Major Valentine Fleming, DSO (17 February 1882 – 20 May 1917)[1] was a Scottish Conservative Member of Parliament who was killed in the First World War.

At the outbreak of the First World War Valentine was a captain in 'C' Squadron, Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars, a yeomanry regiment, having received his commission on 30 June 1908.

Initially the regiment had little more than "a tour of the principal French watering places" followed by a fortnight hanging about Dunkirk and Saint-Omer ("Very dull"), but then on 30 October were told by General de Lisle to: occupy a line of trenches on the right of Messines.

Luckily we had no man hit – I can’t think why – which put some heart into the men .... we began to wonder how to fix the bloody bayonets with which we had been issued two days previously.

(But then De Lisle told them that the line had been broken, so) with empty bellies we become plodding up the usual wire-enclosed ploughed fields on the left of Messines, being pooped at by very high and wild rifle fire ....

[5]He also wrote to a close friend, Winston Churchill, in 1914 (the following is an excerpt): Imagine a broad belt [of land], ten miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the German frontier near Basle, which is positively littered with the bodies of men…in which farms, villages, and cottages are shapeless heaps of blackened masonry; in which fields, roads and trees are pitted and torn and twisted by [artillery] shells...Fleming was promoted to major on 2 November 1914 and became the commanding officer of 'C' Squadron.

[14] A further act of commemoration came with the unveiling in 1932 of a manuscript-style illuminated book of remembrance for the House of Commons, which includes a short biographical account of the life and death of Fleming.