My Great Uncle Sid, the Youngest British Soldier to Fight in World War I
World War 11 #WorldWar11
On a Wednesday night in June 1915, a mob of 600 locals gathered outside P Jung’s bakery on Tooting High Street in south London. Peter Jung, a German émigré who had long ago become a naturalised British citizen, had opened the shop in 1900 and it was famed locally for delicacies such as apple strudels and Viennese whirls. Earlier in the war, hungry kids would be sent there with pillowcases to fill up with free leftover buns. Jung’s son was fighting for the British Army.
But now the mood had changed. Jung pulled the blinds on the store, which was at the base of a large domed, red-brick building with an attractive glass front, just before the windows were smashed by bricks and stones. Jung and his family escaped by clambering over neighbouring rooftops as the looting began. The crowd was dispersed by police at 11pm, before reassembling at Grunhardt’s bakery further down the high street, then Borghorst’s bakery. Newspapers did not necessarily condemn these actions, which were commonplace that summer wherever German expats lived, especially in London: the Balham Gazette urged the people of Tooting to seek out bakers “with British blood in their veins”.
As 1915 rolled on, the war was not going well — certainly not for the Allies, anyway. Britain had joined the conflict the previous August and there was a popular conception,
on both sides, that it would be short and sharp: Emperor Wilhelm II told the German soldiers that they would be home “before the leaves start falling”. By the time of the raid on Jung’s bakery, it was becoming clear that the war would be shattering and all-consuming. It had become “total”.
At 53 Defoe Road in Tooting, little more than a stone’s throw from P Jung’s bakery, lived 12-year-old Sidney Lewis. A smart kid, tall with dark brown hair, cut short at the sides and longer on top, he was on a junior scholarship at Broadwater Road School. Walking to school, he might have passed the poster of Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, with his walrus moustache and giant, accusatory finger: “Your Country Needs YOU”. On the buses, “White Feather Girls” theatrically handed out white feathers of cowardice to men wearing civilian clothes. At home that summer of 1915, the Lewis family would get — increasingly dispiriting — updates from the Daily Mirror: the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, the Second Battle of Ypres, where the Germans unleashed poison gas for the first time. They would read the news one day, then cut it up for toilet paper the next.
The British Army was now facing an existential problem: “wastage”. In the first flushes of the war, more than a million men volunteered. By mid-1915, very simply, more men were dying than enlisting: the Army needed to recruit 35,000 men a week to keep its operations running, but by September, only 16,500 were putting themselves forward.
Sid, as everyone called him, had four brothers and two sisters. They shared three bedrooms with their parents Fanny and Edward, an attendant at a lunatic asylum. Sid’s brother Will signed up with the East Surrey Regiment at the outset of the war, which made a bit more space in the house. It was chaotic, but Sid had a lot of freedom. Certainly no one seems to have noticed when, on 9 August 1915, he travelled a couple of miles to Wimbledon and walked into a recruiting centre. He told the officer that he was a tailor and 19 years old. They checked his height, a nudge under 5ft 6in, and his weight, 51 kilos.
And that was it: Sid was now a soldier in the British Army. On that day in August 1915,
he was 12 years and four months. In less than a year, aged 13, he would find himself with the Machine Gun Corps on the Somme, in a godforsaken wood in Northern France that another British soldier called “easily the worst place on earth”. His story would then be forgotten for almost a century.
The first time I heard about Sid, my great-uncle — I don’t think his name had ever come up before — was during one of the Covid lockdowns. My dad had been contacted through an ancestry website by Susan, a long-lost second cousin in Canada, who asked him what he knew about Sidney Lewis. Sid was my dad’s uncle: he was a sergeant on the Surrey police force who later ran a pub, the George Inn at Frant, near Tunbridge Wells. He died in 1969, aged 66. My dad used to see Sid quite regularly at birthdays and other gatherings when he was growing up and remembered him as “a storyteller”, which is not necessarily a compliment in my family.
What my dad didn’t know — and in fact, for a long time no one did — was that Sid had served in World War I. Apparently Sid had mentioned it during his lifetime, but, the curse of the raconteur, no one took him seriously. Sid would have been too young: officially, you had to be 18 years old to sign up for the Army; 19 to serve overseas. Confirmation of Sid’s story would only come almost 100 years after he enlisted, in 2012. The historian Richard van Emden wrote an article to promote his new book, Boy Soldiers of the Great War, for the Mail on Sunday. The Mail spiked it, but it found its way into the Sunday People. In the article, van Emden noted that the youngest soldier involved in the conflict was almost certainly Private SG Lewis, No 14645, but that in more than 20 years of researching the topic he hadn’t been able to locate him.
Colin Lewis, Sid’s only child and my dad’s cousin, happened to see the article. He looked through his dad’s effects and noticed, for the first time, there was paperwork relating to his years in service that backed up his tall tales. Van Emden, in a follow-up article, pronounced that a “century-old mystery had been solved”. In 2013, the Imperial War Museum verified that Sid was the youngest-known British soldier to serve overseas in the Great War. In September 2016, almost 100 years to the day after he returned from France, a blue plaque was placed on the house in Defoe Road, Tooting, which is now 934 Garratt Lane.
“Because we’re known for covering World War I, we get a lot of people who contact us with various claims,” Anthony Richards, the head of documents at the Imperial War Museum, tells me. “So people will say, ‘Oh, my father was the youngest soldier ever.’ And that might be the family story, but there’s no evidence that ever happened. They are usually based on a nugget of truth that often gets elaborations added over the years. But in this case, there’s no doubt that it’s true. And that’s quite unusual. There are no arguments.”
When my dad sent me the email in November 2020, even though I couldn’t have picked Sid out of a line-up, I felt weirdly pleased, even proud. My father had done some pretty diligent digging into our family tree before, but our relatives either seemed to do boring jobs (domestic staff or linen dealers) or the most reprehensible ones (slave trading). I watched a YouTube video of the day that Sid’s blue plaque was unveiled. Hundreds of people turned up outside an unremarkable Victorian terraced house: there were speeches, and a violinist played tunes from the era. Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, posed for a photograph with the plaque. At one point, a kid — about the same age Sid was when he was serving — came out dressed in vintage army uniform, and there was an audible gasp from the crowd.
This was the power of the story. All of us know a 12-year-old: they are our children, our nieces and nephews. They are handy to have around if you get stuck on Rocket League, but they are uniquely useless in actual adversity, let alone stuck in a trench with a German soldier attacking them with a studded club. When Sid signed up in August 1915, he was tall for his age, but in the only photograph that exists from that time, a posed shot that shows him army fatigues with a whisper of hair above his top lip, he is very much a child.
Sid’s parents, my great-grandparents, appeared to have little idea that he had enlisted and certainly no clue that he was on the Western Front. It was more than a year before they did anything about it. At this point, Fanny, Sid’s mother, wrote to the War Office, seemingly outraged, demanding that her son be demobbed. Sid eventually returned to Tooting in late September 1916, after 13 months of service. But his adventures did not end there: later in the war, he re-enlisted with the Machine Gun Corps, still only 15 years old and technically underage, and was part of the Army of Occupation in Austria at the end of the conflict in 1919. Then, when World War II rolled around, Sid volunteered to be part of a bomb-disposal unit.
All told, Sid lived quite a life. But there were questions, so many questions. What sort of parents fail to notice that their 12-year-old son is missing for a year? Boys that age do spend a lot of time in their rooms, but still. A year. What impact did serving in the war have on a child who had only just become a teenager? More than that, though, there was something enigmatic about Sid. Here was a man who lived through and survived the most extraordinary upheaval and his experiences would have been forgotten forever had an article in the Sunday People — the Sunday People! — not jogged his son’s memory.
It seemed bizarre to me that someone with such an outsized life could have figured so little in the family to which he belonged, which also happened to be mine. That I was only just finding out about him when my father and Colin were in their eighties and I myself was middle-aged. Is this just what families do? Spend so much time on the small stuff that the big stuff slips away? What could I learn about Sid while there was still time? Or was I already too late?
Not only did Sid fight in the great war, I soon discovered he was embroiled in some of its most famous and gruesome exchanges. At some point in 1915, Sid transferred from the East Surrey Regiment to 106 Company, Machine Gun Corps. This might have been because he was a crack shot, but like so much with Sid, we will never know for sure: he left no diaries and seems scarcely to have told a soul about those years.
The Machine Gun Corps disembarked in Le Havre on 27 April 1916 and went straight into operation in the British offensive near Festubert in May. At the end of June, the company moved on to the Somme regions, then to Delville Wood in mid-July. Even in the midst of a relentlessly attritional conflict, “Devil’s Wood”, as the British renamed it, is often singled out as being especially brutal. It ended in victory for the Allies, but came at a terrible price: at the start of the campaign, there were 3,155 South African soldiers; six days later, 2,536 of them, or 80 per cent of the original force, were dead, wounded or missing. German snipers hid in the trees, so a grand forest was reduced to stumps, with only a solitary hornbeam left standing.
“I don’t want to tell anyone about it,” Captain SJ Worsley, a 19-year-old in the North Staffordshire regiment, wrote about Delville Wood. “There was hand-to-hand fighting with knives, bombs, and bayonets; cursing and brutality on both sides such as men can be responsible for when it is a question of ‘your life or mine’; mud and filthy stench; dysentery and unattended wounds; shortage of food and water and ammunition.”
An account from the German side of Delville Wood was perhaps even more visceral. “A wasteland of shattered trees, charred and burning stumps, craters thick with mud and blood, and corpses, corpses everywhere,” one officer wrote. “In places they were piled four deep. Worst of all was the lowing of the wounded. It sounded like a cattle ring at the spring fair.”
It was no place for a 13-year-old; no place for anyone, really. Sid’s son Colin is adamant that his father’s parents, Edward and Fanny, were oblivious to his whereabouts. “My grandparents had no idea where he had gone,” he says. “They must have been worried sick when dad disappeared.” The first they heard about it, Colin thinks, was August 1916, when a comrade of Sid’s came home to Tooting on leave, stopped by Defoe Road, and told them where Sid was, prompting his mother to write the letter demanding his discharge.
All this is certainly plausible, but Richard van Emden is dubious. He believes Sid’s parents knew full well that he had signed up for the Army, perhaps even encouraged it. As a soldier, he would get three meals a day, be outdoors and active, and do his duty to defend the country. They might have felt that Sid was clearly too young to be sent overseas, so would remain in the UK, maybe even somewhere safer than Tooting. What might have been news to them was that Sid was, in fact, at the Somme. “I suspect that there was an element of, ‘Oh my god, have you seen these casualty figures? Right, we’re getting him out now!’” says van Emden. “So, I’m sure his mother knew where he was. I’m certain she didn’t think, ‘He’s absconded and gone to work on a farm in Scotland.’ But it’s nothing I can prove.”
The only solace for Sid and his parents, should they have chosen to see it that way, was that he and the many thousands of other underage soldiers — van Emden has calculated that around 250,000 enlisted in the British Army during World War I — did make a difference. “If you had withdrawn every single underage soldier from France in 1915, we would have lost the war,” says van Emden, plainly. “There were too many of them.”
Sid didn’t exactly receive a hero’s welcome when he came home from France, or after being part of the Allied occupation of Austria in 1919. Britain had gone heavily into debt during the Great War, and there was soaring unemployment: when the census of 1921 came round, Sid was 18, still living at home and an out-of-work carpenter. Finally, in the mid-1920s, his life began to take shape. In 1925, he took a job with the police in Guildford, Surrey. Around the same time, he met Ivy Bardell, who lived in Balham, two stops up from Tooting Broadway on the new Northern Line. They were married in 1927 and in 1933, their only child, Colin, was born.
If what happened on the Somme when he was a teenager stayed with Sid — and how could it not? — he never let on. Or maybe, he was never asked. But, even at the time, there were concerns about the long-term psychological effects of the conflict. Philip Gibbs, one of five official British reporters during World War I, wrote specifically about those who survived Delville Wood — the name of which was now an “evil spell”. According to Gibbs: “The ghostliness of the place left its mark on the minds of men who were not troubled much by the sights of battle. Many would wince at the mention of Delville Wood. Those slashed trees, naked trenches, smoking shell holes, and charred timber, intermingled with bloodstained bundles, once held life, and now make a nightmare.”
Colin isn’t sure how much his father was damaged mentally by his teenage endeavours. Over the years, though, he has started to wonder if he might have been embarrassed by them. Or at least, felt that he had brought shame on his parents, by disappearing and then having to be dragged back home. “Nobody ever talked about it in the family,” he recalls. “He was considered a little bit of a black sheep. He’d been wrong to do it. So they wouldn’t even mention it.”
To try and make sense of Sid’s disappearance, I arrange to visit the house where Sid and my own grandfather grew up, in the company of Geoff Simmons, a member of the local history group. My hypothesis was that Tooting would have been a forlorn spot, and their home a poky, claustrophobic one, with nine of them crammed into three bedrooms. A place he had to escape, at almost any cost. But, in 2022 at least, the house is rather pleasant. The current owner, a graphic designer called Gilly, has painted the interior white and knocked through some walls. It feels open, even spacious. There’s a big garden at the back, dominated by a large cherry tree that Sid’s parents might have planted.
“What a time to grow up in Tooting,” marvels Geoff, as we walk between Sid’s house and the school that he — and my grandfather Edgar, six years his junior — went to. “When Sid was a child, there were suddenly half-a-dozen cinemas, a new library and Tooting Lido, one of the biggest open-air pools in Europe; all kinds of openings. It’s a very attractive proposition.”
My final appointment is in early March at the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, south London. Sarah Paterson, the curator for World War I, arranged for the papers relating to Sid, which Colin donated to the museum and are kept in climactically sensitive conditions at the museum’s outpost in Duxford, near Cambridge, to be brought to London. Paterson books the Dome, a dramatic, light-filled circular room that used to be the chapel of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, for the unveiling. The documents are collected in a grey A4 folder with “SG Lewis” written on the outside in pencil and tied with a white ribbon, a gratifyingly theatrical touch.
It is an unsettling time to be at a museum dedicated to exploring the impact of conflict. Russian troops have recently crossed the border into Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have been forced into a desperate rearguard defence, with men and women of all ages enlisting to fight. The same day that I visit the Imperial War Museum, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen tweets a photograph of four teenagers: “18 year old Ukrainian volunteers off to war in Kyiv. Three days training and they will be on the front line.” It is shocking, and many people, rightly, are shocked. But you also do not have to look very hard for more examples of too-young soldiers. A 12-year-old American, Calvin Graham, enlisted with the US Navy in World War II. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s had participants as young as 10. A 2017 report for the United Nations found that children were involved in 14 conflicts around the globe in 2016, from Afghanistan to Yemen. Evidently, I have been naïve to believe that Sid was an anomaly.
I pull the ribbon and open the folder. Most of the documents are already familiar to me,
having been reproduced in books and articles. There’s a copy of Sid’s birth certificate, the
letter from the Army Council via the War Office authorising his withdrawal from France, the clipping from page four of the Daily Mirror from 18 September 1916 that has a photograph of Sid under the headline “Joined at Twelve”.
It is this newspaper article that feels the most poignant: it’s no more than 100 words long, and makes no moral commentary on Sid’s decision to enlist, but I imagine it must have been pretty thrilling for a 13-year-old to find himself written about in a national newspaper. The pages are yellowing now, and so frail that they have to be kept inside a plastic sleeve. Sid must have been proud enough of the story that he kept it safe throughout his life: for the rest of his childhood, his 30-odd years in the police, another decade in the pub. He held onto it, and saved it for his son, Colin.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that families can be such odd, impenetrable units: the way intimacy can breed disinterest, and even apathy; and the giant holes that come to exist in the middle of them. How, as children and young adults, we have zero interest in the internal or external lives of our parents, until one day we notice how little we know and how quickly time is passing, and we just have to hope that our parents are around and clear-minded enough to fill in the gaps.
There was nothing inevitable about Sid’s story coming to light. Richard van Emden is the only historian who has looked into underage soldiers with serious intent. He might not have written that article. The Sunday People — the Sunday People! — might not have picked it up. Colin might not have read it. Would that have even mattered? I can’t claim it would have been the most dramatic or poignant example of sliding doors, but I, for one, am glad that these precarious strands, so easily broken, have survived. In the process, I have learned a lot about Great Uncle Sid, of course, but also my grandfather, who died when I was 11, and always seemed so austere and forbidding. Even my own father, with whom I talked for hours about the outdoor toilet at Defoe Road and a story that Sid had told in what must have been the late 1940s, about a man — whom he was presumably arresting — who was as mad as a box of frogs but could paint a perfectly straight line, by hand and eye, on the side of a car.
Clearly, Colin would give anything to have one last conversation with his dad about the
Great War, about Delville Wood, about a magnificent forest reduced to stumps. Or just
to ask Sid what he was thinking when, at the age of 12, he looked at the poster of Kitchener’s admonitory finger, or whether he had even seen the poster at all. “I felt really ashamed later on when I realised he had actually been there, what he’d done and everything,” Colin says. “And I’d really not paid any attention.” He gives a wry laugh: “I thought he was just spinning me a line.”