The Last British Soldier Captured in Russia

Unfortunately, the names of those captured with Brian Horrocks at Krasnoyarsk in January 1920, found in the National Archives, does not match the list of the prisoners who returned from Russia that was published in the London newspapers in November that year. This conundrum took me some time to unravel and it was not until I received a letter from the Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum that I traced the background of the last prisoner, who joined Horrocks in the Andronovsky Prison.

Lionel Ricketts Grant was a case maker who attended Linden Road School and went on to work at the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Works and the Stephens Jam Works before joining the Army on 23 February 1916. He was wounded in France, torpedoed in the Mediterranean and served with the 7th Gloucestershire Regiment in Mesopotamia and southern Russia, before ending up in Baku. He is very modest about his adventures between the Armistice and his capture by the Bolsheviks in July 1920, but these matched any of the extraordinary stories I read in World War I memoirs.

His letter to home from the Russian Quarantine Camp at Terijoki, dated 12 November 1920, was the missing jigsaw piece that not only provided vital information about what happened to the prisoners after they left Petrograd, but also corroborated other stories, such as the role of the French Red Cross heroine, Madame Charpentier. After returning home, he married Fanny Rosina Hoyland and they emigrated to Australia on the SS Beltana with their son, Gordon. During the Second World War, he served with the Australian Army.

Lionel Grant is the tall soldier standing second from the left with a Gloucestershire Cap Badge