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

Member’s article

held them to goalless draws in both Delhi and Meerut. We know from Mundy’s grandson that Couldrey played in both games. He had signed Hampshire League forms for Southampton in 1911, but had never got a game. His father ran the Wheatsheaf Inn at Wilton, just down the A36 from Mundy’s home in Great Wishford. Following their footballing capers in India, the battalion was relieved, Mundy claims, to head for Palestine, via Egypt, for “a little real soldiering.” The 1/4th Wilts and 2/5th Hants there joined a newly-formed 75th Division, within the British Army’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF). Shelley was now equipped for combat as a Lewis-gunner, but would still have plenty of opportunities to progress as a footballer. By the time he arrived in Egypt, the EEF had driven their Turkish enemy back into Palestine. The 75th Division soon crossed the Suez Canal to establish a main base at Kantara. The division having driven the Turks back as far as Gaza, Shelley proceeded to Jerusalem, whence his family received his Christmas 1917 greetings. Couldrey’s progress was, however, halted. Soon after the taking of Gaza, he would be involved in two significant encounters with the enemy. In the first, he and Mundy captured two officers, 43 other ranks and two guns at El Kustineh and would each be awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. The following week, Couldrey would be wounded and transferred to the Military Hospital in Cairo. He would remain in Cairo as an instructor at the Imperial School of Instruction in Zeitoun. While he turned out for the School’s football team, he was missing the

chance to play alongside Shelley for the 1/4th Wilts. In July 1918, the 2/5th Hants Battalion was disbanded and 300 of its men, Shelley included, were attached, within the Division, to the 1/4th Wilts. Transferring to the Division’s crack football XI was a smart move for Bert, who would be in their side that duly won the Divisional Cup in Kantara. Turkey concluded an Armistice with the Allies, 12 days ahead of Germany, but it would be March 1919 before both Couldrey and Shelley were discharged. Arriving home, Couldrey would beat Shelley into a Saints shirt, starting the 1919-20 season in the Reserves side that won 10-3 away to Bournemouth FC in the Hampshire League. But that would be the end of a Saints career for which he had first signed forms in 1911. Shelley, meanwhile, would play a few times for Eastleigh Athletic, before Southampton snaffled the boy soldier whose war had included a substantial football apprenticeship in the two-part “academy” that was the 2/5th Hampshire Battalion and the 1/4th Wilts. He made his Southern League debut, by now aged 20, in January 1920. His last appearance for Second Division Southampton in April 1932 was his 465th – a club record that would stand until 1964. The remarkable career of Alverstoke-born Peter DESBROW , as he rose from the rank of “Boy” to that of Major, could hardly have been more different from that of Shelley. But thanks to the military records that Gary Chalk has so diligently pursued for so long, we already knew plenty about that rise before we heard, recently, from his great-grandson, writing from Australia. He not only suggested amendments to what

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