2/Lt. Charles Henry Nash, RAMC (Att’d)

Charles Henry Nash was born on July 16, 1875 in Cork to the Rev. Llewellyn Charles Nash and Ellen Henrietta Nash (née Welland). Charles was the youngest of 3 boys (William Welland Nash and Sidney Dawson Nash) and had an older sister, (Henrietta May Nash), and two younger sisters, (Mary Welland Nash and Anna Florence Nash).

Charles’ mother died in 1893, when he was 18 years old, and two years later he enrolled as a first-year medical student at Queen’s College Cork, on October 28, 1895. By 1901 Charles was living with his father, who was now the Rector of Ballymartle, (near Kinsale, County Cork), his younger sister Mary, his uncle Robert Spread Nash, and a domestic servant. Charles took his final examinations under the auspices of the Scottish Conjoint Board and so when he passed, in 1903, he became LRCP (Edin.), LRCS (Edin.) and LRFPS (Glasg.).

By 1911 he had formed a medical partnership with a local doctor, (Dr. Walter John Roalfe-Cox), and was working as a General Practitioner and living in Mortimer, Berkshire with his brother Sidney, (a former Army officer and now a District Commissioner in West Africa), his sister Mary and a domestic servant. Shortly after the outbreak of war he dissolved his business partnership so that he could join the Army and was commissioned as a temporary Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps on December 28, 1914.

He was attached to the 42nd (East Lancs) Division and by August 1915 was assigned to the 1/1st East Lancs Field Ambulance at Gully Beach, Cape Helles, Gallipoli. On Augst 31st the Divisional ADMS issued orders for him to be attached to the 1/9th Battalion Manchester Regiment, replacing Major Thomas Frankish, RAMC. He remained attached to the 9th Manchesters until he reported sick to hospital on October 25, 1915. He did not return to the Battalion.

On December 28, 1915 he was promoted to temporary Captain which rank he retained until he resigned his commission on March 8, 1919 retaining the rank of Captain. In October 1917 he married Julia Phyllis Smeddle, in Durham, and after he left the Army, they settled in Porthcawl, Wales where he worked in private practice. They had 3 daughters; Phyllis Kathleen Nash (b. 1919), Dorothy Joyce Graham Nash (b.1921) and Vera Peggy Nash (b.1925). They stayed in Porthcawl until the mid-1930s when they moved to Sandhurst, Berkshire.

Captain Charles Henry Nash died on February 8, 1952. He was 71 years old.