Copy of a portrait of Norman Cummins

Portrait of Private Norman Cummins, service number 8/ 3550.

Private Cummins is wearing New Zealand Army uniform, with the collar badges of 'D' Company, 9th Reinforcements, NZEF.

Norman Cummins was the son of William Henry and Julia Cummins. He was born in 1893, the fourth child in a family of twelve.  As as young man, Norman became a well-known Wellington athlete. He belonged to the Brooklyn Harriers Club  and won many championships, including in 1915, the Wellington Provincial five mile cross country championship.

Aged twenty-one when the war began, and working as a storeman packer for Alex Cowan and Sons,  Norman enlisted in the 5th (Wellington) Regiment with the service number 1/322, and went to Samoa with the Advance Party. On 12 February 1915 a court-martial found Norman guilty of drunkenness and he was sentenced to thirty days' imprisonment with hard labour.  Colonel Robert Logan, Commanding Officer of the New Zealand troops in Samoa, commuted Norman's sentence to thirty days' Field Punishment No. 1.  Undergoing this punishment, Norman would have had to stand full-length tied to a fixed post or gun-wheel for up to two hours each day.  As soon as possible after completing his punishment, Norman returned to Wellington where he voluntarily discharged himself from military service on 15 April 1915.

However, Norman re-enlisted in August 1915 with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.  With a new service number, 8/3550, he became Private Norman Cummins of 'D' Company, 9th Reinforcements. He sailed from Wellington on 8 January 1916.  In England, he joined the 2nd Battalion, Otago Regiment, and went to France on 9 April.  The build-up to the great Somme offensive was under way, and the battle commenced on 1 July.

 On 15 September 1916, the Battalion wasone of the leading New Zealand attacking units. As the Official History of the Otago Regiment records, ' ... the advancing waves of men had not proceeded far before officers and men began to drop from the ranks, for heavy maching gun fire was coming from the left and from the front of High Wood.'   

Losses were indeed heavy, and Norman was one of 126 men of the Otago Infantry Regiment, almost all from the 2nd Battalion, who were killed that day.

Norman Cummins does not have a known grave.   His name is listed on the New Zealand Memorial at Caterpillar Valley Military Cemetery in France.

Early in October, after news of Norman's death reached Wellington, a 'Soldier's Gift Fund' fete was held at the Basin Reserve.  A Marathon race on the programme was abandoned as a token of respect for  as Norman's athletic achievements.   

Tragically, Norman's  parents were to lose another son in the war, when Private Durrell Henry Cummins of the Canterbury Infantry Regiment was killed at Bapaume on 28 August 1918.