Early Life :

Education & Career :

Tea Planter, Bokakhat, Jorhat, Assam (1911)

Service Life:

Campaigns:

• The First World War 1914-1918, World-wide.

Did not die in the war. Died of Natural causes through Old Age.

Detail :

In 1911-1912 he participated in the Abor Expedition in the Himalayas with the Assam Light Horse. The fourth of a series of expeditions with the same name, they collected a lot of mosses, lichens and various insects, and they used sentry dogs to guard the camps. Ernest apparently appears as a character in a fictionalized account of the expedition called The Road to Endall by Francis Yates-Brown. Later Ernest served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Indian Army 17th Cavalry, where he rose to the rank of Captain. During WWI he was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps where he earned British pilot's license #3,038 on June 2, 1916 (source: Hart Matthews, Pioneer Aviators of the World). It seems he flew reconnaissance missions over Turkish positions in Palestine, and may have known T. E. Lawrence. The plane also carried one bomb, which the pilot threw overboard by hand when he identified a target. Floyer was associated with T.E. Lawrence in the Hejaz Campaign of 1916-17. It seems he was part of the Arabian Detachment or 'C' Flight of 14 Squadron, which provided air support during Lawrence's attacks on the Turkish Hejaz Railway. Ernest was forced down in Sinai, and was imprisoned by the Turks at Kedos. On June 3, 1917, he was awarded the Military Cross. At present we do not know if he remained a POW until the end of hostilities but it may explain why his Lodge Secretary might believe him to be dead. Ernest went to Canada in 1918 and bought land near Waneta, British Columbia on the Pend Orielle River, where he established the Nine Mile Ranch. Ernest bought the land at least partly as an investment, as the Kettle Valley Railway was initially planned to go along the Pend Orielle Valley. The railway eventually went by another route, and the site of the ranch is now two miles upstream of, and flooded by the waters of the Seven Mile Dam, built by West Kootenay Power & Light in the late 1970's. Following marriage problems Ernest settled in Kenya in 1924, as manager of the Kerichio Tea Plantation for James Findlay's African Highlands Produce Co. During WW II, Ernest was called up to serve in the reserves with the King's African Rifles as officer in charge of Nyanza Province. In about 1953 he retired to England, and stayed with his mother at Camberley, Surrey, but he wasn't happy in England and didn't like the English climate. He had lived most of his life in Africa, so he and and his wife returned to Kenya and bought the 1700 acre Kaimosi Coffee Plantation. The cause of death is not clear; a family letter spoke of complications from a ruptured appendix, and possibly chest or lung problems.

Masonic :

Source :

The project globally acknowledges the following as sources of information for research across the whole database:

• The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• The (UK) National Archives
• Ancestry.co.uk - Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History online
• ugle.org.uk - The records of the United Grand Lodge of England including the Library and Museum of Freemasonry

Additional Source:

• Founder Researchers : Paul Masters & Mike McCarthy
• Researcher : Bruce Littley