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

who were very nice. I learned the three Rs, a little history and we were given talks about behaviour after school hours. We had a concert once a year for the parents.’

      At the age of twelve the need to bring some money into the household meant that Horace stopped going to school full time and took a part-time job at Field’s Mill in the spinning department. He’d start at 7 a.m., finish at midday, go home for lunch and then spend the afternoon at school. All his wages went into the household, other than the sixpence he was given every Saturday.

      ‘I’d buy little toys, pea-shooters, catapults, a bow and arrow,’ he recalled. ‘I had plenty of mates and five or six of us would all go to the local park, but you had to be back for bed by 9 o’clock.’

      At fourteen Horace went to work full time in a small engineering shop on Richmond Road in Bradford. His father had wanted Horace to learn a trade and wasn’t keen on him staying on at the mill doing simple manual work as a full-time occupation.

      ‘The first thing I had to do when I got there in the morning was turn on the gas engine. I didn’t like doing that. Then I used to go to a place called Slingsby’s, where they made handcarts for warehouses. I had to go and collect the wheels, put them on the boring machine and bore them out ready for fitting on the axle and deliver them back to the firm. Also, I had to take out all the filings from the lathes which were then sold as scrap. I kept the floor clean and would go and watch a chap working the machine to see how it was done: it was a good place for training but after twelve months of this I didn’t like it any more. I think it was the dirt and the noise and the running about you had to do. Also, I was on 7 shillings a week; the average wage for a skilled engineer was about 23 shillings.’

      Horace, like his contemporaries Edward, George and William, was fifteen when the war broke out, and he remembered it vividly.

      ‘My father told me there could be trouble among nations because we were being warned in the Telegraph and the Argus about what was happening with Germany,’ he said. ‘The territorials were actively recruiting even before the war broke out so the authorities must have been expecting something. I was interested in the military because we had a quartermaster sergeant in the territorials living near us and I would see him in his scarlet uniform. Also, our headmaster at school, Lodge was his name, was a sergeant in the TA. In addition, I had a friend whose father was in the artillery, so there was always a little link between me and the military. Believe it or not, in those days before the war if people joined the army you thought they either didn’t want to work or they’d got a girl into trouble.’

      On 4 August, Horace was up early and on his way to work as usual. When he reached the top of Richmond Road he saw a billboard outside the newsagent announcing in stark black letters ‘WAR DECLARED ON GERMANY’.

      ‘Even on that day the military was stopping all the horse-drawn vehicles and examining the horses before taking some of them away,’ he said. ‘People welcomed the war in the sense that a challenge had been thrown down over Belgium and they were eager to take up that challenge. That first evening a crowd gathered outside the Belle Vue Barracks and they were cheering every time one of the territorials came out. People were singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and all the old favourites outside the barracks. I got so carried away with it all that I stayed there till half-past ten, and I was supposed to be home at nine.’

      There hadn’t been scenes like it since Bradford City brought home the FA Cup in 1911. In those early days of the fledgling war, when everything seemed so glamorous and easy, Horace watched the men queuing at the recruitment office at the ice rink near his home on Manningham Lane and was already thinking of joining them. The Bradford Pals had just formed, the rink was their headquarters and Horace liked what he saw (2,000 of the Bradford Pals, incidentally, would be at the Somme and 1,770 of them would be killed or wounded on the first day). Bradford was on a war footing and Horace was up for the fight. Every night when he finished work he’d go to the nearby barracks and glean the latest information from the sentries about the war and all the new recruits until he could contain himself no longer.

      ‘I was fifteen when I decided to join up. One morning instead of going to work I left my working clothes in the scullery head, went out in my better clothing, walked into the barracks, lined up, the doctor looked at me, I received the King’s Shilling and that was it, all done inside an hour. They never questioned my age – I just said I was eighteen and that was it. I looked at it as a big adventure: I’d read all the stories in the Wide World magazines in the library and it made me want an adventurous life, so I thought this might be more exciting than the alternatives. Otherwise life was just work and a penny to go in the bioscope at the fairground every now and then. I wanted more than that.’

      Horace’s enlistment received a mixed reaction at home. As soon as he walked through the door his father, who’d seen Horace’s work clothes hanging up in the scullery, demanded to know where he’d been. Horace informed him he’d just joined the army. There was a pause and his father said, ‘Well, you’ve made your bed.’

      ‘There were tears from my mother and she said I shouldn’t have done it,’ recalled Horace, ‘but that was it; it was done. I told them not to get me out because of my age or I’d just go somewhere else, like the navy.’

      Horace Calvert was going to war.

      Fred Dixon came from a slightly less impoverished background near Dorking in Surrey. His father was a draper, although he would die in 1909 when Fred was just thirteen. Born in 1896, he was a little older than my great-uncle in that he was eighteen when he joined up in 1914, but he would come to fight alongside Edward in the 10th Queen’s Royal West Surreys later in the war.

      His father’s death had put paid to Fred’s hopes of earning a scholarship to Dorking High School and instead he had to leave at fourteen to become an apprentice to a hosier. Fred didn’t take to hosiery and before long secured a job on the bottom rung of the ladder in the stationery trade. ‘It was rather Dickensian,’ he recalled later. ‘I worked more than 60 hours a week for 5 shillings. I didn’t have a great deal of leisure time either: on Wednesdays, which was supposed to be my half day, I frequently had to catch an early morning train to London to collect special orders and wouldn’t get back until 4:30.’

      Despite this demanding work schedule, Fred was able to obtain some basic military training long before the onset of the war, thanks to the lads’ brigade at his local church in Woking. Three times a week he’d walk to the drill hall and learn some basic military skills, and received a medal for his aptitude with a bayonet.

      The training and drilling sessions always commenced with a hymn, the highly appropriate “Fight the Good Fight”, with the curate and captain of the lads’ company Reverend Bates at the harmonium.

      ‘He was over 6’3” and sat at this little harmonium pedalling away, looking as if his knees were under his chin, and we’d all sing lustily,’ recalled Fred. ‘He joined up and later on helped in the forming of Talbot House in Poperinge with Tubby Clayton, which became very famous. He was wounded soon after he got there by a bomb dropped from a German plane over the square, a wound in the foot that ultimately shortened his leg. The bomb killed a girl who was there at the time, too. Tubby Clayton ran over and bandaged his foot for him. Reverend Bates came back from the war, eventually became Canon of Leicester Cathedral and was a very fine man.’

      One skill instilled in Fred by Reverend Bates was signalling, which would come to feature very strongly in Fred’s time with the 10th Queen’s. He also learned gymnastics and map reading, and there would be occasional night operations on local commons. They even had a field gun.

      ‘We used an old muzzle-loading naval gun, with drag ropes like you see on the Royal Tournament on television,’ said Fred. ‘Teamwork was the essence of the exercise as the gun had little value except for display. It was fired on the odd rare occasion, but the last time the gun was taken out onto Horsham Common it was sponged, failed, rammed and then fired again, but it seems the lad who was sponging the barrel got rather excited and didn’t do it properly. When the next charge went in, it was accidentally lit by a spark remaining in the barrel and blew the ramrod out, followed by the hand of the lad who’d been doing the ramming. It probably saved his