Ronald Gurner

Stanley Ronald Kershaw Gurner (1890-1939) was a writer and headmaster. A classics scholar at Oxford, he became a teacher after university. In 1914 he was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and served two years in the trenches before being wounded at Arras, where he won the Military Cross, in 1917 by a sniper. After the war he went on to be headmaster of three schools, including Whitgift School in Croydon. He wrote several novels; Pass Guard at Ypres is a thinly disguised autobiography of his time as a junior officer during WWI.