We will remember them........ 
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In Memory of Second Lieutenant Jasper Lees4th Bn. Highland Infantry who died on 28 March 1915 |
GAVE UP HIS LIFEBELT
ALDERLEY EDGE OFFICER’S HEROISM ON THE FALABA
This was the headline to an article in the Alderley & Wilmslow Advertiser of 9th April, 1915. The officer was Second Lieutenant Jasper Lees, the son of Mr John Edward, solicitor, and Mrs Edith Margaret Lee Lees, of St Mary’s Cliffe, Alderley Edge.
The Falaba was a liner which had departed from Liverpool on 27 March bound for West Africa. Second Lieutenant Lees was on board. An officer in the Highland Light Infantry, he was to be attached to the Nigeria Regiment, part of the Royal West Africa Frontier Force. The RWAFF was engaged in one of the forgotten campaigns of the war in the German colony of Cameroon. A few hours out of Liverpool the Falaba was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Pembrokeshire. Jasper Lees, the newspaper article records, gave up his lifebelt to a stewardess – to no avail as both were drowned.
The sinking of the Falaba was headline news in the British press at the end of March 1915. German U-boats had sunk a number of cargo vessels in the first few months of the war but this was the first time that an unarmed passenger liner had been sunk. It caused outrage not only in Britain but also in the USA, as one of the 104 passengers and crew who died was an American. The sinking of the Falaba is almost forgotten today, eclipsed by the sinking of the much larger Lusitania six weeks later, with the loss of 1198 lives, including 128 American citizens. Nevertheless it marked an escalation of the war at sea.
Jasper Lees was born in 1890 in Chadkirk and educated at Eton. He is commemorated on the Hollybrook Memorial, Southampton, and the Eton College War Memorial, as well as on our War Memorial. A memorial service was held at St. Philip’s on 5th April, 1915.
If you know of Alderley Edge men who served in the war
and returned home afterwards, we should be glad to hear of them.