A Great Man Has Fallen in Israel

This is a story that is unique to my sister in law’s partner. He shared some documents and newspaper accounts of his great uncle Richard with me and we thought it was worthy of posting his story on this blog.

The title of this post is a biblical reference to Samuel 2 when David asks the rhetorical question of his soldiers “Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?”

THESE words were originally spoken of Abner, by David king of Israel. It was a time of royal mourning;–of mourning, however, not conducted after the fashion of mere state etiquette. David was weeping over his general’s death in all the simplicity of his most unrestrained feelings–doing homage to the departed, out of respect for fallen greatness.

(The beginning of the Revd. Titcomb’s sermon on the death of the Duke of Wellington 1852)

It is also the heading to a tribute to the late Richard Nassau Davidson.

The prince and great man in this story fell in the 20^th Century, not in Israel but in Castries, the capital of St. Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Caribbean. An independent country since 1979, it remains part of the British Commonwealth. It had a back history of the African slave trade and slavery on the island came to an end in the middle of the 19^th Century. St Lucia was, in its past, a place of conflicting ownership between France and Britain, with Britain taking ownership in the early 19^th century. Therefore, although English is the spoken language of the island, there is a strong French patois in use.

This is the story of Richard Nassau Davidson, a soldier from the age of 15 and a police officer after the First World War. Richard was born in 1885 and died in 1925 at the young age of 40. As far as our research can tell, Richard did not marry, and he had no children. He was born in 1885, in the registration district of Dublin, which was the administrative city of Ireland. When, during the Irish Civil War, the National Archives were destroyed, most records of birth, marriage and deaths, together with Census returns, were destroyed. Some have remained. County Louth and Londonderry are the focus of our research in Richard’s family history. The Davidson family lived and worked in the Dundalk area but one daughter, Anna, left to work and then marry in Londonderry.

Most of Richard Davidson’s life was not spent in Ireland. He joined the Royal Garrison Artillery at the age of 15 and went to the training barracks in Seaforth, Liverpool. He is number 4 in this Census return for 1901.

Census return England 1901 (via Ancestry.co.uk) Boy soldiers aged 14 to 16 and Gunners aged 18 to 27. Richard is number 4 on the list.

 Richard remained a professional soldier until 1921. The Royal Garrison Artillery were formed to practice the discipline of siege artillery which involved forts and fortresses in strategic places along the coast and on the front-line during wars. Richard served in the First World War for two years and after being wounded in the head and the leg he returned to finish his war time at Aldershot in Surrey where he trained officers and soldiers in the art of siege defence.

Richard’s big opportunity for more adventure was when he was posted to Jamaica as part of the team responsible for dismantling the artillery defences there. Eventually arriving in St Lucia to do the same and after being pensioned off he remained on the island and joined the police force.

It is at this point our story begins and ends in this post.

Richard must have been regarded as a man of significant importance to merit this tribute and also a half page obituary in The Voice, the newspaper of St. Lucia. The population of St. Lucia in 1925 would have been less than the 200,00 of today and the cynical might say, well nothing really happens on the island. However, the death of the police inspector and chief of the island prison, was most probably an important office and merited a good send off. Reading the Tribute and the Obituary in the Voice, suggests that he was also much loved by the people that knew him.

An acrostic poem is one which uses a name vertically and starts each line with each letter of the name horizontally.

“Dire troubles of the System surely caused his work to cease”.

I particularly like the line,” Dutys done; he’s for the grave”.

Ex Sergeant Murrell waxes lyrical about his fallen colleague and celebrates Richard as a hero and respected man of the whole population, including the prisoners in his Safe Keeping.

The funeral was in Holy Trinity Cathedral, the Anglican cathedral of St Lucia in Castries. The Voice listed the order of dignitaries in the funeral party.

There are social media sites that celebrate the life of St. Lucia and I have found pictures of the Royal Gaol which looks like a colonial building of that time. It was completely demolished in 2020.

Richard’s grave is no longer marked and although the burial register lists him, that and the small number of documents in the family collection, are all that remains to tell us his story. In the next post on Richard’s life I shall try and piece some of it together in more detail.

There has always been an interest in how Richard got his middle name. There is no evidence of a connection with the Bahamas. The mystery might be solved by the fact that it was part of the full name of William of Orange-Nassau. Nassau is a town in Germany. William of course, is celebrated by Irish Protestants.