In the quiet churchyard of St Lawrence, Priddy, lies Sergeant Major Ernest Simmons, a soldier whose long career took him far from the Mendip hills but who returned, in death, to the village of his birth. Born in Priddy in 1869, Ernest was the eldest child of Henry and Ellen Simmons. His father, a mason of some standing, was recorded in the 1881 census as employing ten men and a boy—evidence of a family rooted in the skilled trades of the Mendip plateau. Just a few doors away lived another Simmons household, Daniel and Elizabeth, suggesting that Ernest grew up within a close-knit extended family community.
Unlike many of his contemporaries who remained in farming or stonework, Ernest sought a broader life. He enlisted in the Army Veterinary Corps and went on to serve for twenty-eight years, including a decade in India and five years in South Africa. His skill with horses and steady rise through the ranks brought him to the position of Farrier Sergeant Major in the 4th Battalion of the Dragoon Guards. By the time of the 1911 census he was living in Preston, near Brighton, still serving in the army and continuing a career that had already spanned more than two decades.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Ernest was forty-five years old—remarkably senior for a soldier in active service. Most of the men who went to France that summer were in their twenties, but Ernest’s experience was invaluable. He landed in France on 16 August 1914 and was soon in the thick of the retreat from Mons, where his conduct earned him mention in dispatches. Later he returned to Britain and transferred to the 6th Reserve Regiment of Cavalry, formed in 1917 to train recruits for the Dragoon Guards. His long service with horses, both in the Veterinary Corps and in the cavalry, made him ideally suited to this role.
Tragically, his career ended not in battle but in accident. While stationed at Tidworth Camp on Salisbury Plain in July 1918, his horse tripped over wire, throwing him violently. He was found unconscious and died the same day, on 26 July, aged forty-nine. To die at such an age, still in uniform, was unusual in itself; Ernest belonged to a generation of older professional soldiers whose experience was pressed into service during the war, long after most men would have retired from active duty.
It was also unusual that Ernest did not receive an Imperial War Graves Commission headstone. Most soldiers who died in the Great War were buried overseas in standardised cemeteries, their graves maintained in perpetuity. But because Ernest died in England, arrangements could be made for a private burial. His body was brought home to Somerset, and he was laid to rest in the churchyard of St Lawrence, Priddy. There, among the fields and stone walls of his childhood, his grave remains a personal memorial, distinct from the uniform rows of white headstones that mark the sacrifice of so many of his comrades abroad.
Today, his resting place in Priddy is a reminder of both the breadth of his service—spanning India, South Africa, France, and Salisbury Plain—and the deep roots that tied him back to the Mendip hills. Sergeant Major Ernest Simmons stands as an example of the older generation of soldiers who gave their lives in the Great War, and whose memory endures in the village where their story began.
