Category Archives: Warwickshire

Commonwealth War Graves, Great War, history, illness, injury, photography, Private, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Somerset, Somerset Light Infantry, story, war, Warwickshire

Private Robert Voisey

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Private Robert Voisey

Robert Voisey was born towards the end of 1891, one of six children to Richard and Sophia. Richard was a tailor and, while both he and Sophia had been born in Cullompton, Devon, by the time Robert was born, they had moved to the Somerset town of Taunton.

When he left school, Robert followed his father’s trade and, by the time of the 1911 census, he was living with his parents and two of his sisters in a terraced house not far from the town’s station.

With the outbreak of the Great War, Robert was keen to do his bit. While full details of his military service are not available, it seems that he initially enlisted in the Somerset Light Infantry, but was subsequently transferred to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Joining the 6th Battalion as a Private, he saw action on the Western Front, and was wounded in April 1918.

Evacuated to England for treatment, Private Voisey was admitted to the 5th Northern General Hospital in Leicester. He seemed to be recovering well from his injuries, but then contracted influenza.

Sadly, this developed into pneumonia and Private Voisey subsequently died on 23rd October 1918, at the tender age of 25 years old.

Robert Voisey’s body was brought back to Somerset and he was laid to rest in the St James’ Cemetery in the town.

Robert’s funeral was written up in the local newspaper, and the report sheds more of a light on the Edwardian attitude towards some medical and mental health conditions than it does on the actual service.

The very fact of [Robert] ever having been a soldier, considering the great disability he was afflicted with through an incurable impediment in his speech, testifies abundantly to his high and noble interpretation of duty and patriotism.

Had he insisted he could at any time have evaded military service, but so eager was he to serve his country that it was not until he had actually been four times rejected as “physically unfit for military service” was he eventually accepted.

To the writer o this brief notice, who was his friend and fellow shop-mate for a long while, but who was at the time doing duty at Castle Green Recruiting Office, he often time used to express his indignation at not being accepted, and on the last occasion he spoke to the writer, it was to emphatically declare himself “as fit to be a soldier as anyone who had yet left Taunton.”

He dreaded the thought of being considered a shirker, and his opinion of many who have, even up till now, successfully evaded service, though far more physically fit than he was, was contemptuous to the bitterest extreme.

He was a true Britisher, a faithful friend and shop-mate, and a courageous soldier of whom no fitter epitaph could be written than “he gave himself in defence of home, country and liberty.”

Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser: Wednesday 6th November 1918
Commonwealth War Graves, Great War, history, illness, photography, Private, Somerset, Somerset Light Infantry, story, war, Warwickshire

Private Henry Underhill

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Private Henry Underhill

Henry Thomas Underhill is one of those people whose lives are lost to time. Details of his early life were difficult to track down, but snippets helped unlock some of the mystery.

In late October 1914, a number of Somerset newspapers gave the following report:

Soldier’s Sudden Death

The West Somerset Coroner held an enquiry at Taunton Barracks on Saturday afternoon relative to the death of Private Henry Thomas Underhill, aged 44, of Street, which took place on Wednesday [14th October 1914].

Deceased was talking to Private TF Davis on a landing in the barracks, when he reeled and, throwing up his arms, fell heavily to the ground, his head striking the floor.

Major Stalkartt, RAMC, was at once summoned, but he found that life was extinct. He afterwards made a post mortem examination, which revealed fatty degeneration of the heart, with a fracture of the bae of the skull. The doctor considered that death was due to heart failure, and that the skull was fractured in falling to the ground.

The deceased was accorded a military funeral at St Mary’s Cemetery the same afternoon. He was an old member of the Somerset Light Infantry, which he recently re-joined on account of the war.

Wells Journal: Friday 23rd October 1914

Private Underhill’s pension record confirms that he was married to a woman called Mary Ann and that the couple had had a daughter, Beatrice Kate Lavinia Underhill, who had been born in December 1906. While searching for Henry directly drew too many variables to provide any certainty, his daughter proved the key to unlock his story.

Henry Thomas Underhill was born in the summer of 1860. One of nine children, his parents were William Underhill and his wife Elizabeth, who was also known as Betsy. William worked as a clerk for a button maker, and the family lived in Birmingham, which, at the time, was in Warwickshire.

When he left school, Henry found work as a ‘brass tube drawer’, making the metal tubes, using a die. He found love too, and, on 13th March 1881, aged just 20, he married Emma Howner. The couple went on to have a son, Ernest, in 1889 although, from the documentation about him, it seems likely that he passed away when only a toddler. Further tragedy was to strike Henry, when Emma also died in 1890, aged just 30 years old.

It may have been around this time that Henry found a focus in military service; he does not appear in the 1891 census and the next set of documentation for him dates from 1900.

It’s at this point that Henry married for a second time. Mary Ann Kelly was seventeen years younger than her new husband, and was the daughter of a carpenter from Solihull. Her father, Michael, had died when she was only a teenager, and she lived with her mother, Lavinia, helping to support her.

Henry’s previous experience with metalwork – and probably his time in the military – found him employment making gun components. The 1901 census finds him and Mary living in Yardley, to the east of Birmingham, with Lavinia and Mary’s younger brother William.

This was obviously a suitable and convenient arrangement; the next census, in 1911, shows the family still living together. By this time, Lavinia was still the head of the household, and shared her home with daughter Mary, Henry and four-year-old Beatrice; son William, his wife Ada and their new-born son, William. Making up the household on Census Day was a visitor, Amy.

War was on the horizon, and this is where we return to the initial news report about Private Underhill. It is likely that Henry had re-enlisted – or at least been called back up – as soon as hostilities broke out. Sadly, his service was not to be a long one, as he suffered the fatal heart attack within a couple of months of the start of the war. Private Underhill was 54 years old at the time of his death.

Henry Thomas Underhill’s body was buried in St Mary’s Cemetery in Taunton, Somerset.