The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy. Charlie Connelly

reported a few days before Christmas at the battalion headquarters at Lavender Hill. I gave them my papers and was measured up for my uniform. By the time I joined, the war had been on about sixteen months and the uniform suppliers were better than they had been in the early days. It wasn’t made to measure but I was fitted out pretty well.’

      The 10th Queen’s would train in Battersea Park with a similar intention to Horace Calvert’s marches through Bradford: to encourage others to enlist. They’d have squad drills, bayonet practice with straw-filled sacks, and marching in column, but the effect seemed to Victor to be negligible: ‘People would watch us train in Battersea Park but by then everybody was used to seeing troops and soldiers everywhere so we were nothing special.’

      In January 1916 the battalion moved on to Aldershot, where they learned skills that would come in useful but couldn’t really be indulged in Battersea Park: trench digging, sandbag filling and the laying of barbed wire. It would be a while, though, before Victor could use those skills in earnest.

      ‘The government had given a pledge that no man under the age of nineteen would see active service,’ he said. ‘But I think with me it was discovered by accident that I’d put a year on my age when I joined. So, when the 10th went to France in May 1916, I was sent to the 12th Battalion in Northampton, a reserve battalion.’

      Alan Short from Bromley-by-Bow in East London was born a month after Edward, in May 1899, the son of a lighterman on the River Thames. He left school in 1914 and worked at the Joseph Rank flour company, in Leadenhall Street in the City of London, and had experienced the reality of the war when the first boy from his local church had been killed in May 1915.

      ‘Alfred Ernest Crawthorne. He was older than me but he was a friend of the family,’ said Alan. ‘He’d helped carry me around the playground to celebrate my elevation to the main school from junior school. He was a very nice man. I knew his two brothers and they took it hard. The families were more or less left to fend for themselves. One conveyed one’s sympathy but there was no spare money in the community to support them.’

      After losing his job in a dispute over wages in January 1917, Alan decided to join up, despite still being four months short of his eighteenth birthday: ‘I went to Stratford in East London. I didn’t want to be called a conscript; it indicated that you weren’t too keen on going. I knew that I was approaching military age, when I could be called up, so I just went myself. I sat there, was called forward, signed forms to join the service for the duration of the war, took the oath of allegiance and got a shilling, which I immediately went out and spent on riotous living.’

      Alan was called up to the Training Reserve, a battalion of underage boys that were given a year’s training in England before they could go out to the Front. With his friend Ernest Moyes he reported to Horse Guards Parade, where they joined around fifty other boys and marched to Paddington Station. From there, they were taken by train to Sutton Veny Camp, near Warminster.

      ‘The others came mostly from East London too, and some of them were already pretty tough,’ he said. ‘There were huts for about thirty men at a time. Your bed was a low trestle, three planks, a short mattress and pillow, and a couple of blankets. After “Reveille” they were packed up and your mattress had to be folded over, all very regimental. The inspections were pretty thorough – they even insisted you had no mud between the studs on your shoes.’

      Like most of the youngsters hoping for a bit of adventure, Alan found the monotony and routine of camp life took a little getting used to: ‘The day would start at 6, and if you were struggling to get up the sergeant would tip your bed up and out you’d get. Then you folded up your mattress and dry-scrubbed your floor with a short-haired brush. Breakfast was mostly bread and butter and tea. I don’t remember any bacon and eggs … Then there’d be training till lunch, and my favourite was a lovely meat pie with a soft thick crust: the quality was good. Then there’d be more training. I found the constant drilling a bit boring, but it meant you learned to stand to attention and obey commands. We learned how to throw bombs too – you got the bomb, pulled the pin out and threw it round arm. I could manage about thirty feet. The bombs were about the size of your hand and were quite comfortable. There were a lot of accidents but I was never nervous with it. Some of the fellas were, but if you followed instructions you were perfectly safe. If a man did a thing wrong they’d call him this, that and the other. It upset me in the beginning but you got hardened to it.’

      Basic training was usually completed in around six weeks and, depending on the state of the war and how urgently recruits were needed at the Front, full training could last anything up to five months.

      Eventually, the new recruits would receive word that they were to be sent over to France, at which point they would be issued with their combat kit: a steel helmet, body belt, field dressings, gas mask and ground sheet, goggles and vests.

      It was around this time that the soldiers would make their wills. If the nerves and the cold, creeping fear of impending departure hadn’t done it, and if the last vestiges of glamour, flag-waving crowds and cheers had not been battered out of the men by the relentless drilling, being handed a folded piece of paper marked ‘Informal Will’ and told to complete it would have been the final realisation that this was actually happening. They were going to war and there was a strong chance they wouldn’t be coming back.

      When the British Probate Office made thousands of soldiers’ wills available online in 2013 I managed to find a scan of Edward’s, one of the saddest documents I’ve ever seen. It’s in his handwriting, controlled and well-practised, if slightly spidery, and it’s dated 2 April 1918, seven months almost to the day before his death. There isn’t much space on the single sheet, and the writing bunches up a little towards the bottom of the page where he’s signed and dated it, with his rank and regiment, but it’s clear and coherent:

      In the event of my death, I leave my War Savings Certificates to my goddaughter, Miss Lily S Hill of No. 6 Spencer Street, Southall, and £2 to my grandmother Mrs Christopher, No. 5 Branstone Street, N Kensington, the remainder of my money and effects going to my mother, Mrs G. Connelly, No 6 Branstone Street, N Kensington.

      And that’s it. That’s all Edward Connelly seems to have left behind of himself: fewer than fifty words of right-sloping handwriting, conventional in its well-practised flourishes and loops, and clearly carefully thought out. I wonder where he was when he wrote it. Surrounded by similar lads to him, the George Fortunes, Fred Dixons and Horace Calverts, sitting on their beds hunched over these flimsy pieces of paper following the guidelines they’d been given as to what to write?

      ‘In the event of my death …’ What a thing for an eighteen-year-old to have to write, miles from home in a strange place, in an unreal world of drills and orders and bugle calls and bomb-throwing practice. How he must have longed to be at home among those familiar cramped streets, still just yards from where he was born, and see his mother and father and grandparents again. Instead he had to prepare to sail for a foreign country, departing Britain for the first time a matter of weeks after leaving Kensal Town for the first time.

      As he thought about the event of his death, he thought about his goddaughter, his grandmother and his mother, arguably the three people closest to him in the world. He didn’t have much to leave, a couple of quid, some savings certificates and the odd few coins and bits and pieces, but he shared them out thoughtfully. That was his legacy, all he had in the world.

      (Lily S. Hill, incidentally, wasn’t dealt much of a better hand by fate than her godfather. Barely a year old when Edward was making her the first beneficiary of his will, Lily married in March 1937 but within six months was dead from a lung abscess.)

      The image of all those young lads, lined up in regimented rows, sitting on their bunks, hundreds of them, all just setting out in life, not even having got to grips with the world yet, not even having discovered who they are, is a powerful one; all of them hunched over like khaki-clad beetles, concentrating, making sure they used their best handwriting as they formed the words, ‘In the event of my death …’

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