British Victoria Cross recipient. Christopher Augustus Cox was born in the small town of King's Langley, in North-West Hertfordshire, and lived there all his life. In 1912, he married Maud Swan, with whom he went on to have eight children. In September 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for active service and, the following July, went to France with the 7th. Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment, where he served as a stretcher bearer. He was wounded in the leg on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1st. July 1916), but returned to the Battalion in time to take part in the Battle of Thiepval that September. The following March, as the Germans were retreating to the Hindenberg line, the Bedfordshires were advancing opposite Achiet-le-Grand. On the 13th. March, the first wave of the advance was checked by heavy artillery and machine-gun fire, and the whole of the line had to take shelter in shell-holes. Private Cox went forward over the fire-swept ground and rescued four men single-handed. When he had collected the wounded of his own Battalion, he then proceeded to do the same to the wounded of the adjoining Battalion (the 54th. Brigade). On two subsequent days, he performed similar work with no regard for his own safety. The following month, during the advance on the village of Cherisy, he received two wounds to his foot and had to be invalided back to Blackburn in Lancashire. On the 21st. July 1917, he was presented with his Victoria Cross by King George V at Buckingham Palace. After the Armistice, he worked as a builder, and then in King's Langley at the Ovaltine factory, which makes a popular bed-time drink. During the Second World War, he served in the Home Guard, and entered the Griffin Inn after it had been hit by an incendiary bomb; regrettably the landlord, Ted Carter, was already dead; the only civilian to be killed in King's Langley during the War. In 1954, Private Cox suffered an industrial accident when he fell off the roof of the Ovaltine factory, with the result that he spent the last five years of his life in hospital. His Victoria Cross is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London.