Notes
The College website (see References) carries this short biography of him: 'Roger Paul Hepburn, 2nd Lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, had graduated with a First Class degree in Natural Sciences in the summer of 1914. The Senior Tutor at the time, Mr Arthur Ramsey, records in his memoirs that when he had returned from an examiners’ meeting in August 1914, three of his tutorial students ‘had left Cambridge at midnight on their motorcycles to offer themselves as despatch riders for service with the expeditionary force. They did not wait to ask leave or to consult their parents, but just left a message to say that they had gone.’ Hepburn was one of the three; he already had an interest in the military as an active member of the University Officers’ Training Corps. Hepburn was a despatch rider on the Western Front for eight months before he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and retrained as a signaller. It was in his work as a Brigade Signals Officer that he was injured on the front line in February 1916. Hepburn returned to the trenches where he was awarded the Military Cross in June 1917, two months before he died of wounds sustained in action.