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

Member’s article

Bert Shelley (fourth player from the left) in the 1/4th Wilts side that won the Divisional Cup

we had recorded but brought two further dimensions to our research: professionally enhanced photography, as seen here; and a detailed account of Major Desbrow’s role as a Courts Martial Officer, enforcing martial law in Ireland in 1920. Whatever our 300+ footballers did in the 1920s is generally less of a concern to us in our forthcoming Saints At War book than in our compendiums of profiles, latterly available on Duncan Holley’s website. That said, Desbrow’s judicial service on the Courts of Inquiry, sentencing Irish republicans, makes a most informative climax to a chapter that begins with Irishmen serving in British regiments on the Western Front. As part of the teasing paradox of that chapter, we have Britons enlisting in Ireland. Born in Yorkshire to a father from Armagh, Harold BAMFORD is an especially interesting case in point. He had played a dozen times for the Saints and had graduated to teaching from having been a pay clerk in the Docks, when he hurried to enlist, in September 1914, in the

Major Desbrow

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