Gordon, Robert Patrick
Rank: Private
Regiment: 4th Battalion Gordon Highlanders
Biography: Son of James A. Gordon, farmer. Born Kennethmont, 5 August 1895. After an excellent school career he matriculated at the University in 1912, and was a student in Arts till the outbreak of war. He joined the University Company early in his course, and applied himself to his training with such zeal and interest that he soon gained the complete N.C.O.'s Proficiency Certificate. After mobilization and training in Bedford he arrived in France with his Battalion in February 1915. He took part in the routine trench warfare of Flanders during the spring of that year, and was killed in action in the brave assault on the German lines in a wood near Hooge on 17 June 1915. Gordon represented the best type of the shrewd, level-headed farming class of the North-East of Scotland. He wanted education and he came up to the University that he might get it in the widest sense of the word. Over in France he displayed the same thoroughness and conscientiousness, the same devotion to duty and to the matter in hand as he had done at home. He was only 19 when he died - his death has been aptly described as "the fall of the unripened fruit".
Date of Death: 17 June 1915
Burial Details: Name recorded on the Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres, Panle 38, Column 7.
Publication: Roll of Service, edited by Mabel Desborough Allardyce. Published 1921.
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