Below is a photograph of Selwyn’s Freshmen of 1913: the young men who arrived at the College 101 years ago. They would have been just as excited about starting their University life as generations of students before and since, and with the same ambitions and hopes for the future. In that autumn nobody could have imagined the scale of the horror that lay ahead.
Of the 32 undergraduates who started at Selwyn in 1913, eight were to die in the Great War which started on the 4th of August 1914. There were 29 new students in Michaelmas Term 1914, and five of those would lose their lives in the conflict. Every year at the College’s Remembrance Day service, the shockingly long list of all Selwyn’s fallen in the First World War is read out.
On Monday August 4th at 10pm, a single candle was lit in front of the war memorial. It illuminated the names of those remembered there – and was a sign of our commitment that, even as the centuries pass, they will never be forgotten.
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