a degree in history. For a time he considered studying to become a lawyer but eventually he joined the family firm.

Valentine married Evelyn Beatrice Ste Croix in February, 1906. His father gave him a wedding gift of £250,000 and his was able to buy Braziers Park, a large house at Ipsden in Oxfordshire. Over the next few years the couple had four children, Peter Fleming (1907), Ian Fleming (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913).

A member of the Conservative Party, Valentine Fleming became the member of the House of Commons for South Oxfordshire when he defeated his Liberal Party, opponent, Philip Morrell, in the 1910 General Election. A fellow member of parliament, Winston Churchill, pointed out that Fleming was "one of those younger Conservatives who easily and naturally combine loyalty to party ties with a broad liberal outlook upon affairs and a total absence of class prejudice... He was a man of thoughtful and tolerant opinions, which were not the less strongly or clearly held because they were not loudly or frequently asserted.... He could not share the extravagant passions with which the rival parties confronted each other. He felt that neither was wholly right in policy and that both were wrong in mood."

In 1912 Valentine Fleming argued in favour of National Service on the grounds that "improvement in the national physique and in the habits of order and discipline among the people of the country... do real good to the working classes, and in the end very largely increase the efficiency of labour for the manufactories of this country."

On the outbreak of the First World War Fleming joined the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars. In November, 1914, he was promoted to the rank of major and sent to the Western Front. Soon after he arrived he took part in the Battle of Ypres. He wrote to his friend, Winston Churchill: ""Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of wounded men, by the piteous calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines of trenches, some 200, some 1,000 yards apart, hardly visible except to the aeroplanes which continually hover over them, menacing and uncanny harbingers of fresh showers of destruction ... It's going to be a long long war in spite of the fact that every single man in it wants it stopped at once."

In 1917 Valentine's battalion was ordered to Guillemont Farm, north of St Quentin. In the early hours of 20th May, the German Army, opened a heavy bombardment. Valentine Fleming was hit by a shell and killed instantly.

Primary Sources

(1) Valentine Fleming, letter to Winston Churchill (November, 1914)

Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of wounded men, by the piteous calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines of trenches, some 200, some 1,000 yards apart, hardly visible except to the aeroplanes which continually hover over them, menacing and uncanny harbingers of fresh showers of destruction... It's going to be a long long war in spite of the fact that every single man in it wants it stopped at once.