Horror And Heroism At Shoeburyness

In 1885 Tony Gould’s great-grandfather was one of seven men killed in an accident at the School of Gunnery on the Essex coast. Here he recounts the moving details of the tragedy.

In the late summer of 2014 my wife, Jenny, and I visited Shoeburyness on the Essex coast. We had never been there before, but I had been thinking about it on and off for a long time. I wanted to see the place where, according to a small item I’d spotted in the Spectator’s ‘One hundred years ago’ column in early March 1985, a ‘frightful accident occurred … involving almost as many deaths among officers as a sharp Egyptian skirmish’. This caught my eye because the Colonel Fox-Strangways mentioned in what followed was my great-grandfather. He was one of seven men killed on that day.

The son of a Devon vicar, Walter Aston Fox-Strangways underwent his baptism of fire in the Crimean War, in which his uncle, Brigadier-General Tom F-S, a veteran of Leipzig and Waterloo, was mortally wounded at Inkerman, perched on a horse next to his commander-in-chief Lord Raglan in full view of the enemy. After Crimea the artillery concentrated on creating a dedicated school of gunnery, with the remote stretch of coast to the east of Southend-on-Sea as one possible location for it. Lack of space at the artillery’s practice range at Woolwich, the greater size and range of the guns being developed (to defeat the new ironclad warships), along with frequent interruptions to firing caused by increased traffic in the Thames estuary, all pointed to the need for an alternative site and in 1858 Shoeburyness got the official nod of approval. By October 1882, when Walter was appointed Colonel Commandant there, the School of Gunnery was well established.