The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.48 No.3 | December 2021

Member’s article

of Mundy’s comrade-in-arms, Gil COULDREY . So many of our third-generation contacts have focused, inevitably, on their ancestors’ later years, but Terry Shelley’s exceptional testimony took us back to the family home in Romsey, pretty much as the nation entered the World War on 4 August 1914. His grandmother, Elizabeth, was receiving advice from her eldest son, Bill, a Boer War veteran, as to whether her youngest, Bert, should enlist – no matter that he was a week shy of celebrating his 15th birthday, three years short of the minimum age to join up and a further year away from being eligible to serve overseas. As Terry tells it, his Uncle Bill persuaded his grandmother that young Bert should lie about his age: it would all be over by Christmas; and even a short spell of army life would do him good. The War would last long enough, alas, for Bill, serving on the Western Front with the lst Hampshire Battalion, to be killed in its 44th month. Meanwhile, military service was indeed doing his kid-brother good, if only in helping to make a most able footballer of him. Despite his obvious youth, boy-soldier Bert had been allowed to enlist in the 2/5th Hants, who followed the 1/5th to India. By July 1916, the fragile recruit had grown into a strapping lad, still not 17 but good enough to play in the side that reached the inter-regimental semi-final. While the Hampshire battalions’ records tell of cricketing achievements, the journal of the 1/4th Wilts offers an insight into football. As kept by the aforesaid Sergeant Mundy, the journal obligingly records his battalion’s football results in India. Of their 20 fixtures in 1916, they lost only one, but the 1/7th Hants

Boy-soldier Shelley

Sergeant Mundy DCM

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