Mr Hamish Slocombe

Male

Birth date: 24.8.1890 y.

Cabin: Orderly Medical Officers-82

Biography:

**Name:** Hamish Aubrey Slocombe
**Position:** Sergeant, RAMC
**Age:** 26; August 24, 1890
**Biography:**
Hamish Aubrey Slocombe was born on August 24, 1890 in Kent, the only child to Fiona and Douglas Slocombe. His father is a well-respected solicitor whose thriving London practice, Slocombe & Associates, afforded the family a comfortable, upper-middle-class life. It was a foregone conclusion that Hamish would follow his father into the legal profession and eventually inherit the firm.

Hamish secured a place at Hertford College in 1908 when he was 18, and there he studied Jurisprudence. While academically successful, he was known among his fellows for his deep love of the arts, spending more time in galleries and poetry cafés than he did in the library. Artistic or not, however, he graduated in 1912 with a jurisprudence degree.

Following his graduation, Hamish completed his legal training and began working at his father’s firm and was smitten by Miss Lucretia Alsby, a young woman from a long-established landowning family. Hamish and Lucretia began a cordially quaint courtship, which became increasingly serious through 1913. The relationship was met with fierce disapproval from her parents, Sir Charles and Lady Alsby, whose objections were rooted in a mix of class snobbery and personal judgment. Though Hamish was financially secure, Lucretia's parents viewed a mere solicitor’s family, however well-established, as beneath their own landed status. They also found Hamish himself unsuitable, labeling him "soft." A particular sticking point, which Lucretia's father often sneered at, was Hamish's habit of spending weekends making watercolor portraits of birds rather than participating in "proper muddy business" of hunting and country-sport pastimes. It was thus that, under immense pressure, Lucretia ended their courtship in the summer of 1914--the most beautiful summer in recent memory--and one of shame and heartbreak for Hamish.

When the Great War broke out in August, Hamish was determined to contribute though his temperament made him profoundly averse to frontline combat. He chose to apply his efforts where he felt he could be most useful and least violent, enlisting in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). After initial training, which saw him assigned to a field ambulance unit, the brutal reality of trench warfare and the indiscriminate nature of artillery and gas became clear. Knowing that the Red Cross emblem was little protection in the chaos of the trenches, Hamish sought a safer-still avenue of service and successfully requested a transfer to a hospital ship, and his first posting was aboard the Aquitania. In January 1916, he transferred to the Britannic, which is currently operating under her second requisition in this war people thought was going to be over by Christmas--almost three Christmases ago.

Edit