Captain Tom Esmond Geoffrey Bailey MC
Fellowship details: No. 4651, elected 4 Dec 1907.
Born: 15 April 1883
Died: 2 April 1919, North Russia.
Biography:
Tom Esmond Geoffrey Bailey was born on 15 April 1883, and educated at Kendal and Dulwich. The fourth of six sons of James Battersby Bailey and of Louisa F Bailey, Bailey entered Clare College, Cambridge in 1902, graduating in 1905. Between 1906 and 1908 he was occupied in a mineral survey of Nyasaland for the Imperial Institute, with Dr A R Andrew. One of the outcomes of this work was the joint paper, Geology of Nyasaland, which was published in the Society's Quarterly Journal in 1910. From 1909 to 1912 Bailey was employed in research in the oil-fields of Burma and Borneo.
At the outbreak of the War, Bailey returned home from Borneo to take up a temporary commission in the Yorkshire Regiment (6th Bn), and with them he served in France during the years 1915-1918. He was promoted and recommended for honours for his conduct at the battle of the Somme in 1916, and was severely wounded in the Battle of Arras, 1917. In November, 1918, he was sent to North Russia, and fell fighting there on 2 April 1919, while advancing unsupported on machine-guns which had opened up unexpectedly on his path. He had been awarded the Military Cross for his behaviour in action not many days before, but did not live to know of it.
Cemetery: Archangel Allied Cemetery, Russian Federation.
Bibliography:
- Andrew, A R and T E G Bailey, "The Geology of Nyasaland", 'Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society', vol 66 (1910), pp189-237.
- Andrew’s and Bailey’s results of their mineral survey in: Dunstan, W R. ‘Nyasaland Protectorate. Reports on the results of the Mineral Survey, 1906-1907’, London (1908).
- Obituary, ‘The Times’, 9 April 1919.
- Obituary, ‘Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society’, vol 76 (1920), Proceedings, pp xlviii-xlix.
- Obituary, ‘Geological Magazine’, New Series, Decade VI, No.6, June 1919, p288.