From A History Of The Wiltshire Strattons, updated and edited by Richard Flower Stratton, 1987:
Gerald Stratton 1879-1969
Gerald was educated at Dean Close School where he won the Victor Ludorum for athletics. Then briefly he was despatched to his Aunt Charlotte’s at Sutton Veny to dissuade his cousin Dorothy from marrying “that awful garage man”. He failed.
At 18, he enlisted as a trooper in the Glamorgan Yeomanry and served in the Boer War in the Imperial Yeomanry 8th Division (The starving 8th). On the 26th of September 1900 he earned the D.C.M. for staying with and guarding, a wounded colleague whilst the rest went off for help – or ran away! Invalided home with a near-fatal attack of enteric fever, he was later commissioned in the Highland Light Infantry with whom he returned to Africa. In 1906, with the Natal Mounted Police he survived many narrow escapes in the Zulu war.
Back in England in 1908, he joined the Glamorgan Mounted Police. He was in command during and after the coal-field riots. He was reserve for the Welsh Hockey Team.
During the Great War he spent two years commanding the 2nd Battalion The Welch Horse, a holding unit for reinforcements. Impatient for action, he dropped rank to Lieutenant in order to join the Royal Artillery in France. During the German attack in 1918 he was found in the snow having fallen from his horse through dysentry and general exhaustion. The price he paid was almost total deafness, for which he got a pension from the Army till the day he died. In spite of this he served as Lance Corporal in the Home Guard throughout the Second World War.
In 1920 he had married Gwladys Davies and their unmarried and only son Brian was killed in a tank landing craft off Normandy in 1944.
Gerald and Gwladys were a devoted couple and both died in the winter of 1969/1970.
What a warrior!