The Hambledon War Memorial records a man simply as “T. Kimber”, without rank, battalion, or date of death.
No obvious civilian record has yet been found linking a man of that name directly to the parish, and two soldiers of the Hampshire Regiment killed during the war match the initials.
Ephraim Hughes was born in Hambledon in 1884, the son of Charles Frederick Hughes and Harriet Louisa Clay. His childhood was unsettled from an early age. The family left Hampshire while he was still young and by 1891 he was living in Leeds. Two years later, in 1893, his mother died, and his upbringing thereafter took place largely among extended family away from his birthplace.
Harry Robert George Hooker was born in Hambledon about 1884–1885, the son of a village family whose lives were closely tied to the parish. Unlike many men commemorated on the memorial, his military career began long before the outbreak of the First World War. He enlisted in the regular army around the turn of the century and made soldiering his profession, serving with the Hampshire Regiment across the overseas garrisons of the British Empire.
Harry Furber Hooker was born in Hambledon on 21 June 1895, the son of Mrs Emma Hooker of Lytheys Close. Like many rural Hampshire boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, his future did not lie entirely in England. At the age of fourteen, in October 1909, he left home and sailed from Britain to Canada, arriving at Quebec aboard the Empress of Ireland. He was sent west to Manitoba, part of the large movement of young British farm workers who emigrated to the Dominions in search of opportunity and agricultural employment. There he grew up working as a farmer on the Canadian prairies.
Charles Richard Hooker was born in Hambledon in 1879, the son of Richard and Ellen Hooker of West Street. He grew up in the village in a working family and, like many local men, found employment as a general labourer. In 1907 he married Annie Louisa Biggs and they made their home in West Street where they raised two young children, Winifred and Harold.
Edward Thomas Hill was born in Hambledon and grew up in the rural surroundings of the village before choosing a very different life at sea. In February 1913, still a young man, he enlisted in the Royal Navy as a Stoker Second Class and travelled to Portsmouth to begin his naval training.
His first months were spent at the shore establishment known as HMS Victory II, the naval barracks where recruits were issued kit, taught discipline and instructed in the demanding technical duties of boiler-room work.
Albert Hamilton was born in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, about 1895, but grew up in Hambledon where his widowed mother Jane Hamilton raised her family in West Street. By 1911 he was working locally as a farm horseman, typical of many young men in the village whose lives were rooted in agricultural labour before the war.
James Frederick Hall was born in Hambledon around 1877, the son of George and Eliza Hall. He grew up in the village as part of a large rural working family and spent his childhood in Hambledon where he attended school before entering employment locally. By early adulthood he was working as a brewer’s drayman, a physically demanding occupation delivering barrels of beer from brewery to public houses by horse and wagon.
Reginald George Goffin was born on 15th May 1895 at Toddington, Bedfordshire, the son of Benjamin Goffin and Elizabeth “Lizzie” Durrant. Within a few years the family moved to Hambledon, where his father ran a drapers and grocers business at Commerce House in East Street, a building still standing today as West Street Cottage. The 1901 census shows Reginald living there with his parents and brothers, part of a growing village family rooted in trade rather than farming.
George Samuel French was born in Hambledon in 1897, the son of Samuel Thomas French and Emma Esther French. His childhood was marked by early loss when his mother died in 1902. Afterwards George, his father and younger brother moved into Hoe Gate Farm, the home of his grandfather Samuel French, a retired Royal Navy Petty Officer. The household combined farming life with a background of military discipline, and he grew up within a close rural family typical of the Meon Valley at the turn of the century.
