Born: December 18th 1909
Died: January 1941
Age at Death: 31
Died on active service, January 1941
Father: A.W. Brankston, Engineer and Shipbuilder, Shanghai, China
Address: c/o Miss E. Brankston, 43 Holly Avenue, Jesmond, Newcastle on Tyne
Born on 18 December 1909 in China, into the family of Archie Brankston, an engineer working in shipbuilding in Shanghai, Archibald was sent back to England to receive a public school education. At the College he took part in a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore as property manager and understudy. Harold Hobday, killed a month before Archibald, was in the same production.
A sinologist and fluent Chinese speaker, he returned to the country to work as a civil engineer from 1933 to 1935, before giving up practical for intellectual pursuits related to his country of birth. He travelled widely to study antiquities in Asia, and in 1938 became Curator in the Department of Oriental Antiquities & Ethnography at the British Museum, leaving only in 1941 to join the Ministry of Information, the wartime propaganda arm of the British government. The ministry sent him to Hong Kong on a war mission of unknown purpose. He died there of pneumonia at the age of 31.
To mark Remembrance in 2023, a Brighton College family visited the Hong Kong Cemetery, and found Archibald’s headstone.