Lives of the First World War

known 13th October 1915

Alexander Adam Seaton, of the 1st Cambridgeshire Regiment, who died of wounds on September, was the son of the Rev J A Seaton, vicar of St John’s, Cleckheaton. He came up as a Scholar to Pembroke from Leeds Grammar School in 1903, and in 1906 was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos, and in the first class of the Historical Tripos (Part II). He was Lightfoot University Scholar in 1908, and won the Prince Consort Prize in 1910, in which year he was elected to a Fellowship at Pembroke. He devoted himself to historical studies with great ardour, and was soon appointed to a College lectureship in history which he discharged with enthusiasm. Unswerving in his devotion to a lofty ideal of duty, on the outbreak of the war he forsook the congenial life of teacher and student, and accepted a commission in the Cambridgeshire Regiment, ‘Where,’ his Colonel writes, ‘he was held in the greatest esteem by all. He was most painstaking and conscientious in the discharge of all his duties and absolutely without fear. Not a soldier by inclination, he left his peaceful life as a Fellow of Pembroke solely because he conceived that his duty lay that way, and the hour had come for every man to strike a blow for his country. I know that he, with most people, hated the business of war, as such, but did not shrink from the great sacrifice.’ In Pembroke his loss is deeply mourned; with him a great influence for good has passed away, for he lived his life, as he ended it, doing his duty.

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